--- “Well ye ken the

--- “Well ye ken the noo!”
Frederick Forsyth strips the message down to the bare bones for a few
people in certain places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Middle
East who might not have been paying attention. If you’re one of these
people, you should be informed that “Bring it,” no longer means “come after me.” It now means, because of this we’re going to come after you,
and may Allah and your seventy-two virgins help you. You started it:
we’re going to end it. You may ink-in the changes to your dictionary
now. In fact, it would be best if you did. We wouldn’t want you to
not be on the same page as we are, now would we? We’re pretty fair
that way.
--- The speech. Everyone’s chatting about it this morning on the web.
So, I’ll throw out my two cents and will be done with it. I heard
what I needed to hear. Yes, he wants more money. Not surprising, and
yes Congress should give it to them. Yes, he wants to get the Europeans
on the job. That’s not surprising either. The speech was simply a
reaffirmation of why we’re there, what we are doing, and what it’s
going to take to get the job done. There wasn’t anything new there,
other than the eighty-odd billion dollars the prez wants Congress to
allocate for Iraq and Afghanistan. Unlike Sullivan this morning,
however, I’m not surprised, that he didn’t ask for more troops. It
would be a waste of resources to just blindly dump new troops into
Iraq. Areas that are on the verge of being settled now, where they’re
training new police forces, will soon no longer need the massive number
of U.S. forces they are currently enjoying. Those troops will then be
reassigned to new areas that could use the backup. It’s logical,
people. It’s actually translog, as in transportation and logistics,
but that’s beside the point. We don’t need more American troops in
Iraq. We need more international troops so we can cut the number of our
boys and girls that are over there…so we can save some coin.
For all the money we’re actually spending right now in Iraq, and all
the people who are complaining about it, it surprises me that everyone
forgets the Pentagon has accountants, too. It’s like the naysayers
think the Pentagon has gone on a spending spree at the nasty mall
across town and they need to cut up the Visa before any more money gets
spent on worthless junk. That’s not it at all. They’re actually
being fiscally responsible. Yes, the administration needs more money to
make sure the job is done correctly---and it’s a lot of freaking
money---but the fact they’ve decided not to send out any more troops
is a good thing for all you fiscal conservatives who are having a
coronary failure because of the sheer number of dollars going out.
Relax. They’re using their resources wisely. I hesitate to mention
it, but honestly, do we want a bunch of green soldiers over there
anyway? Right now we’ve got people on the ground who are doing the
deal. Their overall effectiveness rating is going up, despite what CNN
would have you believe. Give them the time to do their job and to do it
well otherwise Iraq will be worse off than when Saddam was in power. If
you haven’t a clue as to what I’m talking about, I’ll give you a
reference point. Go rent Band of Brothers, Part Four, Replacements,
and I think you’ll get an idea. We don’t need anymore dead
soldiers, but sending in new, green, troops would ensure that outcome.
--- I’ve got a few problems with this guy.
Hmmph. God love priests. Especially honest, hard-working,
true-to-the-faith priests who do Jesus’ work. Nothing can possibly be
harder on them right now than the backlash of the pedophilia scandal. I
can completely understand where the Church has tested their faith.
They’re on the front lines, after all. The pope’s the general, safe
back in HQ, calling the shots and they’re out fighting the good fight
just as an infantryman would. What’s that old saying? No one’s an
atheist in a foxhole? Well, I would have to think that’s true, but
just imagine what it would be like for a priest in that proverbial
foxhole, defending the Church and its actions, while trying to spread
the word at the same time? It’s gotta be hard. It’s not surprising
to me that the much ballyhooed “wall of silence” comes up on a
regular basis. Everyone in the media thinks there’s some grandiose
conspiracy to protect the Church at all costs,
so everyone must shut the hell up, and that includes parish priests.
Yeah, there’s a grain of truth there, but, hell, come on and be
realistic. I don’t think it’s so much the idea of a cover-up on the
average priest’s mind “Shred the parish files and do it now!”
but more that they just don’t want to have to deal with the idiocy of
those above them because they can’t do anything about it. Priests are
like the employee who works for the large pharmaceutical company which
has put out a drug that’s now been proven harmful to five chimpanzees
on the easternmost hillside in Rwanda. These people don’t have
anything to do with the running of the joint, yet they bear the brunt
of the blame when the fit hits the shan. Who can blame them for not
wanting to deal with it by not discussing it? I don’t necessarily
think it’s the most courageous thing they could do, nor the most
responsible, but we have this tendency to forget that priests are
human, too. Now, don’t freak out and think I’m coming down on the
side of the pedophiles. I’m not. The Church had a responsibility to
protect the children and they failed. There’s no be’s, by’s, or
buts about it. But, it has been of interest to me how poorly the media
has interpreted just how such a thing could have happened. It was
ignorance at its absolute worst, and while it’s no defense in this
day and age, I can understand how the Church’s policy of shifting
priests started and how entrenched the policy became despite the new
information that came to light regarding pedophiles. We seem to forget
that pedophilia wasn’t an illness a hundred years ago, or even fifty
years ago: it was just going out and finding yourself and nice young
wife, of childbearing age, who was, most likely under the age of
eighteen. Were the GI’s who brought home sixteen-year-old war brides
after WWII pedophiles? By today’s standards, yes, they were. But back
then, no, they weren’t. Innocence was lost early on because life
spans were shorter. Nor does pedophilia include homosexuality: it’s
the one sexual mental illness that doesn’t discriminate between the
sexes---boy or girl, it doesn’t matter---you just have to be under
age to qualify as a victim. They also had no way of knowing that the
recidivism rate of pedophiles is close to one hundred percent. These were all things they did not know and had no way of knowing because no one knew these things.
