CNN : Cardinal receives standing ovation for apology - Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston received a standing ovation Sunday after telling parishioners he wished he could "undo the harm" from the handling of sex abuse allegations against priests. Law, who travels this week to the Vatican with other U.S. cardinals to discuss the scandal, called it a "wake-up call for the church." As well the Vatican issued a statement that Abuse is not simply a Church problem, but rather is prevelant in society. While this might be true, it sounds like 'spin doctoring', since while abuse is a social problem, covering up for abusive priests and shuffling to them to new parishes where no one knows is a Church problem. For this reason the apology from one of the Bishops responsible rings rather hollow, and the 'standing ovation' seems very peculiar. If the church received 'a wake up call', it was not in regards to molesting priests, since the church obviously 'woke up' to that business long ago. The church also received the same wake up call numerous times in the past, where, in Canada the exact same scandal broke years ago, where the exact same thing happened,and another bishop was involved, and the abuse was institutionalized in orphanages and went on for decades, (has anyone seen the show 'The Boys of Saint Vincentes', a docudrama on the Canadian scandal - you might recall the frequent scenes of priests and monks being quietly shuffled away to different parishes in cars, while Bishos and Cardinals had secret chats about covering it all up with the high ranking officials in the police and government). This is not a new thing and obviously continued to happen as the new American scandal over the same thing indicates. The church did not just suddenly 'wake up' but rather it seems to have been business as usual for the last few years. And then there is the abuse of Native North American children, not limited to the Catholic church, which spans the century, and has been the subject of lawsuits here in Canada. This problem is institutionalized and the spin doctoring and hollow apologies fail to recognize this simple fact. The problems are systemic, cross the boundaries between denominations and are problems with the institution itself, and not simply a problem with a few bad apples. The spin doctoring is hardly encouraging since it has been heard before, most notably in Canada, and the institution, as such powerful and entrenched institutions do, seems to be in 'damage control mode', hardly encouraging.

Their are other examples of the same thing. For example the following scandalous story of extreme abuse in the church 'broke recently' and is also evidence of a profound institutional malaise, and being mired in the darkness of a not so noble past, such things being pushed by ministers from the pulpit, using books written by ministers in the past, for ministers...Such things are evidence for a profound instituional malaise where abuse is deeply entrenched in the tradition, resulting in the terrible abuses throughout history and the racism and colonial abuses which are actually not alien or foreign to Christianity but rather deeply embedded with roots going back thousands of years. In the Bible such great 'moral leaders' as 'Moses endorse child abuse and the rape of virgins, a theme repeated once again in the book of Judges, which tells the story of the abuse of 400 young virgins, so just how one seperates the instituion and its entrenched documents from the ensueing scandals that span centuries is a real good question. The Biblically endorsed violence and abuse continue right to this day, as an institution fails to hear a 'wake up call' and continues on with its institutionalized abuse of the human race, including the current abuse of Palestinians, showing a shocking lack of ordinary empathy and common sense from the pulpits of the land, and an inability to feel the pain of others. (No doubt the churches will, and I should say, should be sued by the Palestinians, just as they have been by the native Americans, and perhaps someday they will be taken to court and sued for writing such abusive and atrociious things as the following...) Christian and Jewish Right call for Biblical massacre of Palestinians


Links to a whole collection of institutionally protected, violently abusive scriptures... Biblical violence and racism

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