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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Oh, how right on the mark South Park was about Bill Donohue. Apparently his thuggery and vile language that he uses has clearly seeped into the Vatican.

This is indefensible.

A senior Vatican priest, speaking before Pope Benedict XVI at a Good Friday service, compared the world’s outrage at sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church to the persecution of the Jews, prompting angry responses from victims’ advocates and consternation from Jewish groups.

The Vatican spokesman quickly distanced the Vatican from the remarks, which came on the day Christians mark the Crucifixion. They underscored how much the Catholic Church has felt under attack from recent news reports and from criticism over how it has handled charges of child molesting against priests in the past.

The pope and his bishops have denounced abuses in the church, but many prelates and Vatican officials have lashed back at news reports that Benedict failed to act strongly enough against pedophile priests, once as archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1980 and once as a leader of the Vatican’s powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The Vatican has denied that he was at fault, and Vatican officials have variously described the reports as “deceitful,” an effort to undermine the church and a “defamatory campaign.”

Speaking in St. Peter’s Basilica, the priest, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, took note that Easter and Passover fell during the same week this year, and said he was led to think of the Jews. “They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence, and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms,” said Father Cantalamessa, who serves under the title of preacher of the papal household.

Let me see if I've got this straight: A Vatican priest tried to equate the uproar the world is articulating over the horrors their own child-molesting priests have inflicted through the years (and which was covered up by the church hierarchy) with the systemic genocide practiced against the Jews. It leaves me numb.

This is something Bill Donohue would say on cable TV--although he has a reputation for attacking Jews himself. Every day that goes by, these men of the cloth disgrace the religion they represent. How dare they? I guess Father Cantalamessa couldn't utter a word of remorse at his Mass for the hundreds and hundreds of children that have been irrevocably damaged by the sexual violence priests have brought upon their lives. He did offer up a tepid mention of them, though.

Father Cantalamessa’s comments about the Jews came toward the end of a long talk about Scripture, the nature of violence and the sacrifice of Jesus. He also spoke at length about violence against women, but gave only slight mention of the children and adolescents who had been molested by priests. “I am not speaking here of violence against children, of which unfortunately also elements of the clergy are stained; of that there is sufficient talk outside of here,” he said.

Here's a list of some of the sins of the church just as a reminder to Father Cantalamessa as he makes his absurd claims on Good Friday.

Here's just a little reminder of the history that makes this comparison particularly distasteful:

The Crusades

Pope Urban II, anxious to assert Rome's authority in the east, sent a military expedition in 1095 to reconquer the holy land. The crusaders ravaged the countries they passed through and massacred the Muslim, Jewish and even Christian population of Jerusalem after capturing it in 1099. After 200 years of conflict Muslim armies drove them out for good, but the crusaders' symbol of the red cross remains provocative.

The Inquisition

The attempt to combat suspected apostates, Jews and Muslims at the time of the Reformation spawned tribunals in Europe and the new world that tortured and executed thousands. Ecclesiastical queasiness about flowing blood led to the use of racks, thumbscrews and red-hot metal instead of blades; 2,000 people were burned at the stake during the tenure of Spain's first grand inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada.

The Holocaust

Pope Pius XII never publicly condemned the Nazis' persecution of Jews, even when they were being rounded up and deported from Rome. His silence is partly blamed for the failure of Germany's Catholics to resist Hitler. Anti-Jewish Catholic doctrines such as the claim that the Jews murdered Christ were said to have ideologically underpinned nazism. Vatican officials allegedly helped Nazis escape Europe after the war.

And these are the people who want to make decisions about everyone else's personal life:

ESSEN, Germany — The German archdiocese led by the future Pope Benedict XVI ignored repeated warnings in the early 1980s by a psychiatrist treating a priest accused of sexually abusing boys that he should not be allowed to work with children, the psychiatrist said.

“I said, ‘For God’s sake, he desperately has to be kept away from working with children,’” the psychiatrist Werner Huth said in an interview Thursday. “I was very unhappy about the entire story.” Dr. Huth said he was concerned enough that he set three conditions for treating the priest, Peter Hullermann: that he stay away from young people and alcohol and be supervised by another priest at all times.

Dr. Huth said he issued the warnings — explicit, both written and oral — before the future pope, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, left Germany for the Vatican in 1982. In 1980, following abuse complaints from parents in Essen that the priest did not deny, Archbishop Ratzinger approved a decision to move the priest to Munich for therapy.

Despite the psychiatrist’s warnings, Father Hullermann was allowed to return to parish work almost immediately after his therapy began, interacting with children as well as adults. He was promptly accused of molesting other boys and was convicted in 1986 of sexual abuse in Bavaria.

Benedict’s then-deputy, Gerhard Gruber, said that he was to blame for that personnel decision, which he called a “serious mistake.”

Clearly a case of geographic standards, since I can tell you for a fact that many of the parents of Catholic school kids in Philadelphia's inner city are "living in disaccord with Church teachings." In other words, the rules are much more flexible when the schools don't have enough paying students. Hell, many of the Philadelphia students aren't even Catholics!

I can tell you, though, that even teachers here are rather intimidated by the contractual requirement that they lead pristine Catholic lives that are an inspiration to students. (Unlike, say, the pedophile priests who are groping kids or the Papal court members who are running prostitution rings.) For teachers, parochial schools mostly get devout Catholics who believe in Catholic schools, or ex-public school teachers who are burned out by the discipline problems. It's definitely not the salary (they make the pre-visitation Ebenezer Scrooge look like a spendthrift).

If I taught in Catholic school, I'd find some dirt on the pastor, blackmail him and go about my merry sinful way. But that's just me!

BOULDER - Some parents are considering pulling their children out of a Catholic preschool after the school told a family a student could not return because the parents are homosexual.

A meeting was held to discuss the issue at Wesley Chapel in Boulder Friday evening.

"This could be one of those moments where the community is holding a mirror up to the church for it to take a look at its policy and reconsider what they've been doing," Wesley Chapel Pastor Roger Wolsey said.

Teachers at Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School were told about the situation earlier this week. Staff members say they were told a student would not be allowed to re-enroll because of his or her parents' sexual orientation.

The Denver Archdiocese says the student's parents are two women and their homosexual relationship violates the school's beliefs and policy.

"They're entitled to do what they want," Wolsey said. "And I would respect them no matter what they decide. [But] I think a lot of churches are doing a lot of soul searching right now."

In a statement sent to 9NEWS, the Archdiocese said, "Homosexual couples living together as a couple are in disaccord with Catholic teaching."

According to the Archdiocese, parents who enroll their kids at Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School are expected to follow the Catholic Church's beliefs.