http://thetyee.ca/Views/2007/10/29/MairCatholicism/
The Tyee is an online newspaper, and frequently a very good read. I haven't been on that site in a while, and was reading this morning. Rafe Mair, a well known writer and opinionated as the day is long, wrote a column a couple days ago which inspired this very satisfying morning rant, well, satisfying to me. It's published as a comment on the site, signed by cypress.
I've just read Mair's column on Catholicism. I have not read all the comments, and realize I might be taking up eye-time with points already made.
The Catholic Church is the oldest European institution, no? As such it is the repository of the oldest, and perhaps most outdated, ideological foundations among institutions, which have been spread all over the globe. Those ideological matters include the actual practices of the institution under examination. Mair points to a tiny fraction of the possible cases to be made for the hypocrisy, the cruelty, the woman hating, the violence promoting and sanctioning, child damaging, practices which might be enumerated if there were time enough and space to do so.
And in addition, Roman Catholicism promotes and supports and revivifies at every turn the ideology and practice of patriarchy - the sanctioning of the rule of the fathers over everyone and everything.
As such, in my view, there is every reason to celebrate each stone turned over to reveal the breadth and depth of the heinous treatment of human beings by this institution of Catholicism. Whether you agree with Mair is hardly the point. The point is that Catholicism, and those of its defenders and its practitioners who refuse to reject in a personal or public way the damage done in the last 1500 years or so [because it is the institutionalized Catholic Church - not only the beliefs of christians which is the problem] to millions of human beings, who condone the on-going contemporary practices of destruction and death which institutionalized Catholicism is.
How can any thinking person who has given even a moment's thought to the plight of the children of sub-Saharan Africa, the plight of their mothers, their fathers, their grandparents, refuse the practical, real need to combat both social resistance and viral success with latex? How do you rationalize such thinking? Have you no compassion?
How can anyone who's taken even a cursory look at the nearly successful annihilation of First Nations in Canada over the last 400 years think for a moment that the ideas and practices of institutionalized Catholicism didn't have a key part in that genocidal, greed driven history?
Do you get it that it hasn't been only boys who have been stolen from their childhood by sexual predators supported, protected and hidden by the institutionalized Catholic Church? Girls and their mothers, sisters, aunts and grandmothers have been the targets of sexual predators taken care of by the Catholic Church for millennia now.
Every word you write in defense of them, every word you speak in their favour adds to the burdens carried by the living and dead targets of the Catholic Church's institutionalized practices of greed, predation, and death.
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