Shorter Cardinal Pell: If you agree to a candlelight dinner then you’re just asking for it, aren’t you? How could sex later be rape? [link]
Shorter Cardinal Pell: It’s totally OK to tell a clerical abuse complainant that they’re the only one to ever accuse that priest while writing the same day to another complainant against the same priest. [link]
Shorter Tony Abbott: My Mate The Cardinal dealt with this case totally honourably, honest, he just did because I say so. [link]
Shorter Cardinal Pell: The West needs more Western babies! [link] (Subtext: “Wimminz, on your backs: you owe it to your country. And you non-Western folk, stop reproducing and get back to the jungle at once.” (subtext provided by Pavlov’s Cat))
More shorter Pell subtext: those 500 young men at WYD that the Church hopes will choose to become priests “need to cause quite a number of pregnancies before they go all celibate on us”. (via Ambigulous at LP)
Shorter Pope Benedict: We want to help the environment, really [link] (subtext: just so long as nobody mentions the elephant in the room about how the single most useful thing we could do is allow women to limit the size of their families).
(subtext via Helen at Surfdom)
Shorter Bishop Fisher: Clerical abuse victims are just cranky spoilsports who should STFU so that priests can enjoy looking at glorious young people without distractions. [link]
(as noted by Lauredhel yesterday)
And news just in!
Shorter Vatican: When the Holy Father told reporters that he would work for “healing and reconciliation with the victims” of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy in Australia [link] at WYD, he didn’t actually make any formal commitment to an actual apology, so sorry for any “misunderstanding” [link].
UPDATE
Commentary in more depth: Just realised that I was most remiss in not including a link to LP’s coverage of WYD – there’s a lot of it, linking to plenty of coverage that goes beyond official sponsor News Limited’s rather hagiographic efforts.
Categories: culture wars, ethics & philosophy, media, religion, social justice
Hoyden About Town 
Shorter Rev. Philip Jensen: You can’t trust the bloody Micks! [link]
Amandas last blog post..At Least They Didn’t Call it A Bear
Well, that’s certainly the way to appeal to anybody who finds the Catholic hierarchy rigid and unappealing – offer them an even more rigid and unappealing alternative. Well played, sir!
With regard to Vatican environmentalism being incompatible with the ban on contraception, it’s interesting to note that next week will be 40 years since the Papal Encyclical Humanae Vitae, the papal bull which enshrined the 1931 innovation of a Church teaching against contraception.
Voice from the Desert (“Supporting survivors of clergy sexual abuse and examining the cover up, causes, and effects of that abuse”) reproduces the transcript of an ABC program about how surprised the world was by the 1968 pronouncement, when most people were expecting the pope to come down on the side of allowing contraception to limit family size, and how that disconnect between most married couple’s sense that contraception is moral and the Church’s insistence that it is not has led to much erosion of the moral authority of the Church.
I do not like thee, Doctor Pell;
The reason why I cannot tell,
But this I know, I know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Pell.
The whole thing has me torn between hate and humour.
Because “cause … pregnancies” is so asshat in tone that I have to laugh. Then realizing how far we haven’t come from my childhood in a peadophille epidemic church community that says rapist-priest survivors are just spoilsports …ah how the laughter dies.
I’m not as anti-church as some liberals who’ve never been subject to one, because religious freedom is a right too, although I reject the tendency to assume moral superiority to the secular.
But the blanket abuse of hetero-patriarchal church privilege to mask sheer hate of others erotic autonomy? You know someone has privilege when they can present such HATE as healing, and still retain influence.
Just realised that I was most remiss in not including a link to LP’s coverage of WYD – there’s a lot of it, linking to plenty of coverage that goes beyond official sponsor News Limited’s rather hagiographic efforts. I’ll update the post to include that as well.