In midst of global sexual abuse crisis, Vatican covers up, scapegoats the innocent

Posted on April 3, 2010 by Sabina Becker

That’s what the headlines would read if mainstream anglo news services had any remaining commitment to accuracy. Instead, what we get is:

“Venezuela’s Catholic Church says Chavez’s Marxist politics threatening religion”

“Church: Marxism a threat to religion in Venezuela”

“Is Hugo Chavez the Kremlin’s Useful Idiot?”

Okay, that last is dumbass “analysis” of the recent visit by Vladimir Putin, by a Brazil-based sportswriter who clearly knows nothing about international politics. But still, are we sensing a pattern here?

Yup, the old Red Scare soundtrack is playing once more on the Mighty Wurlitzer! The Cold War has been miraculously resurrected! Hallelujah!

And just in time for Holy Week, too, when the discredited Catholic hierarchy has its biggest opportunity to lure straying sheeple back into the fold and get them to revert to the old superstitions of praying for rain and blaming the leftist president for El Niño. No shit, that’s what Cardinal Urosa is calling on Venezuelans to do. As if the people of Venezuela hadn’t been watching the skies for months, hiring cloud-seeders, or listening to climatologists who know better than the church does as to what’s what. And in a country where the overwhelming majority of electricity is generated by hydro (the Guri Dam alone provides a whopping 70% of the entire country’s power), of course the seasonal rains are of paramount importance. (The fact that the much-maligned infrastructure, which generations of previous presidents failed a lot harder to invest in, worked better when there was no drought gets swept under the rug. It’s much easier to blame Chavecito that way.)

Of course, what gets left unsaid by the Dissociated Press and other associated disociados is that Cardinal Urosa is a rabid right-winger, as are all the Venezuelan cardinals. They have always come down clearly on the side of the oligarchy, and never more so than now, when the oligarchs are out of power and likely to remain so for decades, if not forever. As Alberto Nolia points out on the most recent episode of his show, The Devil’s Papers, the Venezuelan church hierarchy is politicized; it is aligned with the opposition; and even during Holy Week, they just can’t lay off the politicking. And considering that the Church is supposed to be a spiritual force in the world, rather than a political one, that’s a real perversion.

But of course, that’s not the only perversion it’s guilty of. Here’s Professor Vladimir Acosta, saying something that would have been unthinkable two decades ago–but which now, in this scary red era of “no free speech in Venezuela”, is not only speakable, but widely acknowledged by the nation’s progressive majority:

He’s saying that despite his considerable charisma, the late Pope John Paul II was an arrogant reactionary, one of the worst in modern history. He was allied with the Reagan administration, the CIA and all their puppets in Latin America, most notably the pious Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet. His canonization of the founder of the known fascist cult, Opus Dei, is more than a little hinky; so is his consistent silencing of progressive voices within Catholicism, such as Latin America’s proponents of Liberation Theology. Apparently anticommunism was always more important to him than the church’s professed concern for social justice. And anticommunists got preference and handshakes, even when they were the most vile abusers of human rights–as were the Argentine junta’s devoutly Catholic generals, along with Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. Human rights abusers were absolved, excused and forgiven, but never shunned, excommunicated, or even admonished! That was for those who dared to question papal infallibility, such as Hans Küng.

And of course, we won’t get into all the sexual abuse that was going on while John Paul II was in power. Abuse which the current pope, who was then Cardinal Ratzinger, was instrumental in sweeping under rug after rug after rug. Neither will we go into the fact that they’re running out of rugs now, because the rugs are being yanked out from under them by scores of victims coming forward to tell all.

No, let’s just play the old hoary tune about how the godless commies are coming, and how the KGB has made a beachhead in Venezuela. That’s much easier than delving into how many Venezuelans (and others) were sexually abused by clerics for how long, isn’t it?

