Boy, WikiLeaks is really racking up the enemies, huh? If Julian Assange is ever found dead, there's going to be a very long list of suspects. No wonder the Vatican condemned the WikiLeaks release:

(AP) — Newly released U.S. diplomatic cables indicate that the Vatican felt "offended" that Ireland failed to respect Holy See "sovereignty" by asking high-ranking churchmen to answer questions from an Irish commission probing decades of sex abuse of minors by clergy.

That the Holy See used its diplomatic-immunity status as a tiny city-state to try to thwart the Irish fact-finding probe has long been known. But the WikiLeaks cables, published by Britain's The Guardian newspaper on Saturday, contain delicate, behind-the-scenes diplomatic assessments of the highly charged situation.

The Vatican press office declined to comment on the content of the cables Saturday, but decried the leaks as a matter of "extreme seriousness."

The U.S. ambassador to the Holy See also condemned the leaks and said the Vatican and America cooperate in promoting universal values.

One leaked document published Saturday, authored in February 2010 by Rome-based diplomat Julieta Valls Noyes, cited her conversations with Irish Ambassador Noel Fahey and his deputy, Helena Keleher, about the diplomatic bind Ireland found itself in.

Ireland wanted to be seen as fully supportive of the independent probe into child-abuse cover-ups in the Dublin Archdiocese, but its Rome officials also didn't want to intervene in the probe's efforts to get information from the Vatican, Noyes' report said.

Noyes reported that Irish diplomats in Rome decided not to press Vatican officials to respond to questions from the panel, which was led by an Irish judge and operated independently of Ireland's government. It sent letters to the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Vatican's ambassador to Ireland seeking information on Vatican officials' knowledge of cover-ups, but got no replies.

The Opinion Mill

The Bush family has often been referred to as the WASP version of the Corleones, but the Soprano clan makes for a much better comparison. At its best, "The Sopranos" is an acid mockery of the phony gravitas of the three "Godfather" movies. Where Michael Corleone is heroically evil, an international player who consorts with statesmen and the Vatican before succumbing to his tragic flaw, Tony Soprano is a sewer rat engaged in the grubby business of preying on human weakness and fear -– when his fall comes, it will be tragic only to himself. Until then, however, he’s going to make as much money as he can for himself and his buddies, and leave the rest of the world holding the bill.

I'm not just using hyperbole here. I do think that when honest historians assess the Bush administration, they will find it more useful to treat George II and his Republican cronies as a criminal organization rather than a political party. The best tool for analyzing Bush's policies is not historiography, but the procedures used by federal agents as they pursue a RICO investigation into a mobbed-up business.

Take the money and run. As long as Republicans are in power, that phrase should replace "E Pluribus Unum" on the national seal. It's the natural outcome of a quarter-century of rhetoric about how government is the problem, not the solution; how government doesn't work; how deregulation is the only way to build the economy. If government is nothing but a taxpayer-funded scam, then why not use it to enrich yourself and your buddies? If the very idea of public service as an idealistic calling has been turned into a mealymouthed joke, then where's the shame in abusing power and running the country into the ground? As long as you can convince just over 50 percent of the suckers to vote your way, you can throw yourself a party and leave the world holding the bill. Read on

Bullet Bags for Bush A Liberal Dose

Displaying the singular tact and deep humanitarianism for which he is so deservedly reknowned, Chief Chimp hostedRead on

Vatican: Catholics Who Back Abortion Shouldn't Take Communion

This is coming from LifeNews.com and I haven't found the story anywhere else:

The Catholic Church has produced a new document for bishops across the world to examine that says Catholics who support legalized abortion should refrain from taking communion because they are out of step with church teachings. The Vatican said pro-abortion Catholics are not taking their faith seriously and those who take communion and support abortion are behaving in a scandalous manner...read on

Couple that story with Michael's article about evolution and you can see where the Catholic Church is headed. The divide is growing wider between democracy and theocracy. If the current Vatican continues on this course, Pat Buchanan may finally have his wish. A small and isolated Church.

