I knew this day was coming… I felt it creeping up on me slowly as I perused the PriestArrested subreddit. I could sense it looming just over the horizon as I watched Spotlight and read reports on various abuse scandal inquiries around the world. I could smell the day getting closer, I could almost touch it as I listened to personal stories of abuse in Canada’s residential schools. The day grew nearer as I researched the Pope for this piece and now, finally, after having watched The Keepers, the day has finally arrived.
The day I write off every last Catholic. Every single one of you. You are all complicit in unending, relentless child rape. Every single one of you.
Before you cry about bigotry and complain that I cannot blame all Catholics for the actions of their clergy, I would like to remind you that yes, the fuck, I can. Just like I can dislike all KKK members, and find abhorrent every last member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association, I can absolutely hold every last fucking one of you Catholics responsible for what your organization has done to generation after generation after generation of children.
You attend your churches, you pay your tithes. Your numbers fill seats and create the power the church continues to hold over its victims. Your donations pay for the relocation and defense of child rapists. You continue to attend the services put on by an organization that spends more time and money covering up baby rape than it does anything else. You are a member of a group that is unequivocally synonymous with child rapists.
You could, at any point in time, walk away and still remain a devout Christian. You do not have to give up your God nor your rituals nor your beliefs to turn away from the Catholic church and refuse to identify with it. If you did turn away from it en masse, the Church would slowly lose some of the power it has – a power that comes with great numbers of followers. If you all just walked away, citing an inability to support their covering up of child rape, how could they justify continuing the cover-ups; the relocations; the defense of rapey priests? You could walk away, and no longer associate with this organized group of pedophiles and still have your religious beliefs. Instead, you choose to remain. You choose to support, in your numbers and your tithes and your complicit silence, the systematic sexual abuse of Catholic children all over the world.
You’re not stupid. You’re not naive. You know this problem hasn’t gone away nor dwindled. You’re here on the very same internet that is home to databases of priests who have raped babies. You have the same access to the headlines that populate subreddits like PriestArrested. You can listen to the same podcasts as I can, you can watch the same documentaries as me. You’ve got libraries nearby, you can watch the news and you know how to access Wikipedia. You know, just as well as I do, that the problem that no one can help thinking about when the Catholic Church is mentioned persists to this very day and is being enabled as high up as God’s little Pope, himself. You know this, and yet you still fill those pews, still tithe and still proudly identify as a Catholic.
Make no mistake: your quiet presence in the pews at mass is an unspoken message. It’s a message that you are okay with thousands of priests the globe over threatening children with the images of hell if they didn’t keep quiet the fact that they were being repeatedly raped by grown-ups.
Your modest donations add up and pay for defense lawyers, settlement fees and relocation costs. You cannot be a tithing Catholic and live under the delusion that not one cent of your money has ever enabled the rape of children.
You know it has. I know it has. And yet, you keep tithing. You keep filling those pews. You keep supporting this heinous, abhorrent organization that enables the systematic abuse and relentless rape of children… who knows? Maybe even your own children! Maybe it even happened to you!
So, yes, I can blame all Catholics. As Tom Petty once said,
If I was in a club, and I found out that there had been generations of people abusing children, and then that club was covering that up, I would quit the club. And I wouldn’t give them any more money – Tom Petty
You see, Tom here describes perfectly how a moral person would behave given the knowledge we all have about the Catholic church. Some of you I’ve spoken with have explained to me that you’d rather better the church from the inside. The problem here is that it’s not working. How many more generations of Catholic children need to be raped while fearing the wrath of God before you realize you have to get out and get out fast? How many more children’s lives must be destroyed and flipped inside out for you to see that a mass exodus from the church is all that will end this relentless abuse?
How long is it going to take you to realize that the well-being of our children is of far more importance than your silly little transubstantiation rituals and your fucked up gatherings to praise a God who would allow this to continue? How long do you need before you can no longer see the pleading eyes of a child terrified his or her body is going to be entered, yet again, by a grown adult and ignore it?
When does this god-given morality you all love to boast about kick in? When do you become one of us: a human being with empathy and compassion?
As a rule, I don’t like to lump all members of a group into the same pile as their bad seeds. However, when that group’s bad seeds are enabled by the presence and continued donations of all members of that group, ignoring every member’s complicity is just denial. You are all to blame. The sooner you realize that the fewer kids will be abused in the future.
You walk away from Baby Rape, Inc. and I can respect you. Until then, stay away from my children. Until then, stay away from my family. Until then, stay the fuck away from me.
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