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12 Responses to In midst of global sexual abuse crisis, Vatican covers up, scapegoats the innocent

  1. Manaat says:
    April 3, 2010 at 11:02 AM

    Believe it or not, Papa Ratzi has been relatively sane on Vzla. He recently appointed Msgr. Moronta in some hotshot position at the Vatican (I forgot what exactly it is): he is the most moderate (and politically progressive member of Vzla’s Conferencia Episcopal), and has apparently asked Urosa & Co. to cool it a bit and be a bit more neutral in Vzla’s politics. Moronta’s appointment was widely perceived as a slap in the face for the more reactionary segment of the CEV.

  2. Sabina Becker says:
    April 3, 2010 at 11:11 AM

    Seems that Urosa & Co. are ignoring that message. They’re ginning up the old Red Menace thing even though Chavecito is on record as a Catholic himself. Craziness!

  3. Jim Hadstate says:
    April 3, 2010 at 2:07 PM

    Yeah, having grown up in Liberation Theology theology, I have a better handle on what its principles and teaching are than the arrogant jackass Pope John Paul II (Can you imagine the arrogance of someone naming himself after not one but two of the original apostles. And not just any Apostles. THE Apostles.). I also know a great deal more about it than the Fuhrer Pope Youthnazi.
    The big lie told about it was that it embraced Marxism, which is absolutely a lie. It was centered on the theological teachings of Christ and the gentleness of sharing found in the 4 Gospels.
    The thing is, Christ called for shared sacrifice and shared goodness. These two concepts are abhorrent to the oligarchy in Latin America. They believe in that good old capitalist belief that what is mine is mine and what’s yours is mine, too.
    Agrarian reform, as it was understood in liberation theology did not mean the state confiscation of land that was actively being farmed by the person claiming the land. Well, since most of the landowners, including the Catholic Church, were absentee landowners, and the thought of getting dirt under their manicured fingernails was abhorrent, they stood to lose a great deal, including the workers that they kept in serfdom, if not actual slavery.
    The Church, to protect its own vast landholdings and the cash flow from its wealthy parishioners, had to come up with some way to tamp this down. Equating it with Marxism was the perfect solution. Not only did it let the church brand it a heresy, because Marxism makes man the center of life not God, it also brought down the boot heel of the US military and the cash of the US to the dictatorial powers in Latin America. Problem solved! Oligarchs happy. Church happy. US happy. Campesinos, who cares? Only waiting in the wings was the defiant priesthood of Latin America and the nouveau socialists of Latin America who were not beholden to anyone except their own downtrodden. Surprise! Viva Fidel, el padre de la revolucion. Viva Che, el corazon del la revolucion. Viva Hugo, Evo, Rafael, Daniel, Luiz y Fernando. And if I’ve forgotten anyone, I’m sorry. It’s Satan’s fault. Just ask the Fuhrer Pope!

  4. Wren says:
    April 3, 2010 at 3:32 PM

    It’s the whole communism=atheism canard this time used to divert attention from the whole Catholicism=protect child rapist fact. Never mind that democratic socialism is not communism much less the authoritarian collectivism of the old Soviet Union.
    Eric Ehrmann (got to love that dual expertise in sports and global issues) has the gall to mention propaganda while touting the whole buying weapons from Russia is evil garbage even as anyone claiming to be an expert in global issues should know the U.S. is the largest arms merchant on the planet and it isn’t even close. And of course any mention of Columbia’s crime against humanity by killing civilians and dressing them up as rebels to garner more military aid from the U.S. or the U.S. military base agreement with Columbia just isn’t happening. That can’t be happening to these people because that might actually be a legitimate reason for Venezuela to be buying arms from Russia.
    Does Huffington Post read Huffington Post?

