D1B wrote:
The Vatican is evil. Gannon and you are right; everyday Catholics didn't rape the kids or do stupid **** on a regular basis like their leadership. They're decent people. That however doesn't absolve them from partial responsibility. They, so far, have failed to hold their leadership accountable for their blatant immorality and crimes against humanity. Sure there's been some dissent, but nothing commensurate with their true power and responsibility as humans and followers of Jesus Christ. They have failed too.
This underscores something I've been harping on here for years - organized religion is dangerous. Billions of catholics trained to turn their heads to an atrocity happening before their eyes. They're no different than the average Third Reich German citizen who allowed their leaders to practically wipe out an entire race of people and engulf the world in war. Its a form of insanity.
See, that's the part I don't agree with. You make it seem like any shedding of light on the child abuse scandal has come entirely from non-Catholics, outside of the church, when the reality of it is it's the very laity you are heaping blame on that has blown the whistles and has moved to make the church hierarchy accountable. more so than anyone else. Groups like SNAP and others are made up almost entirely of people who come from the Church's lay population (and are either still part of the Church or who have left) and are the ones who have gone public with what they know or what they themselves have actually experienced. They have brought these issues to light. You castigate those very people as blind automatons when the reality is without those people, again, the lay population of the church, we may never have heard of these atrocities.
The blame, and all of the blame, lies with the priests and other people in position of power who actually committed the crimes, and it also lies with anyone, other than the victims, who had direct knowledge of the actual crimes and did nothing about it (i.e. the Cardinals and bishops of the world who may have never touched a child but knew for certain that other priests did and said and did nothing about it, as well as any non-Church hierarchy person with that knowledge).
Your comparison to the Third Reich is just a piss poor comparison - they couldn't have been any more public about their feeling of racial superiority and the need to annihilate and enslave anyone not of their race, and people went right along with it - I've yet to ever hear the Church advertise that young children should be sexual prey and that people should and do support that. Analogies are dangerous if you just flub it, like you did here.
But, I don't think CHI or their attorneys were going for sainthood. 
