In the immortal words of Dave Matthews: ‘Don’t drink the water’

These are the kind of people we have running our country: A U.S. representative who believes that the glass of water Pope Francis, aka Jorge Bergoglio, drank from during his recent speech before Congress was actually consecrated holy water.

With beliefs such as that, rational behavior rarely follows, and subsequent action of Rep. Bob Brady, D-Pa., was no exception. After the speech, Brady took the used glass of water, which Stephen Colbert called “old man’s backwash,” and proceeded to drink from the glass himself:

According to The Washington Post:

He carefully carried the glass, still half full, back to his office where he sipped the water and then passed it around to his wife and two staffers. Later, he invited Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) to his office, who, along with his wife and mother, dipped his fingers in the water. Casey’s office confirmed this was true.

Brady later emptied the remaining water in a bottle with plans to bless his grandchildren with it. The Post picks up again:

Now, as we understand it, and please correct us if we’re wrong, unless the pope actually blessed the liquid it’s not technically holy water.

“Please correct us if we’re wrong …” Happily. Even after the Pope or any other priests “blesses” water, it’s still nothing more than two hydrogen and one oxygen molecules and has no extraordinary abilities other than, of course, the power of quenching thirsts.

Brady told the press that he could “care less” what anyone thought about the water. He still believes it’s holy water:

“Anything the pope touches becomes blessed,” he said. “I think so and no one is going to change my mind.”

So, Francis is like a Catholic version of Midas with the golden touch? In any case, Brady was undeterred in his belief about the holy water and commits the same mistake as many fellow believers who think the world contains a supernatural component despite a lack of evidence in all of recorded human history, except for some deeply flawed ancient texts.

In any case, a company called Wayne Enterprises is attempting to cash into this belief. The company was or still is selling drinking water it is marketing as holy water. The company claims the water has been blessed “by hands of God.” According to the company’s website:

By hands of God, we mean a priest, churchman, clergyman, cleric, curate, divine, ecclesiastic, elder, father, friar, holy man, lama, monk, padre, pontiff, preacher, rabbi, rector, sky pilot, or vicar.

Our future goal is to have a clergy from every faith bless each bottle of Holy Drinking Water.

“Every faith?” So, representatives from all 4,200 religions in the world are going to bless each individual bottle of water before the product is shipped out? Sounds like a logistical nightmare.

Salvation for atheists?

Continuing the policy of pretty much making up things as they go along, the Catholic Church, under the leadership of Pope Francis, skipped 2,000 years of Christian tradition, which holds that only believers in Jesus get to have redemption and eternal life, and proclaimed that even atheists can get into heaven so long as they are good. So much for John 3:16, “Jesus is the way, the truth and the life,” nearly the entire book of Revelation, and well, free will, since I doubt that even nonbelievers who also happen to be “good” — that would be almost all of them — would not want to be dragged into heaven and forced to sing praises to God for eternity. That, to them, would be hell.

Here is the pope:

The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart, do good and do not do evil. All of us. “But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.” Yes, he can … The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the blood of Christ, all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone “Father, the atheists?” Even the atheists. Everyone! We must meet one another doing good. “But I don’t believe, Father. I am an atheist!” But do good: we will meet one another there.

Stephen Colbert, a Catholic himself, opined on the pope’s declaration in a recent edition of The Colbert Report:

Ratzinger hastens John Paul’s divinity

[[Pope John Paul II]], predecessor of the current pope, [[Joseph Ratzinger]], is one unverifiable miracle away from sainthood this weekend, following a beatification ceremony Sunday at the Vatican. Sister Marie Simon Pierre claimed she was cured of [[Parkinson’s disease]] after praying to Pope John Paul. John Paul died of Parkinson’s. How convenient. Too bad he couldn’t pray to himself or to one of the other legions of mortals the Catholic Church has raised to god-status through the centuries.

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times - The reliquary containing the blood of Pope John Paul II was placed on a pedestal during the beatification ceremony by Sister Marie Simon Pierre, right, who says she was cured of Parkinson's disease after praying to John Paul II, and Sister Tobiana. Sister Tobiana cared for the late pope.

Neither John Paul, nor Ratzinger are deserving of canonization, of course, since their collective track record on human rights is contemptible at best. John Paul looked the other way when bishops and others within his own church were accused of pedophilia, failed to administer swift justice on the accused or failed to report or covered up cases altogether. Here is The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd:

… John Paul forfeited his right to beatification when he failed to establish a legal standard to remove pedophiles from the priesthood, and simply turned away for many years.

… How can you be a saint if you fail to protect innocent children?

Ratzinger’s record is hardly any cleaner. You know a church has major internal problems when one of the most dominant links on the front of its website reads, “Abuse of minors, the church’s response.”

John Paul was also well known for his stance against condom use, a stance that no doubt has caused untold suffering in Africa and other parts of the world after the Church openly condemned condom use in impoverished countries, ludicrously claiming in 2003 that condoms were ineffective because they had tiny holes in them. Ratzinger’s statements about condoms are barely any more enlightening.