  5. Sabina Becker says:
    April 3, 2010 at 3:57 PM

    Jim, I have to laugh when I hear how wrong the media get EVERYTHING to do with Liberation Theology, and Venezuela too. The first Sandinista régime in Nicaragua had priests working within it! And they had no problem reconciling their Christianity to the alleged “Marxist atheism” of the Sandinista ideology. Same thing in Venezuela. I watch La Hojilla as often as it comes on the Internets. Every so often Mario Silva (who used to be with the Venezuelan Communist party, and is now with the PSUV) gets a phone-in from one of two priests, Father Vidal Atencio or Father Rojas (first name eludes me), both of whom are leftist, and both of whom specifically link Christianity with socialist principles. Father Vidal, in particular, points out what a leftist Jesus himself was, telling his richer followers to pool their excess goods so that nobody lacked, and so that they could help those in need. And he exhorts his audiences to do the same. Yeah, that’s redistribution of wealth. But it’s also putting wealth to work–something capitalism talks a good game about, but shamefully neglects to do in the real world. What good are inordinate riches in the hands of 20% or fewer, if 80% of the country is malnourished, undereducated and without doctors? That money isn’t gonna trickle down, and the oligarchs are well aware of that. They really don’t give a shit if those they deem to be useless eaters all die. Their only regret is that the law forbids them from owning actual slaves again.
    Wren, I don’t think some of these writers they got even read themselves. All they do is generate “content”, of varying quality. When it comes to LatAm, about half the time the HuffPo falls on its ass. The figure rises to 100% when it comes to Venezuela, unless the author of the piece is Sean Penn (and how sad is it that an actor can do the necessary homework better than a professional reporter?) They seem to think that US progressives WANT to hear how evil the president of Venezuela is, rather than finding out the truth for themselves.
    And quite a few of them do, because they’ve fallen into lazy habits of thinking created by lazy habits of so-called journalism. FUX Snooze was the first to break the “news” of how Dubya “won” in Florida (he lost, as the recounts clearly showed), and everybody else just fell in line like dominoes, even though the FUX “reporter” who broke the phony story was Dubya’s own cousin. (And the governor overseeing the state’s electoral process was Dubya’s own brother. The layers of nepotism and hinkitude are many.)
    Everybody heard and bought the bullshit about how FUX is such a hot network (that’s another thing for me to comment on, later) and decided that to attract viewers, they had to out-FUX FUX. Shit, FUX even has a priest “reporting” for them! So now you’re seeing the fallout–everybody’s decided that if the State Dept. hates Venezuela, if a few right-wing bishops say there’s Marxism afoot, etc., then by God, it must be so! And we have to scoop FUX on that at any cost, before their resident priest pipes up!
    Meanwhile, the sheeple get fleeced…not by the wolf they’ve been taught to fear (it’s actually another imaginary bogeyman), but by their “shepherds” themselves. Some of whom are in the church, and others in the media.

  7. Sabina Becker says:
    April 3, 2010 at 11:11 PM

    OMG, as soon as I started flipping through Pa’Julio’s naughty pix, that damn song started running through my head again. And then, I had another vision of Carvajalino, with nothing on but his hat and a smile.
    I need air again!!!

  8. Manaat says:
    April 3, 2010 at 11:46 PM

    PaJulio’s bf is kinda cute.

  9. Sabina Becker says:
    April 3, 2010 at 11:53 PM

    Yeah…nice faces, nice tushies, shame about the politics. Silly oppos! They forget who persecuted the gays the most…wasn’t the Chavistas, that’s for sure.

  10. Slave Revolt says:
    April 4, 2010 at 9:50 AM

    Bina, spot-on about so much of the US progressive community ‘wanting’ to hear that Chavez is evil. So true.
    It pains me when I read the discussion of intelligent, educated, literate, erudite people talking total bullshit when it comes to notions and concepts of ‘objectivity’ and bias in human communications.
    There is no ‘reality’ that any political tendency can see clearly.
    Science and ‘facts’ are tied to truth, and there are different types of ‘truth’ that bear human society.
    Not to become too esoteric, what I mean to say is that curious minds would engage a discussion of ‘what can we know’.
    All political tendencies will emphasize and play down and ‘frame’ events congruent to their/our goals.
    I have went far afield here, and there are no final answers about how to engage these concepts in the dynamic play of everyday discourse.
    But, self-critique and curiosity are also sorely missing among so-called progressives in Western society. There is a deep laziness when it comes to investigating and challenging myths.
    If we can find ways to incorporate noble, dexterious ways of framing contemporary politics, we develop narratives that are far more compelling than the fare being pimped on us from elites–Huffington Post, the AP, or Fox News.
    For me, a familiarity with the way Noam Chomsky has engaged critical thinking when it comes to news is a good place to start, a primer for truly inquiring minds.
    The dominant Western ideologies are diseased inasmuch as they create results that are pathological. Recognizing how we are all victims of the disease is a first step toward revolutionary and healthy change.
    Forgive the digression and the lack of clarity in the presentation of some of these ideas. But I think the ubiquitous claims to knowing ‘objective reality’ are delusional on many levels.
    The so-called progressive community that hates on Chavez and doesn’t seek a more nuanced understanding of many critical issues is as much an impediment as the corporate/imperialist far right.

