NO CATHOLIC PRIEST HAS EVER VIOLATED THE SACRAMENTS-- NOT IN 2,000 YEARS

Last year at this time I was getting ready for a trip to Argentina. I documented that trip at my travel blog, the Around the World Blog, including my meetings with a beautiful and brilliant woman who has worked to oppose the military junta. Her short jail term makes her luckier than as many as 30,000 Argentines who... disappeared. This week a distinctly Nazi-oriented Roman Catholic priest, Father Christian von Wernich, was convicted of genocide, murder and torture in Argentina for his role in the "dirty war" against leftists.

Nearly 70 now. Von Wernich was the Buenos Aires police chaplain when the vicious military dictatorship was in power (1976-83).

Von Wernich was repeatedly accused by witnesses of using his position as a priest to assist interrogators in extracting information from the detained. Hector Ballent, who testified on the first day of Von Wernich's trial, said Von Wernich approached him within the clandestine center where he had been tortured under "La Maquina"-- stripped naked, soaked and shocked with electricity. Von Wernich urged him: "Why don't you confess, so that you won't be punished anymore?" Ruben Fernando Schell described an exchange with Von Wernich where the priest told him, "You've been planting bombs, doing bad things so that, when you leave-- if you leave-- God will reject you." He described Von Wernich's pressure as "the worst torture, a moral torture."

The Argentine Catholic Church refused to investigate or to get involved and still hasn't excommunicated the priest-- having transferred him in cognito to a small parish in Chile at one time to keep him out of the hands of the authorities after civilian government and democracy were restored. "Tuesday the church released a tepid statement, claiming his role was individual and not supported by the church, indicating that the Argentine Church's refusal to investigate is likely to remain."

Von Wernich had earlier accused witnesses of lying to the tribunal, in detached religious tone. "False witness is the devil, because it is filled with malice. In 2,000 years of history, no priest of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church has violated the sacraments."

No doubt for Von Wernich the Spanish Inquisition were the glory days of The Faith. But yesterday the BBC reported a story from Italy of another Roman Catholic priest-- this one way higher up in the ecclesiastic hierarchy than Von Wernich-- who has followed a more prosaic priestly path to damnation. Monsignor Tommaso Stenico, however, was just suspended for his duties at the Vatican after telling an interviewer "that he did not regard himself as being in a state of sin because of his homosexual activities but was forced to keep them secret because of the church's teaching on the subject." He later realized he probably shouldn't have admitted he was gay and tried retracting it using a novel approach: "I said I was homosexual in order to unmask those who really are."

Perhaps Stenico and Von Wernich will wind up in the same circle many years from now. It will be a very crowded one, full of all the priests and shamen insisting that "In 2,000 years of history, no priest of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church has violated the sacraments."




UPDATE: LET'S BE FAIR...

It isn't only sick, right-wing religionist nuts who claim to be "not gay" and then molest young boys; it's also sick, right-wing political figures who do that. And no, I'm not going to rehash a bunch of charges against Mark Foley, Mitch McConnell, Larry Craig, David Dreier, Jim McCrery, Bob Bauman, and... well you know the list. Cliff at Brave New Films alerted me to the story of yet another depraved Republican sex-maniac this morning.

The chairman of the Republican Party in Brown County faces criminal charges for allegedly fondling a 16-year-old Ethan House runaway and providing the boy with beer and marijuana late last year.

Donald Fleischman, 37, of Allouez, was charged last month with two counts of child enticement, two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a child and a single charge of exposing himself to a child.

What is wrong with these right-wingers? Are they all just horribly depraved? After Bob Bauman (R-MD) was caught with a young boy and lost his re-election bid and after he had stopped the denials and self-denials, and after he had come to terms with himself as a gay person, he wrote an autobiography, The Gentleman From Maryland-- The Conscience of a Gay Conservative. In it he admits that "in a desperate effort to create my illusion of self esteem I adopted conservative politics with a fervor amounting to neurotic escape. It would be my refuge form the unacceptable inner reality." OK... but they should do it with each other and leave minors alone.