Excuse me, but who appointed the Catholic Bishops Gods and Guardians of All Things? As one who spent her time in the Girl Scouts along with her friends in elementary school all those years ago, I have only good things to say about them. While I wasn't exactly a master of cookie sales, I limped along in other areas, but certainly don't recall any outside groups having anything to say about our activities.

So could someone please explain to me how this is possible? Via Washington Post:

Long a lightning rod for conservative criticism, the Girl Scouts of the USA are now facing their highest-level challenge yet: An official inquiry by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

At issue are concerns about program materials that some Catholics find offensive, as well as assertions that the Scouts associate with other groups espousing stances that conflict with church teaching. The Scouts, who have numerous parish-sponsored troops, deny many of the claims and defend their alliances.

The inquiry coincides with the Scouts’ 100th anniversary celebrations and follows a chain of other controversies.

Earlier this year, legislators in Indiana and Alaska publicly called the Scouts into question, and the organization was berated in a series aired by a Catholic broadcast network. Last year, the Scouts angered some conservatives by accepting into a Colorado troop a 7-year-old transgender child who was born a boy but was being raised as a girl.

Some of the concerns raised by Catholic critics are recycled complaints that have been denied by the Girl Scouts’ head office repeatedly and categorically. It says it has no partnership with Planned Parenthood, and does not take positions on sexuality, birth control and abortion.

“It’s been hard to get the message out there as to what is true when distortions get repeated over and over,” said Gladys Padro-Soler, the Girl Scouts’ director of inclusive membership strategies.

In other instances, the scouts have modified materials that drew complaints — for example, dropping some references to playwright Josefina Lopez because one of her plays, “Simply Maria,” was viewed by critics as mocking the Catholic faith.

The new inquiry will be conducted by the bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth. It will look into the Scouts’ ”possible problematic relationships with other organizations” and various “problematic” program materials, according to a letter sent by the committee chairman, Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne, Ind., to his fellow bishops.

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I hope the Obama administration stands firm on this one. It was only a matter of time until the church upped the political ante, and of course a low-life like Newt Gingrich is only too happy to jump on the bandwagon. The American church's hierarchy climbed under the covers with the right wing decades ago, and they're all too happy to tear down the Democratic candidates on command:

During church services on Sunday, Catholics around the country were read a blistering letter assailing the Obama administration for an "assault on religious liberty" in the form of a coming requirement that most church-linked organizations - among them hospitals, schools and universities - offer birth control coverage as part of their health care plans.

Despite strong lobbying from religious groups, the Health and Human Services Department announced earlier this month that most church-linked groups will not be exempt from the requirements - which also mandate that no co-pay be charged for contraceptive services - though they will have an extra year to comply beyond the August 1 deadline.

Churches themselves (along with any other employer that is explicitly focused on offering a religious message, and which primarily employs those who believe in that message) are exempt from the requirement.

Religious groups were outraged by the decision - saying it forced employers at church-linked organizations to violate their conscience - and on Sunday Catholic leaders took their complaints directly to parishioners. As Business Insider reported, similar letters were read in churches around the country complaining that "the Obama Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation's first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty."

In an appearance on "CBS This Morning" Monday, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich brought up the letters, using them as an opportunity to attack both the Obama administration and Republican rival Mitt Romney.

"The Obama administration has just launched an attack on Christianity so severe that every single church in Florida had a letter read from the bishops yesterday all across the country - Cardinal [Timothy] Dolan was leading an effort to explain that, literally, freedom of religion in America is now being attacked by Obama," he said. "The Romneycare does the same thing. Romneycare has tax-paid abortions. Romneycare put Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in America, in the bill. No right to life group's in the bill. Planned Parenthood is. Romney himself approved taking away a conscience clause from Catholic hospitals."