And I’m not talking how Canon Law demands these priests need to be
dealt with here: I’m talking common sense.
The Church thought pedophilia a temptation. A sin. A sin that would be
absolved under the seal of confession with the promise of go forth and sin no more inherent in the deal. That was what they expected of priests. Go forth and sin no more.
And they honestly believed this. I know. It sounds loony and very
careless in retrospect, but they expect it of all Catholics, not just
priests. In the Catholic faith the burden is on the individual to make
themselves more worthy of Christ and the blessings of Heaven. The
Church definitely does not guarantee you entrance to Heaven when you
get baptized. That would mean a world full of happy, guilt-free
Catholics skipping breezily through life, sniffing the tulips. I ask
you: when was the last time you chatted with a happy, guilt-free
Catholic? Hmmm? I’m waiting. And it appears I’ll be waiting for quite some time, like
until the second coming, but I digress.
Now, this does not excuse the Church’s actions once it knew what the
scoop was. It doesn’t. It makes it easier to understand why it
happened, but not the for the love of God, I thought you were doing Jesus’ work here, are you sure you know who your boss is? denials and evasions. Those
can be easily chalked up to the fact the Church doesn’t admit it’s
wrong very often. Think about it: they just let Galileo off the hook a
few years ago. And he had the gall to think that---gasp---the Earth
wasn’t the center of the universe almost five hundred years ago. This
guy, however, bothers me beyond repair. Benedictine monk leaves the
priesthood and is now a father, husband and a consultant for a law firm
suing the Los Angeles diocese, advising on Canon Law and the like.
It’s a great story. The man loves the Catholic faith, but not the
Church and he’s made that clear. I can understand: I feel the same
way. But it seems to me that it would be better for everyone involved
if he kept his mouth shut from now on. I can barely understand what a
burden it must have been to be the cover-up boy, and I sympathize, but
there’s no mention of him complaining to his superiors about the vast
and overwhelming intelligence (duh!) behind this policy. In fact, he
dodged it just as well as anyone else, despite his claims to have had a
crisis of conscience over it. He was in the Church. He had the power to
make a change and yet he didn’t. He was just as chicken as everyone
else who didn’t do anything; who just kept their mouths shut despite
their insider knowledge. This is a wee bit much to bear, Father, er,
whoops, but the point still stands. If not you, then who? As hard as it
is, I’ll let him off the hook on this one, though. However, I’m
still going to hold a grudge. There’s no getting around it, but I do
understand it was the Church hierarchy who was responsible for this,
not the average, non-pedophile, parish priest. To rip him a new one
over this makes no sense to me because he most assuredly wasn’t
Patton: he was just one of the millions of soldiers on the frontlines,
fighting the good fight. Anyone who is even remotely familiar with how
the Church works should know this. The real problem that I have with
him is that he completely disregards the sanctity of the confessional
and then uses those tidbits gleaned over years of listening to
confessions for anecdotal evidence. Arrrgh! What’s said in the box,
as he so charmingly calls it, is supposed to stay in the box. It
doesn’t matter if he’s not a priest now---he was a priest then.
It’s completely irrelevant if a sinner or a saint was doing the
confessing; he felt the need to violate the sanctity of the
confessional to back up his point. He thought it was ok to do this in a
if you’re going to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs
sort of way and that’s just wrong.
I can’t even explain how this notion of his, that it’s
good---usable---evidence, just enrages me. I don’t want to think that
when I go to confession the things I say or the sins I confess might be
bandied about in a newspaper ten years from now because the priest I
confessed them to left the priesthood, was being interviewed by a
reporter and needed my confession to back up his point about how the
Church was wrong. Confession is between you, the priest and God. No one
else is involved. No one else is supposed
to be involved. That’s the way confession is designed. Who, in their
right mind, would go into a confessional and spill their guts with the
knowledge that the priest wasn’t going to keep the information to
himself? No one. I know I wouldn’t. And yet this man thought it was
ok to completely disregard that, even though he divulged the
information in a reference based, anonymous, sort of way. But that’s
a slippery slope, isn’t it? Nothing in this world of instant research
via the web is anonymous. You wouldn’t even have to go that far to
find out who the victim was: all you’d have to do was go to the
parish and get chummy with the members and do a little detective work
from there. Sound hard? It wouldn’t be. The article listed the parish
he was working at when he heard the confession of one of the victims.
I’m sure there are more than a few people out there, in that parish,
who read the article who knew exactly whom he was referring to.
What happens if a reporter tries to seek out this victim by doing a
little snooping around? The same is true for the sinners who confessed
to him. What if they’ve actually gone forth and sinned no more? What
if they’ve actually redeemed themselves? Reputations they might have
worked hard to put behind them are now in jeopardy because Mr. Wall
opened up his big fat mouth. He just dropped a bunch of bread crumbs
for some enterprising reporter who really wants to know the extent of
the whole scandal. And what’s worse is that it worked. It did show
just how bad a problem this was that he was absolving victims of their
sins, despite the fact they had committed no sin to begin with (which
is wrong, but that’s another topic for another day). It’s
positively revolting, but quite frankly, I’m not sorry he felt the
need to leave the priesthood. He could have used any other bit of his
many years in the priesthood to prove his point, but not this one.
The revelations from the confessional that he felt the need to divulge
are only going to shake Catholics’ faith even more than they already
have been. And that’s one thing beleaguered Catholics like myself don’t need.

--- And here it is. I know you’ve been waiting for it. The Chuckle of the Day.
Start breakdancing with me and shout it from the rooftops Ghostbusters!