  11. Sabina Becker says:
    April 4, 2010 at 10:32 AM

    Slave, the only problem with the US progressive community is that it’s, well, stuck inside the US. Which is a big fat echo chamber and gets very loud at times. Whatever’s “in America’s interests” is good, even when it’s bad for everyone else and even bad for a lot of US citizens themselves; that’s the message that gets dinned home time and again. Legislate for consumer protection, and the corporations all howl on cue that you’ve taken away “the people’s freedom”–never mind that the people, the actual people, might in fact WANT to be free from that incessant corporate death grip on their lives, that endless imperative to “express your freedom” by buying junk. Tell McDonald’s to stop clogging people’s arteries, and they retort that it’s “unAmerican” to “deprive” people of the “choice” their artery-clogging gunk supposedly supplies.
    In a climate like that, little kids can hardly be blamed for not knowing where their food comes from, or what a fresh tomato tastes like when it’s not being sugared to death and boiled into ketchup. People have actually been brainwashed into thinking that it’s some kind of patriotic duty to smoke cigarettes (because it keeps Virginia tobacco farmers in business) and eat unhealthy food (because it’s “The American Way Of Life”). They have not been taught to connect the dots between all the thousand varieties of junk on Wal-Mart’s shelves and the degradation of the environment from here all the way to China. The public education system has been gutted to the point where there are millions of functional illiterates roaming the streets, looking for their next hit of crack (and it’s not necessarily the cocaine kind we’re talking about here, either.)
    And the reason the system’s been gutted is so that people don’t have the mental tools anymore to connect the dots between their own failures and the global capitalist system itself. They’re taught that failure is personal, it’s yours and yours alone, and that if it happens to you, well, you just deserve it! You’re never taught to look for the hidden dynamic behind it, or to recognize it properly, much less how to reform the system so that the disaster can’t happen again.
    So when a guy like Chávez or Evo comes along, and says he’s gonna use the system to change the system, to improve it so that it serves the people of his country and not the corporations (whether domestic, foreign or some incestuous hybrid of the two), of course the Mighty Wurlitzer is gonna crank up the old Red Scare Blues. A LatAm leader who is working for his people is automatically a “dangerous populist demagogue”, “anti-American” (never mind that Latin America IS America, and a bigger chunk of it than the US), etc., etc. And since the “liberal” media repeat the same lie as the wingnut far-right fringe groups, albeit perhaps a bit more “nuanced” or seemingly intelligently worded, well…of course the progressives, unless they’ve been to LatAm, or can understand Spanish, or have worked directly with Latino immigrants and communities within the US (except the right-wing ex-Cubans, natch), they’re not going to know fact from falsehood! They’re going to believe that Chávez is the antichrist, that Evo is evil, that Rafael Correa is a douchebag, and on and on, because a corporate-owned, -financed and CIA-connected media outlet is going to be telling them that. Chávez is Saddam, and he’s coming for your unborn kids! Panic panic fear fear terror terror!
    And they’re going to believe it, even if they are liberal, because they haven’t the energy to go up against their own country’s entrenched systems and change them. There is an elaborate mechanism at work that’s been built up over decades, and will take many years to dismantle if anyone ever finds the cojones to do it. The closest anyone from the US ever came to actually doing something about it was when JFK said he’d gut the CIA and return it to being just a coordinator of intelligence gathering agencies. And just look how they retaliated against HIM. They had a program going where the Mafia supplied the assassins for any “delicate” covert op in a foreign country where the US couldn’t be seen blatantly showing its hands. Importing it to home turf turned out to be perfectly feasible. And the cover-up is massive because there’s a well-oiled machine at work to keep that going. That’s why, to this day, you still have otherwise intelligent, sane, rational people seriously believing that Lee Harvey Oswald–the CIA’s patsy–“acted alone”!
    To change the system, obviously, is going to take more than just one person. Chávez, contrary to the media myth, is not a one-man band. He’s the logical outgrowth of a decades-long revolutionary process that began with Bolívar and independence from Spain, then progressed through Zamora and the unification of the people against the oligarchy, and from there, into the 20th century, an opposition first to dictatorships and then to pacted, fake democracy. He was elected because he was the only candidate to listen to the people, not just a bunch of handlers sent by the State Dept. to keep the country in line and its oil dirt-cheap. It was the people that made him. And that’s why it was so profoundly unsettling for the oligarchs and the State Dept. and its media machine up here when the coup of ’02 was reversed. It was the people that did it. Chávez was an isolated prisoner, so he could not have done a thing by himself. It was all a direct refutation of the Great American Myth of Rugged Individualism. No single individual could have staged the coup, and certainly not the pushback that followed. The coup was the work of dozens, perhaps a few hundred, all directed from Washington (and financed from there, as well). But the counter-coup was the work of millions of poor, ordinary Venezuelans, directed only by themselves and supported at ground level by one another. There was no money involved. It was purely the will of the people, their anger, their outrage, that kept the momentum going until there was no choice but to bring Chávez back or face a full-scale revolt!
    And that’s why Chávez is really so scary to the media up here. It’s not him, it’s the THEM which he represents. Venezuela is full of brave, feisty, uppity people, but it’s easier not to show them; easier just to single out one big, loud, red-shirted man. Because if you had to pan back and show the actual size of the crowd, the progressive community up here would realize in an instant that they’d been lied to about Venezuela, and we couldn’t have that!