Can you believe the utter hypocrisy coming out of the mouth of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican's secretary of state when he made his outrageous remarks?

He's a bigwig in the Vatican and he's using the Bill Donohue defense while speaking at a press conference in Chile that involved pedophilia practiced on young girls.

Every time the Vatican talks about the horrific abuse cases---they make complete fools out of themselves.

The Vatican's second-highest authority says the sex scandals haunting the Roman Catholic Church are linked to homosexuality and not celibacy among priests.

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican's secretary of state, made the comments during a news conference Monday in Chile, where one of the church's highest-profile pedophile cases involves a priest having sex with young girls.

"Many psychologists and psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relation between celibacy and pedophilia. But many others have demonstrated, I have been told recently, that there is a relation between homosexuality and pedophilia. That is true," said Bertone. "That is the problem."

His comments drew angry reactions from Chile's gay rights advocates.

"Neither Bertone nor the Vatican has the moral authority to give lessons on sexuality," said Rolando Jimenez, president of the Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation in Chile.

Jimenez also said no reputable study exists to support the cardinal's claims.

"This is a perverse strategy by the Vatican to shirk its own ethical and legal responsibility by making a spurious and disgusting connection," he said.

At least one of the highest-profile pedophiles in the Chilean church victimized young girls, including a teenager who became pregnant. At the time, the archbishop of the capital, Santiago, received multiple complaints about Father Jose Andres Aguirre from families concerned for their daughters. But the priest – known to his parishioners as Father Tato – continued serving at a number of Catholic girls schools in the city...read on

I've been doing some research and there are very limited studies out there on pedophilia.

USA TODAY has an article called: Is homosexuality to blame for church scandal? Their findings are in stark contrast to the Vatican's position that homosexuals are to blame for the Church's sexual abuse cases.

Although no large-scale national research has been done, several small studies find homosexuals are no more likely than heterosexuals to molest kids, says San Diego psychologist Robert Geffner, editor of The Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, a professional research journal.

And of course there's the celibacy issue that the Vatican denies has anything to do with these crimes, but some researchers believe is a real cause of the problems.

Dr. A.W. Richard Sipe, also argue that the sexual deprivation that occurs in the priesthood could lead one to turn to children and that boys are more accessible to priests and other male authority figures than girls.[52] A study by Dr. A. Nicholas Groth found that nearly half of the child sex offenders in his small sample were exclusively attracted to children.

After learning about these child molesters, the Church did virtually nothing to protect other children from these monsters.

She told the Chilean newspaper La Nacion: "I thought it wasn't that bad to have sex with him because when I told priests about it at confession they just told me to pray and that was it. They knew, and some of them guessed that it was Father Tato. But everyone looked the other way. No one corrected or helped me."

She said one of the priests she confessed to about her sex with Aguirre was Bishop Francisco Jose Cox, who himself was facing allegations of pedophilia.

Cox had been bishop in La Serena, in northern Chile, for seven years when he was removed in 1997 amid rumors that he was a pedophile. He was first transferred to Santiago, then Rome, then Colombia, and finally Germany. The Schoenstatt movement, a worldwide lay community within the Catholic Church, paid for the moves and his treatment.

In 2002, Santiago Archbishop Francisco Javier Erraruriz said Cox had agreed to be removed for "inappropriate conduct."

Can you imagine confessing to another monster? It's a scene right out of one of those slasher movies when you think the actor got away and at the last minute his friend turns up and attacks him instead.

I used to think that Bill Donohue had no contact with the Vatican and was blathering on his own, but now I'm not so sure.

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The heat is finally getting to the Vatican because they finally posted guidelines on their website to add some clarity on the issue of how they should handle sex abuse case.

An issue that should not need any clarity at all.

The Vatican responded Monday to allegations that it had concealed years of clerical sex abuse by making it clear for the first time that bishops and other high-ranking clerics should report such crimes to police if required by law.

