Here are some of the highlights of Andrew Sullivan's incendiary post today on this movie:
Alex Gibney’s new documentary on the child-rape epidemic in the Catholic Church that raged for decades (and maybe centuries), Mea Maxima Culpa, debuted tonight on HBO. I’ve watched it twice. It is both an inspiring testament to faith and truth – as well as a devastating indictment of pride, power, and lies. The former come from four boys who attended St John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee in the 1970s...The story begins as long ago as 1974 when four boys put fliers on the windshields of the cars in the parking lot of the church run by the man who raped them. They simply said “Wanted” with the priest’s name (the more explicit flyer in the video above came later). Instead of being listened to, the kids were disciplined.
Eventually, Gibney finds Father Lawrence Murphy confessing to raping over 200 boys over a long period of time. He raped them in their dorm rooms; he raped them in the confessional, using the small window as a glory hole and granting absolution based on rape or masturbation...It’s things like that that simply chill you, haunt you, force you to confront the pre-meditated, profound assault on human souls that the Catholic Church, from the Pope on down, enabled, perpetuated, and lied about for so long – and still hasn’t been held fully accountable for.
And what this documentary proves beyond any reasonable doubt (like Gibney’s examination of the Bush-Cheney administration’s decision to torture prisoners in “Taxi To The Dark Side”) is that all of it was known throughout the hierarchy for decades. There is even a network of Church-operated “psychiatric” clinics for serial child rapists that don’t use traditional psychotherapy or report criminals to the cops or sequester the rapists from the public (let alone defrock them). These clinics simply enforce spiritual discipline and then recycle the priests to rape more children. We know from public documents that as far back as the 1940s, pedophile priests were showing up at these centers.
The systematic rape of children was then obviously not a function of some kind of major cultural shift in the 1960s and 1970s, although that era might have sent a permissive signal to the global network of child rapists the Vatican was already hiding and enabling. It has been a core problem with the “celibate” priesthood in the US for decades, and every single bishop and every single Pope knew it...John Paul II emphatically cannot be somehow removed from this picture. He personally protected one of the worst offenders, Marcial Maciel, who was a serial rapist, drug trafficker, bigamist and rapist of his own son.
Joseph Ratzinger, when he was Archbishop of Munich, personally signed off on sending a priest to therapy, after that priest had raped several children, never notified the police, never told the parents of the children at the parish the priest was then assigned to, and because of this negligence, was, in my view, complicit in the rape of several more children before the priest was finally caught, arrested and sent to jail. Let me repeat that: the current Pope enabled and abetted the rape of children – and his only way out was to blame a lower official, who subsequently said he’d been pressured. More than that, no one else in the church knows more about this long record of child-rape than Ratzinger. From 2001 onwards, all cases of child rape or abuse were ordered to be sent to his personal office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. And all of it had to be kept completely hidden from the outside world. In the words of Hans Kung, Ratzinger’s former modernizing ally in the Second Vatican Council,Ratzinger himself, in a letter on “grave sexual crimes” addressed to all the bishops under the date of 18 May, 2001, warned the bishops, under threat of ecclesiastical punishment, to observe “papal secrecy” in such cases.
He knew everything – and had the goods on every Cardinal, in whose dioceses thousands of complaints had been filed. And one wonders why it was a surprise he was elected Pope. When you’re the J Edgar Hoover of the Vatican, who is going to challenge you?Read Andrew's full post here.
I suppose the old adage is true - repeat a lie often enough and eventually people will believe it. Now if you are incapable of honesty in reproducing this garbage at least post correct information about Sullivan and let the world see him for who he really is.
ReplyDeleteSullivan may not know anything about rape, but he sure knows about prostitution and lethal sex acts. In 2001, he was outed for selling his body on the Internet (see http://goo.gl/a5JIR). Hiding under the name RawMuscleGlutes, Sullivan posted his interest in having sex with men who did not wear condoms. That’s right, his preference was to practice oral and anal sex with “bare back” men (guys who hate “safe sex”). It was ever so kind of him to disclose that he was HIV-positive.
Sullivan is a sexual acrobat who loves to practice “diversity.” Consider that he posted two pictures of himself on the Internet that showed only his torso, saying he wanted “bi-scenes, one-on-ones, three-ways, groups, parties, orgies and gang bangs.” Whew! But those who say he is not discerning are wrong: he explicitly ruled out “fats and fems.” Good choice. We know all this because some of his gay partners recognized Mr. Headless when the pictures of his torso surfaced (how these fellows are able to do this is positively amazing).
To be sure, Mr. Headless will no doubt protest that his sick behavior was “consensual”—the favorite moral cop-out invoked by every sexual deviant who has ever walked the face of the earth. What we need to know is whether he ever had sex with an unsuspecting man, i.e., with some poor soul who had no idea that Mr. Headless was HIV-positive. And we need to know it now, before he takes another obscene shot at the pope.
So carry on posting reviews by this sicko, but at least have the honesty to show the filth from whence he comes.