Catholic Church Finally Being Treated Like the Criminals They Are

For once, justice may finally be served in this country…

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal by the Vatican for immunity in a high-profile pedophilia case, dealing a setback to the Holy See as it tries to protect itself from a litany of sex abuse cases. The court refused without comment to consider whether the Vatican had legal immunity over the sexual abuse of minors by priests in the United States, allowing a lower court suit filed in 2002 to proceed.

The plaintiff in the case, identified only as John V. Doe, was abused numerous times in 1965 when he was a teenager, by an alleged pedophile priest, Father Andrew Ronan, in Portland, Oregon. Before being accused of the offences in Oregon, Father Ronan, who died in 1992, allegedly sexually molested seminarians in Ireland and children in Chicago.

The Vatican wanted U.S. courts to throw out a lawsuit that sought to hold the church responsible for moving Father Ronan from Ireland to Chicago and then to Portland despite the sex abuse accusations that followed him from parish to parish. But the nine US judges refused to consider the church’s claim that it enjoys “sovereign immunity” and therefore is safe from prosecution.

I bet there’s millions of John Does out there who were happy to hear this one, and I hope the Church goes broke trying to pay them all off. (Which doesn’t make up for what they did, by the way, but if these lawsuits slowly unravel their credibility as well as their finances, I’m all for it.) This immunity loophole was getting to be almost as large as the holes in their dogmatic arguments, so it’s nice to see that the U.S. court system, which has long been under the thumb of Christianity, is starting to recognize that piety is not analogous to moral perfection. I wonder how many of the Pope’s faithful would flock to see him behind a courtroom stand instead of a pulpit.

And speaking of Pope Benedict and his minions being treated like the criminals that they are, Belgium also isn’t buying this immunity bullshit…

Four days after a series of police raids of Catholic institutions in Belgium that drew sharp criticism from the pope, the reason for the unusually aggressive operation has emerged: a formal accusation that the church was hiding information on sexual abuse lodged by the former president of an internal church commission handling such cases.

The declaration to the police set off four raids in which the authorities seized hundreds of case files from the commission’s current leader, detained a group of bishops for more than nine hours and disturbed the tomb of a cardinal where construction work had recently been done. Investigators drilled into the tomb and lowered a camera, but found only the remains.

Investigators are now analyzing more than two truckloads of seized documents, many related to 475 complaints lodged with the sex-abuse commission after the resignation in April of a popular bishop who admitted that, early in his career, he had molested a boy.

Two truckloads, eh? They’re gonna need a bigger boat if we really want to see justice done – raid the fucking Vatican already. Who’s going to stop them, the beret-wearing, orange-and-blue-striped-jumpsuit sporting Vatican police with their LARPing axes? Seriously, telling the authorities that they have no right access to their archives and private files is like a murderer telling the police that they have no right to look in that freshly dug hole in his backyard. If they truly have nothing to hide, as they continue to claim, then why not let us have a look for ourselves? If you think the shit that got out was shocking, just imagine what’s inside all those locked cabinets. Of course, if these raids were to actually happen, you better believe that there would be so much smoke rising from the Vatican chimney that people would think that a new Pope was just elected. I’m sure a lot of the real hard evidence has already been destroyed by now, but if they’ve been this sloppy (or arrogant, depending on how you want to look at it) all these years, who know what other horrors they may find?