Victims have charged that the Catholic Church created what amounted to a conspiracy to cover up abuse by keeping allegations that priests raped and molested children secret and not reporting them to civil authorities.

The Vatican has insisted that it has long been the Catholic Church's policy for bishops, like all Christians, to obey civil laws. In a new guide for lay readers posted on its Web site, the Vatican explicitly spells out such a policy.

''Civil law concerning reporting of crimes to the appropriate authorities should always be followed,'' the Vatican guidelines said.

That phrase was not included in a draft of the guidelines obtained Friday by The Associated Press. The rest of the guidelines follow previously known and public procedures for handling canonical investigations and trials of suspected abuse...read on

The Vatican offered no explanation for the addition.

Doesn't that make everyone feel so much better? Ross Douthat actually tries to make the case that the new Pope is better than the old Pope because the abuses happened under his watch.

The church’s dilatory response to the sex abuse scandals was a testament to these weaknesses. So was John Paul’s friendship with the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ. The last pope loved him and defended him. But we know now that Father Maciel was a sexually voracious sociopath. And thanks to a recent exposé by The National Catholic Reporter’s Jason Berry, we know the secret of Maciel’s Vatican success: He was an extraordinary fund-raiser, and those funds often flowed to members of John Paul’s inner circle. Only one churchman comes out of Berry’s story looking good: Joseph Ratzinger.

Berry recounts how Ratzinger lectured to a group of Legionary priests, and was subsequently handed an envelope of money “for his charitable use.” The cardinal “was tough as nails in a very cordial way,” a witness said, and turned the money down.

Sorry, no sale. So Ratzinger didn't take an envelope with cash. The fact that he was handed an envelope stuffed with money shows how the Catholic church was operating like a group from a Mario Puzo novel rather than a religious institution.

And MoDo makes sense in her latest column about being a woman and living as a Catholic. Worlds Without Women

When I was in Saudi Arabia, I had tea and sweets with a group of educated and sophisticated young professional women.

I asked why they were not more upset about living in a country where women’s rights were strangled, an inbred and autocratic state more like an archaic men’s club than a modern nation. They told me, somewhat defensively, that the kingdom was moving at its own pace, glacial as that seemed to outsiders.

How could such spirited women, smart and successful on every other level, acquiesce in their own subordination?

I was puzzling over that one when it hit me: As a Catholic woman, I was doing the same thing.

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Oh, this is getting absurd. But at least they aren't dropping hints blaming the Jewish media, the way they've done in the past. I suppose that's progress!

On the most solemn day in the Roman Catholic calendar, a senior Vatican priest ignited a fresh chapter Friday in the debate over the priest abuse scandal by comparing criticism of the Church and Pope Benedict XVI to the historic persecution and "collective violence" against Jews.

In a Good Friday sermon in St. Peter's Basilica attended by the pope, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa said a Jewish friend had written to him, saying the recent accusations about the Church reminded him of the "more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism."

Jews know "from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence," the priest said, and "because of this, they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms."

The statement stung Jewish groups -- with one spokesman calling it "repulsive" -- and prompted calls for the priest to retract it and for the pope to address it.

The statement also angered victims groups, which expressed outrage that the Church, some of whose priests preyed on generations of Catholic children, was portraying itself as a victim.

"The pope is not the victim here, nor is the Church hierarchy," said David Clohessy, who is an advocate for victims and who experienced alleged abuses by a priest as a boy. "The victims are the boys and girls being sexually assaulted by priests, nuns, seminarians."

He said, "When they play the victim, when they rally around those who were predators or try to cover up for them, it just intimidates those who were abused from speaking up."

It's not often I'm with Maureen Dowd, but I have to agree with her on this one: The scandal is too big, the pope is in too deep. (He's still in denial, calling the scandal "petty gossip.")It's time the Catholic Church had a female pope. (Heck, if Alanis Morrisette can portray God, why not pry open those closed minds even further?)