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After a two-week firestorm of controversy on the question of religious institutions that are not churches providing contraceptives with no copayment, the Obama administration changed the final rule in several respects. Here they are, in a nutshell:

• Institutions which are affiliated with a church such as Catholic hospitals, universities, and the like will not have to include birth control in the health insurance they provide to employees.
• Employees of those institutions will have access to contraceptives without a copayment because the insurer will cover it with no copayments separately. This means the insurer will reach out to women to offer free contraceptives outside of any relationship with their employer.
• For religious employers who use insurance companies, this will be the final rule and women will have access to contraceptives without copayments beginning August 1, 2012.

And with that, heads exploded from here to Rome. The video above is an interview Catholic League's Bill Donohue did on Friday's Megyn Kelly show, after the announcement of the change in the rule. You really must listen to him rant on and on, threatening that President Obama "will pay for this," and alleging that it really is a secret plot to force the Catholic Church to pay for abortions. And of course, all of his false claims went unchallenged.

But back to the issue at hand. The goal was to make contraceptives available to women without a copayment. This satisfies that goal, because insurers will simply take care of the cost without including contraception coverage in the plan these institutions adopt. It is far less expensive for them to provide full coverage for birth control than it is for them to provide maternity coverage and well baby care for all of those babies that would come into the world as a result of not having any contraceptives available. To that end, the decision was a complete end-run around the bishops' plan to erode support for the ACA by making a big deal out of this rule.

From the President's remarks on Friday:

Today, we've reached a decision on how to move forward. Under the rule, women will still have access to free preventive care that includes contraceptive services — no matter where they work. So that core principle remains. But if a woman’s employer is a charity or a hospital that has a religious objection to providing contraceptive services as part of their health plan, the insurance company — not the hospital, not the charity — will be required to reach out and offer the woman contraceptive care free of charge, without co-pays and without hassles.

The result will be that religious organizations won’t have to pay for these services, and no religious institution will have to provide these services directly. Let me repeat: These employers will not have to pay for, or provide, contraceptive services. But women who work at these institutions will have access to free contraceptive services, just like other women, and they'll no longer have to pay hundreds of dollars a year that could go towards paying the rent or buying groceries.

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Father Jonathan Morris, a Fox News analyst, was on Bill O'Reilly lecturing America about Obama's decision that Catholic institutions do not get to discriminate on birth control coverage for their employees due to their religious convictions. Bill introduced him as a 'Roman Catholic' priest, but he's much more than that. He's a premium member of the Legion Of Christ. I've written at length about the Legion Of Christ, a Catholic offshoot cult-like sect of the church and its sickening founder. The Legion of Christ is another Catholic order covered in Sin : UPDATED 1,2,3

As a man who grew up Catholic I have to say I'm horrified at all this breaking news that shows how the church and the current Pope covered up child molestations, booze and everything else under the sun. The LA Times wrote a story about the multi-billion dollar order that is flourishing in Mexico: The Legion of Christ

As the Catholic Church is rocked by scandals about abusive priests and the failure of its hierarchy to confront them, Maciel in many ways embodies the insidiousness of the problem.

Maciel was dogged for years by allegations that he sexually molested young men studying to be priests, had affairs with women and was a drug addict. He evaded sanction thanks in large part to the privileged status granted him by the late Pope John Paul II. Only in 2006 did John Paul's successor, Benedict XVI, discipline Maciel by ordering him to stop functioning as a priest; by then, Maciel was 85.

Maciel was popular at the Vatican because the Legion was one of the fastest growing orders in the Catholic Church, able to produce wealth and recruit priests at a time of declining memberships and severe shortages in the clergy — and because it espoused the conservative brand of Catholicism that recent popes have favored.

Today the Legionaries, as they are known, operate in nearly 40 countries with 800 priests, 2,600 seminarians and a lay branch called Regnum Christi ("Christ's Kingdom") that has more than 75,000 members....read on

The horror. Read the full article to understand the depths of depravity that Rev. Marcial Maciel, the Saint of their Catholic order, sank into. It truly is disgusting beyond belief.

