Santa Claus sticks it to Pope Benedict XVI! But there's a serious message behind the lampoon:A Christian Bishop, Monk, and child advocate, whose legal name is Santa Claus, is taking Pope Benedict XVI to task, for what Bishop Santa Claus describes as, "the Pope’s continued moral failure to address urgent children's issues within the Roman Catholic Church."You can read the entire "news release" here. It's good stuff.
... In the United States, between 1950 and 2009, the Roman Catholic Church has paid more than $2.6 billion to settle claims of abuse by clergy, has obstructed criminal and civil investigations, and often filed for bankruptcy to avoid making court-ordered payments to survivors of clergy abuse. Santa observes that, “The Roman Catholic Church clearly is more concerned with protecting its clergy and assets than protecting vulnerable children."
Santa Claus, who always puts his children first, proposes mandatory reporting laws, a one-strike lifetime ban for any priest who molests a child, mandatory fingerprinting of all priests, revoking the tax-exempt status of any church that fails to report abuse, and requiring all priests to take classes in how to detect and report child abuse.
Now here's where we're screwing up as a society. If these rules that Santa Claus proposes were put to Congress, there would be howls of protest! I can just hear it now, a cacophony of spluttering outrage at the insult to our priests. Fingerprinting priests? Treating them like criminals?
But wait ... isn't that exactly what we do for teachers? Don't family counselors and psychiatrists have to follow special laws about child abuse? And aren't priests acting as both teachers and marriage counselors? Why shouldn't they be held to the same high standard as others in the professions?
Especially given their track record, and the history of cover-up and abuse by the Roman Catholic church!
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agreed!
ReplyDeleteAs a person who has worked in the teaching profession for a long time I can tell you that we are never given unsupervised access to children without a criminal background check, including having our fingerprints taken. I was unaware that this mandate did not apply to clergy. That's insane!
ReplyDeleteHi Edie - It is insane. You have to wonder why the church hasn't set such a policy. Even if you give them no credit for trying to protect children, you'd think they would do this out of self-interest just so they don't get sued any more.
ReplyDeleteEvery time I read about another one of the Catholic Church's coverups and their disinterest, it makes my blood boil.