Pope Go Homo
Posted on July 20, 2008
The Pope, Joseph Ratzinger, a man appointed to his job for life by cardinals who were themselves appointed by the previous Pope(s) has again apologised during an address in Australia for the ‘pain and suffering’ caused by the ‘misdeeds’ of priests — that is the systematic rape and abuse of children by clergy and the ongoing cover-up of these crimes by Church authorities. You would be right to ask why the Pope has to keep apologising for these crimes, unless child rape is endemic and institutionalised in the Roman Catholic Church and its ideology. Note that the apology does not cost the Church anything. Ratzinger did not apologise directly to the children or their families, and did not specify whether the apology was to victims in Australia, where there have already been over one hundred convictions of rapist priests, or to all of the victims past and present, nor is it clear that his bland words were supposed to compensate for the past hundreds of years of abuse.
The New South Wales state government, which contributed $A86 million of taxation revenue towards World Youth Day, attempted to muzzle political protest during the Papal visit, with the Deputy Premier gazetting a special law to impose fines of $A5500 on anyone who causes annoyance or inconvenience to participants in a World Youth Day in Sydney. The Australian Federal Court subsequently ruled the legislation ‘invalid in law’, as there is ‘no intelligible boundary’ on what ’causes annoyance’¹, allowing protesters to wear their ‘annoying’ tshirts and hand out condoms and coathangers along the pilgrims’ route without fear of arrest and prosecution.
It was encouraging to glimpse banners of Australia’s Socialist Alliance on news coverage of the protests against the Pope’s visit, with their slogans supporting women’s rights, same-sex marriage, safer sex and access to safe abortions, instead of the pandering to backward, reactionary mediaeval ideology that we see in Britain from the likes of the opportunist Socialist Workers Party, and the political degenerates of the Socialist Unity Network who form the arse of the RESPECT coalition, the failed vehicle for the Labour renegade, Stalin admirer and showboater, George Galloway. The Church has at every turn been counter-Reformation, counter-Enlightenment and counter-revolutionary, preaching and prosecuting murderous ideology, opposing every attempt to loosen its grip on the lives, minds and pockets of the human beings under its control, functioning as an arm of the oppressive state and responsible for ancient and modern genocides, including millions of deaths from HIV/AIDS in Africa and Asia, where Church doctrine continues to forbid the use of condoms by the faithful.
While socialists understand why people turn to religion — the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world — socialists must also be the implacable foes of the clergy who prey upon and abet the oppression of the poor, the vulnerable and the ill-educated.
¹ Court dumps ‘annoy’ law — Sydney Morning Herald, 15 July 2008.