They have also been the target of International probes into their sexcapades, and Morris is the face of this order:

But while Opus Dei, the other controversial conservative Catholic order, was made famous in Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," the Legion of Christ is virtually unknown to most Americans – at least on the surface.

Two of the most visible priests in America are Father Thomas Williams, a movie-star-handsome CBS News analyst, and Father Jonathan Morris, who is sometimes referred to as "Father Knows Best" on the Fox News Channel. They belong to the Legion of Christ but rarely identify themselves as such on camera.

"Dan Brown got the wrong group," said Genevieve Kineke, an orthodox Catholic who was a member of Regnum Christi, the legion's lay movement, from 1992 to 2000 and writes a blog about her experiences. "The Legion of Christ is the scary cult embedded in the bosom of the mother church. Not Opus Dei."

Watching this man pontificate on religion and America is blood curdling. In this video Fr. Thomas Williams tries to say that maybe their founder had multiple personalities. I don't hear much shame from these two over Maciel's behavior, do you? In the above video, Bill O'Reilly shifts the discussion very quickly away from any mention of sexual abuse that was allowed to go on by the church across the world for decades and and how disgusting it is that men like Morris then try to lecture Americans on our system of government or the rights of women.

John Boehner actually got out of his chair and gave a speech Wednesday on the House floor, decrying the Obama administration's policy of requiring birth control coverage with no co-payments to employees of church-affiliated organizations. He was vociferous in his claim that it was a clear intrusion into religious liberties, and vowed that Congress would act if the Administration didn't.

“In imposing this requirement, the federal government is violating a First Amendment right that has stood for more than two centuries, and it is doing so in a manner that affects millions of Americans and harms some of our nation’s most vital institutions. If the president does not reverse the Department’s attack on religious freedom, then the Congress, acting on behalf of the American people and the Constitution we are sworn to uphold and defend, must.”

Republicans need an issue like this to unite, because they can't come together on basic conservative principles. This is why there is such a divide among the candidates for a Republican nominee, and why Boehner jumped right on the bandwagon.

However, not all religious organizations agree. Via The Hill:

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As a Catholic, I'm getting a little tired of right-wingers like Newt Gingrich spewing nonsense like this.

Newt Gingrich sought to make inroads among religious voters Sunday, accusing President Obama of having “basically declared war on the Catholic Church.”

Gingrich, who converted to Catholicism himself in 2009 (his third wife, Callista, sings in a Catholic choir), was speaking about the Obama administration decision this week to require church-affiliated employers to cover birth control drugs in their health plans, regardless of religious beliefs.

Gingrich, in an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, said the decision represented “a radical Obama administration imposing secular rules on religion.”

Since Newt is a new convert, he might be surprised to learn that,

Some 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used contraceptive methods banned by the church, research published on Wednesday showed.

And,

A Le Moyne College/Zogby International national poll in 2007 found 67 percent of American Catholics disagree with the church teaching that artificial birth control is wrong.

And,

In particular, Catholic voters do not approve of schools teaching abstinence-only programs in schools. Six in ten (64 percent) oppose requiring high school sex education programs to only teach abstinence. They also believe insurance companies should be required to cover and pharmacists required to sell birth control pills. Three-quarters of Catholics support requiring health insurance plans to cover birth control pills (75 percent). Nearly eight in ten (78 percent) oppose allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions.

Let's get real, shall we? The U.S. government is actually on the same side of this "war" as most American Catholics. Those "secular rules" Gingrich whines about the Obama administration enforcing are already being embraced by church members, whether he knows it or not.

What really annoys me is that right-wing partisans like Gingrich side with the Vatican when it's convenient and ignore it when it's not. Want to discuss the Vatican's position on the death penalty, the Iraq War, global warming, torture or Social Security and Medicare, Newt?

Didn't think so.

I was really surprised at this column by E.J. I was raised Catholic too, but I'm outraged at the Church's hostility towards contraception and I didn't think he bought into this narrative. And let's be honest E.J, many pro-lifers will not vote or support Obama anyway so why should this matter to him or any progressive Catholic? Why should the president do any more for them than the Democratic Party already has?