  12. Slave Revolt says:
    April 4, 2010 at 12:40 PM

    Well, at least Kennedy being Catholic is tied to the post, pedophilia in the Church. LOL
    Anyway, I concur with your analysis. As well, I think that Kennedy was killed by powerful forces and that Oswald was a perfect patsy. However, I think that many people mythologize Kennedy in ways that contribute to distortion.
    Isn’t it interesting that when the MSM discusses Oswald that they so thoroughly play-down that he was trained to speak Russian by the US government, that he was trained as a special operative? That he would go rouge so quickly and draw attention to himself as a Cuba-supporting communist in New Orleans—well, this doesn’t pass the smell test. There are other things that are compelling, but these two stand out for me.
    I was born one week before Kennedy was killed (so, we all know I wasn’t involved LOL).
    I agree with Chomsky’s take that dwelling on the JFK assassination is a bit pointless. Absent an irrefutable smoking gun, I see dwelling on this as diverting energy from the matters at hand.
    Also, I believe that Dr. King’s so-called murderer was a patsy, and that elements within the government were involved (FBI/CIA, etc.). King’s family also believe this. (One of my first formulative memories as a young child was watching King’s funeral with my nanny, an African American woman from Georgia. I was sad, and I sensed that a great person had been taken from us. That same African American woman and her husband are what functions as real family for me today, and I am blessed to have them.)
    However, 9-11 being a government conspiracy, for me, is totally ludicrous, and I wouldn’t be surprised if elements in the US government have helped pump-up the hysteria with respect to this.
    So many otherwise intelligent people on the left have bought into the 9-11 conspiracy, and there is no talking logically and discussing the issue, in most cases.
    Again, I think that dwelling on conspiracies that cannot be proven beyond a doubt anytime soon diverts valuable energy from what we can do here and now.

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