Pope Benedict has continued the church’s ban on female priests and is adamant against priests’ having wives. He has started two investigations of American nuns to check on their “quality of life” — code for seeing if they’ve grown too independent. As a cardinal he wrote a Vatican document urging women to be submissive partners and not take on adversarial roles toward men.

But the completely paternalistic and autocratic culture of Il Papa led to an insular, exclusionary system that failed to police itself, and that became a corrosive shelter for secrets and shame.

If the church could throw open its stained glass windows and let in some air, invite women to be priests, nuns to be more emancipated and priests to marry, if it could banish criminal priests and end the sordid culture of men protecting men who attack children, it might survive. It could be an encouraging sign of humility and repentance, a surrender of arrogance, both moving and meaningful.

Cardinal Ratzinger devoted his Vatican career to rooting out any hint of what he considered deviance. The problem is, he was obsessed with enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy and somehow missed the graver danger to the most vulnerable members of the flock.

The sin-crazed “Rottweiler” was so consumed with sexual mores — issuing constant instructions on chastity, contraception, abortion — that he didn’t make time for curbing sexual abuse by priests who were supposed to pray with, not prey on, their young charges.

My late aunt Agnes (my godmother) was explaining to me some years back that she didn't approve of women who wanted to be priests.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because Jesus was a man, and so were the Apostles. That's why priests have to be men," she told me.

"Well, Aunt Aggie, if you really want to be literal, you should have to be Jewish to be a priest. Because Jesus and the apostles were," I said. (I can't help it. I love to mess with people.)

A devout woman, she looked at me, shocked at my blasphemy. But she still couldn't come up with an answer.

Popablility:

The Pope played a leading role in a systematic cover-up of child sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests, according to a shocking documentary to be screened by the BBC tonight.

In 2001, while he was a cardinal, he issued a secret Vatican edict to Catholic bishops all over the world, instructing them to put the Church's interests ahead of child safety.

The document recommended that rather than reporting sexual abuse to the relevant legal authorities, bishops should encourage the victim, witnesses and perpetrator not to talk about it. And, to keep victims quiet, it threatened that if they repeat the allegations they would be excommunicated.

--

Cardinal Ratzinger reinforced the strict cover-up policy by introducing a new principle: that the Vatican must have what it calls Exclusive Competence. In other words, he commanded that all child abuse allegations should be dealt with direct by Rome.

Patrick Wall, a former Vatican-approved enforcer of the Crimen Sollicitationis in America, tells the programme: "I found out I wasn't working for a holy institution, but an institution that was wholly concentrated on protecting itself."

If this information had been exposed a few years ago, would Cardinal Ratzinger had ever been named Pope? I can't wrap my head around this. Forget if he's the Pope now. What type of human being would cover up crimes against the children? He obviously had a lot of experience in this matter.

Has anybody seen Bill Donohue lately? Maybe he'll go on TV again and blame the Hollywood Jews for this mess too.

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And there's this one where he calls some abuse cases "gold diggers" in Ireland.

TIME:

The shocking extent of child abuse by clergy in Ireland's parishes and Catholic institutions was exposed last year in two government enquiries, known as the Ryan Report and the Murphy Report. The first described "endemic sexual abuse" at schools and orphanages run by religious orders from the 1930s to the 1990s, while the latter accused the Catholic Church, the state and the Irish police of colluding in the cover up sexual abuse committed by priests in the archdiocese of Dublin.

A rape victim from Ireland slams Donohue over his remarks. "You're views are insane."

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So, I have a question:

Since when was it any damn news anchor's business how good of a Catholic their guests are?

Last night, filling in for Bill O'Reilly on his Fox program, Laura Ingraham invited on Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois to talk about health-care reform and comprehensive immigration reform, Ingraham took a wild tack to go after Gutierrez: She questioned him on how good of a Catholic he was, because he had announced he was voting in favor of President Obama's health-care package.