Obama’s breach of faith over contraceptive ruling

All religions live in the U.S. and must honor our laws. What's being offered is not illegal. How many times are women and progressives supposed to kowtow to the religious right? It's infuriating and I grew up Catholic.

Digby writes:

Tell me again why I'm supposed to care that "progressive" Catholics are unhappy that president Obama mandated that Catholic institutions that employ people who are not members of the faith have to provide birth control coverage under the health care law? I'm hearing they feel "betrayed."

Welcome to our world folks. Now you know what it felt like for the rest of us when the administration made a deal with the Church to give abortion coverage pariah status in the health care law and treat it as though it is something so dirty that decent people wouldn't even want their money to touch the money of those who bought this dirty coverage. It wasn't pleasant.

I don't pretend to understand why progressive Catholics, who I'm told practice birth control at similar rates to non-Catholics, are upset that the government is mandating low cost coverage for everyone—for something they personally practice. That sort of hypocrisy is simply beyond the ken of a heathen like myself. But as a political matter, the*President made the right decision. Pro-choice progressive women have been shafted over and over again on reproductive issues and to enable this growing anti-birth control crusade to gain traction at the hands of a Democratic president would have been a true betrayal of epic proportions. Keep in mind that Democratic women outnumber Democratic men by nearly 10 points.

I feel betrayed by a religion that taught me only how to be a better person when I attended in the '60s and '70s. I'm so sick and tired of these hypocrites telling women what they can and cannot do.

Today, 1 in 3 women has trouble affording birth control. The U.S. has one of the highest rates of unplanned pregnancies in the industrialized world, and studies show that women who plan their pregnancies are likely to be healthier, seek prenatal care, and have healthier children.

Given all of this, shouldn't the question be why a group of mostly men—bishops or otherwise—need an extra-extra special exemption from prioritizing the health of women? Sadly, this is no freak occurrence. When the Obama administration made the misguided decision not to allow Plan B to be sold over the counter, the debate focused exclusively on the way he—"as a father"—viewed the idea of 11-year-old girls getting Plan B with their pack of gum. The overwhelming majority of young women who were simply trying to avoid pregnancy or abortion, both far more risky than Plan B, were ignored. And when a collection of almost all men pushed the "Bart Stupak amendment," holding health reform they supposedly supported hostage for the sake of inroads on their anti-choice agenda, the actual impact their amendment would have on women was virtually absent, as news coverage lionized these men's dedication to their consciences.

Shouldn't we ask why women's health, our ability to control our lives and bodies and careers, is such a popular political football? Is it because the women who actually are affected have no voice in our political system?

Bart Stupak got run out of office for supporting these people. They are not interested in facts or freedoms. We do not live in a monarchy where men are the lords and women are the chamber maids. Dionne's instincts have been compromised by the same propaganda as so many Americans have been over the years. It's really sad.

Many of you knew I grew up a Catholic. Being Italian with ancestors from Sicily, I had no choice. I'm not hostile to religion per se, but as I've grown older I'm able to make my own mind up on many issues like choice, poverty and the death penalty. Obviously the rise of the religious right in this country has had a huge negative impact overall in American society. The televangelists made billions of dollars off our teevees and turned con men, liars, hypocrites and circus performers into mega millionaires. PFAW was Norman Lear's response after he saw some of these charlatan's become beltway darlings. Antonin Scalia is one of these religious frauds. He espouses that he is a devout Catholic, but when faced with a true tenet of Church doctrine, which is against the death penalty, he shrivels up into a typical movement conservative player:

That Justice Antonin Scalia believes in execution as a moral form of punishment is a well-known fact. That he is an observant, traditional Roman Catholic is, similarly, well-known. That he appears to believe his church supports the death penalty and that he’s willing to stake his job on that conviction is nothing short of astonishing. But there it is: “If I thought that Catholic doctrine held the death penalty to be immoral, I would resign,” he told an audience at Duquesne University Law School last month. “I could not be part of a system that imposes it.”

