The Catholic Church needs to be honest about something.

OK, so let's be clear on one thing. The rape of young children is wrong. Male or female, it doesn't matter. Anyone who rapes a child should be force-fed his own genitals, lightly fried on a bed of blanched poison oak leaves. And then kicked in the stomach until they bleed out their ears.

Does that seem unforgiving of me? I'm sorry. Maybe I'm just cranky right now.

So, let's be clear on what's going on right now.

See, we have to take the Wayback Machine back to before Cardinal Joey the Rat was declared to be the Pope; this would be after he was a member of the Hitler Youth, but before he told the people of Africa that condom use would send them to hell, and still wouldn't prevent AIDS, so there, nyaah.

Now, back then, there was this priest named Peter Hullermann.

It seems that a psychiatrist, Dr. Werner Huth, told the Catholic leadership of Germany (which included the current Pope Benny) that this priest needed to be kept away from young boys and alcohol. Father Hullerman liked to get loaded and rape altar boys. And the nascent Pope ignored it. Transferred Father Hullerman to a different diocese. And then another. And another.

In Milwaukee, the Reverend Lawrence C. Murphy was sexually abusing deaf boys for years in his school.

For decades, a group of men who were sexually abused as children by the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin reported to every type of official they could think of that he was a danger, according to the victims and church documents.

They told other priests. They told three archbishops of Milwaukee. They told two police departments and the district attorney. They used sign language, written affidavits and graphic gestures to show what exactly Father Murphy had done to them. But their reports fell on the deaf ears of hearing people.

This week, they learned that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, received letters about Father Murphy in 1996 from Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee, who said that the deaf community needed “a healing response from the Church.” The Vatican sat on the case, then equivocated, and when Father Murphy died in 1998, he died a priest.

In Ireland, hundreds of abused boys were hidden by the Catholic Church; at least two have come forward who were forced to sign confidentiality agreements saying that they wouldn't bring charges against the church. This is in the wake of charges against the church in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.

Now, the fact that a major gay prostitution ring was being run out of the Vatican might look bad, right? Well, ironically, it was discovered in the same week where the Archdiocese in DC announced that they wouldn't offer health coverage to any spouses of employees, because there might be a chance that they'd have to cover a gay couple.

With all this going on, we get an op-ed from Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Now, Bill is usually good for a laugh now and again, as he rants his spittle-flecked way through whatever minor issue is raising his blood pressure this week. But he's outdone himself here.

Employers from every walk of life, in both the U.S. and Europe, have long handled cases of alleged sex abuse by employees as an internal matter. Rarely have employers called the cops, and none was required to do so.

Now, Bill, here's where you're sticking your foot in it already. There's kind of a big difference between Bobby from Records grabbing Susie's butt, and Father Murphy jamming his cock into the rectum of a ten-year-old boy, isn't there?

Beyond that issue, the focus on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is far out of proportion to the attention given by the media to the sexual molestation of minors when committed by non-Catholic clergymen. According to a report by the New York Times in October, the Brooklyn district attorney's office had filed charges in 26 cases of sexual abuse involving members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
Just this month, Rabbi Baruch Lebovits was found guilty on eight counts of sexually abusing a Brooklyn boy. Yet the Times, which has run several stories on the decades-old cases in Ireland and Germany, never reported it. And none of it merits the kind of attention given to priests.

Hell, Bill, the answer is right in the question, isn't it? Rabbi Baruch went to jail, didn't he? (Oh, and it seems that there was, in fact, media coverage of it...)

(And just like clockwork, we have somebody trying to blame Obama with pedophile Catholic priests. Because Obama is responsible for every problem in the world, even the ones that started decade or even centuries before he was born. Which makes just as much sense as trying to blame the "permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s" - you know, I lived through the 70s, and I don't recall the rape of young boys being a popular spectator sport.)

Now, let's compare the case of Rabbi Baruch, currently getting gang-raped in the shower somewhere in the New York penal system, against the case of, say, Cardinal Bernard Law, who, after it was shown that he covered up the sexual abuse of altar boys in Boston for years, was promoted to a position in Rome, is currently "responsible for one of the four most important basilicas in Rome," and is hiding out in Vatican City, which doesn't have an extradition treaty with any country.

See, here's the problem, Donahue. You don't allow your priests to have sex. You don't even let them masturbate without it being called a sin. Which leaves you with a group of adult males, with all the hormones God put in them, denying their own sexual identities. That energy has to go somewhere, right?

And meanwhile, the Catholic Church reserves the right to lie (by omission, in this case). Baltimore passed a "truth in advertising" ordinance, which would have required pregnancy counseling services to advise women if they do not refer women to abortion providers or give help with birth control. And the Catholic diocese has sued to get the ordinance overturned, because they don't want to have to tell women those little facts.

Apparently, nebulous concepts like "the truth" aren't actually that important to the average Catholic.

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Update (4/1/2010): And because Bill Donohue is basically a dishonest fuck, he's now claiming (and his Catholic League took out an ad in support of this viewpoint) that the problem isn't pedophilia, it's all the fault of those pesky gays! Because most of the victims were 12 or 13, so they were "post-pubescent"!

Here, Donohue. Let me see if I can help you out a little. Here's a handy list of the age of consent for pretty much every state in the US. Please notice that there isn't a single state, not even South Carolina, where it's legal to have sex with a 12-year-old.

Let me just say it now, for the record. Bill Donohue is a worthless bag of pus.