Her reasoning was that the national Catholic Bishops' conference had announced that anyone voting in favor of the bill would not be a good Catholic. As Gutierrez tried to politely point out, this really is a church-state separation matter. Or has Ingraham forgotten the bad old days when it was pro forma for anti-Catholic bigots to accuse Catholic politicians of doing the bidding of the Vatican?

Maybe Ingraham should ask those nuns who defied the bishops just how good of Catholics they are. Hold out your wrists, young lady!

The "good news" for the Church, I suppose, is that its centuries-old habits of secrecy mean that the real story is unlikely to become public.

And the bad news? Because the real story is unlikely to become public, the suspicions and whispers will continue to undermine the Church's moral authority and credibility - and without those things, what do they have left? Time to come clean:

The Vatican sprang to Pope Benedict XVI's defense Saturday amid accusations that he tried to hush up reports of clergy sexual abuse and failed to adequately punish an offending priest in his native Germany before becoming pontiff.

Senior Vatican officials denounced the allegations as part of a smear campaign against the pope, who they say is committed to confronting the problem and cracking down on abusers.

"The accusations are failed attempts to involve the Holy Father" in the sexual abuse scandals, Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said.

But controversy continued to rage in Germany over a serially abusive priest who was returned to a pastoral position during the pope's tenure as archbishop in the Munich region about 20 years ago. Church officials in the area acknowledge that the decision to reassign the priest was wrong but insist that it was not made by Benedict, who was then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger.

"These events which are spoken of have been amply clarified by the archdiocese of Munich," Lombardi said in a brief phone interview.

The scandal in the pontiff's homeland is one of a wave of emerging crises for the Roman Catholic Church in Europe. A major scandal involving sexual and physical abuse by priests and nuns in Ireland has seriously undermined the church's authority in that predominantly Roman Catholic nation. More recently, complaints of abuse have surfaced in the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland.

In Saturday's edition of Avvenire, a newspaper for the Italian bishops' conference, a Vatican official revealed that over the last decade, the Holy See had investigated 3,000 clerics for alleged abuse, in cases going back as far as 50 years.

Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, the Vatican's prosecutor in incidents involving sexual abuse of minors, said that most of the cases were from the United States. But in 2009, the U.S. accounted for only 25% of all new cases reported worldwide.

Benedict, while he was still a cardinal, issued a directive in 2001 telling bishops to keep abuse cases confidential, which critics say contributed to a culture of silence and coverup.

But Lombardi, in an interview with the Vatican's radio station, rejected that conclusion, saying that the pope "wanted an absolutely rigorous and transparent line on the pedophilia scandals in the church" and was committed to "confront, judge and adequately punish such crimes under ecclesiastical rules."

And in the spirit of that openness, the Vatican says the Pope is being "set up":

Father Federico Lombardi appeared to suggest in an interview on Vatican Radio that the pope, who also has strong links to the city of Regensburg, was the victim of a plot.

"It's rather clear that in recent days there have been people who have searched – with notable tenacity – in Regensburg and Munich for elements to personally involve the holy father in the question of the abuses," Lombardi said. "To any objective observer it's clear that these attempts have failed."

The Vatican has been appalled in recent days by a flood of allegations of priestly sex abuse in Germany, Holland, Austria and even Italy.

Today, the pope's former diocese rushed out a statement to pre-empt a story in tomorrow's edition of the Munich-based daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. It said that when Joseph Ratzinger was the city's archbishop he had agreed that a priest from another diocese should undergo therapy at a rectory. The records suggested that "it was known then that this therapy should probably be carried out due to sexual relations with children". But instead of sending him for therapy, the statement said, the diocese's then vicar-general, Gerhard Gruber, assigned him to a parish where at least one child was subsequently abused.

"Gruber takes full responsibility for the wrong decisions," the diocese said.

Are they telling the truth - or is Gruber being asked to fall on his sword? People no longer believe the Catholic Church without question, and that will inevitably weaken their influence.