Let’s start with Scalia’s implication that the Roman Catholic Church supports the death penalty. The evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. In 2005, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement saying that “ending the death penalty would be one important step away from a culture of death and toward building a culture of life.” In 2007, the Vatican said that capital punishment is “an affront to human dignity.” Both Pope Benedict XVI and his predecessor, John Paul II, have consistently voiced their opposition to the death penalty and praised governments and leaders who abolished it.

In 2007, Benedict sent a letter through an emissary pleading for clemency in the Georgia capital case of Troy Davis. On Sept. 21, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Davis’s petition for a stay of execution and Davis was killed by injection. One doesn't know how Scalia voted. But in any case, that justice’s professional and democratic obligations overrode the express wishes of his pope that night.

I don't pretend to speak for Catholicism at all or claim to be an expert on it either. I do know that it did help me in my own way, but I like to keep what religious or spiritual beliefs I have to myself. I know atheists who have more common decency in their pinkie finger than many supposedly devout Christians. When I was fifteen I made a conscious decision that the death penalty was nothing more than revenge. If one person was executed unjustly then the whole ball of wax comes crashing down. When I started really dating I began to think about what would happen if I got a a woman pregnant. I decided that I would be a stand up guy and do the right thing no matter what, but I made a decision that a woman should have the right to choose what happens to her own body. I was still going to church on Sunday's with my first girlfriend at the time. If I were to have become a devout Catholic, there would be no room for my feelings about the death penalty. I don't think an average working class Catholic living in America was trying to find loopholes in how the church felt about the death penalty even back then.

On the question of doctrine, though, Scalia is out on a limb, and like a cartoon bunny, he’s sawing it off behind him. In 1995, Pope John Paul II issued an encyclical — an official document of the utmost importance — called “Evangelium Vitae,” in which he weighed in on the death penalty.

“The nature and extent of the punishment,” he wrote, “ought not to go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible to defend society.” In today’s societies, the pope said, “such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.”

Death penalty opponents celebrated, saying that “Evangelium Vitae” voiced the church’s near total opposition to capital punishment. Although important theologians disagreed, saying the encyclical falls short of calling the death penalty immoral, Scalia was not one of them.

In a 2002 speech at the University of Chicago, Scalia said “Evangelium Vitae” reversed centuries of Catholic tradition by making capital punishment — his word — “wrong.”

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Really, he's been saying the same thing for years...but it's still sickening

None so blind as those who will not see.

It would serve Bill Donohue and the Catholic League well if they went through some basic public relations training. Their latest attempt at bomb-throwing is a full page ad in the New York Times that blames the sexual abuse crisis on an overzealous media, scam artists, and, of course, "the gays."

The refrain that child rape is a reality in the Church is twice wrong: let’s get it straight—they weren’t children and they weren’t raped. We know from the John Jay study that most of the victims have been adolescents, and that the most common abuse has been inappropriate touching (inexcusable though this is, it is not rape). The Boston Globe correctly said of the John Jay report that “more than three-quarters of the victims were post pubescent, meaning the abuse did not meet the clinical definition of pedophilia.” In other words, the issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia.

Abuse took place in the Church and it handled it very poorly. It doesn't matter whether it was pedophilia or homosexual or heterosexual in nature. People were abused and the Church did nothing for decades. The Church failed not only the victims, it failed its flock.

The rhetoric isn't entirely new...the video above is from this time last year, and there are others from 2008 and 2009. The careful parsing of words ("It's not pedophilia if they're adolescents") is yet another turn of the knife in the back of the victims, and so typical of Donohue. After all these years, he still doesn't get that the refusal to take responsibility is part and parcel of why people lost faith in the Catholic Church.

I'm pretty sure that the official Church would much prefer that Donohue (who is not officially sanctioned by the Catholic Church in any way) would just shut up, because he's certainly not helping them bring people back to the flock.

Donohoue likes to alienate people - not welcome and accept. He's looking to make enemies and fight battles over things that don't always make sense. Much of the apologetic work that Donohoue and his organization does hurts the greater Catholic cause. Donohue doesn't represent the Catholicism I know and practice. He is not formally affiliated with the Catholic Church in anyway, something I wish more people knew. He represents the extreme conservative wing of the Church that thinks Church teachings revolve around sex and nothing else. He comes across as a hack that uses his well-funded bully pulpit for self-promotion. He should be dismissed by Catholics who want the Church to grow and not shrivel into some fundamentalist sect limited to pre-Vatican II adherents.

You can watch the entire movie here.

There must be something very wrong at the Vatican. The Pope's new scapegoat for the Church's sex abuse scandal is the 1970s.

Belfast Telegraph:

Victims of clerical sex abuse have reacted furiously to Pope Benedict's claim yesterday that paedophilia wasn't considered an “absolute evil” as recently as the 1970s. In his traditional Christmas address yesterday to cardinals and officials working in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI also claimed that child pornography was increasingly considered “normal” by society. “In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” the Pope said.

“It was maintained — even within the realm of Catholic theology — that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a ‘better than' and a ‘worse than'. Nothing is good or bad in itself.”

The Pope said abuse revelations in 2010 reached “an unimaginable dimension” which brought “humiliation” on the Church...read on

I watched this gut wrenching documentary last night called Deliver Us From Evil, about a serial pedo-rapist that the Catholic Church enabled for three decades. I cried along with Mr. Jyono, who thought Father O'Grady was a friend to his family only to find out after O'Grady was arrested in another county that he had raped his daughter for seven years. Clearly the Church covered it up, as video testimony shows, and instead of dealing with the problem, sent him out of town so he could hunt for new victims. It would be as if the Attorney General of California, after arresting Ted Bundy for being a serial killer, decided to give him a bus ticket to Iowa and told him to just stay away from girls -- while the AG then offered support with prayers to Bundy and maybe even a pension plan if kept quiet. What would Ted do?

I've been covering the child abuse cases that have been revealed in recent times along with finding out the Vatican and their hierarchy, instead of acting like the moral authority they claim to be, covered up the hundreds of abusers and actually allowed them to destroy future families for decades. And so much ofthis happened under Cardinal Raztinger's (Pope Benedict XVI) watch.

The office led by Cardinal Ratzinger, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had actually been given authority over sexual abuse cases nearly 80 years earlier, in 1922, documents show and canon lawyers confirm. But for the two decades he was in charge of that office, the future pope never asserted that authority, failing to act even as the cases undermined the church’s credibility in the United States, Australia, Ireland and elsewhere.

Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, an outspoken auxiliary bishop emeritus from Sydney, Australia, who attended the secret meeting in 2000, said that despite numerous warnings, top Vatican officials, including Benedict, took far longer to wake up to the abuse problems than many local bishops did.

Digby writes:

I'm fairly sure that pedophilia was considered an absolute evil in the 1970s. It was just covered up --- mostly because of institutions like the Church which made even the thought of sex so shameful that even innocent victims of abuse were afraid to admit it. But whatever "context" he's thinking of, in normal society sexual exploitation of children wasn't part of it except on society's fringe (just as it is today among certain fundamentalist sects.)
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There are many examples of our leadership and elite institutions and leadership failing, but I think this one is the best example. When even the Church that has made human sexuality a purely procreative necessity within sanctioned marriage is making excuses for pedophilia among its priests because of "the times" then it's fairly clear that any institution can be thoroughly corrupted to its very core. It tends to create just a little mistrust among the people.

You can see why blowhard Catholic sex-abuse apologists like Bill Donohue are around. To him, these child molesters weren't even pedophiles. They make plenty of cash off of doing their best to beat back any criticism directed at the Church.