The current pope is well aware of the continued heat being placed on the church because of these and other misdeeds. Thus, as Catholic officials are apt to do, Ratzinger simply made up the rules as he went along, waiving the traditional five-year wait for beatification and went ahead with proceedings weeks after John Paul gave up the ghost, the latter presumably not finding the correct saint on which to pray to save himself from the incurable disease. Here is Ratzinger at the ceremony talking and largely misrepresenting John Paul:

He was witness to the tragic age of big ideologies, totalitarian regimes, and from their passing John Paul II embraced the harsh suffering, marked by tension and contradictions, of the transition of the modern age toward a new phase of history, showing constant concern that the human person be its protagonist.

Ratzinger called John Paul “blessed,” which means he can now be exalted in public, presumably putting him just a step below Jesus. Sainthood then, in everyone’s eyes except deluded Catholic officials and followers, will place John Paul on the same tier as Jesus in the stupendously fabricated and polytheistic world of Roman Catholicism. I wonder if the good shepherd himself would take offense.

The Catholic Church’s vale of tears

For a church which seems absolutely consumed with the topic of sex, from abstinence, to prohibiting condom use in Africa, to circumcision, to homosexual priests, to continued and near ubiquitous charges of molestation of children (some deaf, no less!), readers shouldn’t be surprised that the Catholic Church and Joseph Ratzinger, the current pope, is summoning every possible excuse to deflect the allegations.

Indeed, charges against Catholic officials are mounting. Heaped onto the allegations, the short list includes that of:

Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul, 55, who is an Indian priest accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a 16-year-old girl, may be extradited to the U.S. to face trial. He was alleged to have sexually assaulted the female church member while serving in Minnesota.

Peter Hullermann, a German priest who, after receiving therapy for his pedophilia, was allowed to continue working. Current allegations have surfaced, spanning from the 1970s to the late 90s. Only in mid-March of this year was he suspended.

Father Donald McGuire, who sexually abused two teen boys in the 1960s and was only convicted in 2006. He also allegedly had sexual relationships with at least seven teenage boys between 1969-2004. Here is a timeline of the egregious mess.

• Michael Teta and Robert C. Trupia — Two more, of which the late Tucson Bishop Manuel Moreno struggled with the Vatican to get defrocked.

I could, no doubt, continue. In the latest episode of blame-shifting, the Catholic News Agency is claiming that this New York Times article fails to mention that the lawyer Jeff Anderson has been the lead attorney in numerous suits against the church and has an obvious vested interest in seeing that new allegations come to light. Lawrence Murphy is the topic of The Times article, and he is accused of molesting up to 200 deaf children.

According to a William McGurn opinion piece, what Laurie Goodstein, the author of The Times story,

did not tell readers is that Mr. Anderson isn’t just any old lawyer. When it comes to suing the church, he is America’s leading plaintiffs attorney. Back in 2002, he told the Associated Press that he’d won more than $60 million in settlements from the church, and he once boasted to a Twin Cities weekly that he’s “suing the s–t out of them everywhere.” Nor did the Times report another salient fact about Mr. Anderson: He’s now trying to sue the Vatican in U.S. federal court.

And the Catholic News Agency:

According to the Pioneer Press, Anderson charged that the Pope along with his predecessors was”the mastermind, head, of an international conspiracy to cover up their own crimes and keep them above the law.”

Donald Marshall, who has accused Fr. Murphy of kissing him and attempting to fondle him when he was a teenager at Lincoln Hills Boys Home in Irma, Wisconsin, also spoke at the press conference.

Now 45, Marshall said he was shocked when he was told that “then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI — had a chance to defrock Murphy but instead did nothing,” the Pioneer Press says.

Then-Cardinal Ratzinger “may have not fondled me, but he’s no different because he allowed it to happen,” Marshall said, according to the Pioneer Press.

In fact, Cardinal Ratzinger was not appointed to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) until 1981, well after the abuse took place.

His office addressed sexual abuse cases only when it involved abuse of the confessional until 2001, when it took over abuse cases from the Roman Rota. Allegations against Murphy came to the CDF’s attention in 1996 because of claims he abused the confessional.

The documents provided to the New York Times by Anderson and Finnegan, as well as the Times’ interpretation of them, have been called into question.

The documentation included the minutes of a key Vatican meeting between three Wisconsin bishops and CDF Secretary Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone. However, the same documentation revealed that these Italian-language minutes were translated “very roughly” into English using a computer translator.

Properly translated, the minutes show that the Vatican never ruled out the laicization of the priest, but a lack of records from the archdiocese created barriers to a canonical trial.

In his Wall Street Journal essay, McGurn provided additional documentation challenging the Times’ claims that the priest was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system. In fact, Fr. Murphy was stripped of his priestly faculties, a process McGurn declares the equivalent of taking away a doctor’s medical license.

McGurn challenged the press to continue examining the “hard questions” about Catholic prelates’ action in the Murphy case. However, he suggested reporters provide “some context, and a bit of journalistic skepticism about the narrative of a plaintiff’s attorney making millions off these cases.”

One can only wonder, however, what difference all this makes. We can’t dispute the fact that lawyers are in law to make money. That Anderson is, perhaps, taking an active role in uncovering corrupt activity either says something about his good character or his bad character. But it doesn’t matter which. The case against Murphy is only one case of a multitude leveled against the Catholic Church. In addition to cases pointed out here, the Murphy case

is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.

And now, we have Ratzinger and other Catholic officials equating the ill-fated church with the persecution of the Jews.

If that sounds like a heinous analogical leap, you would be right.

Speaking in St. Peter’s Basilica, the priest, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, took note that Easter and Passover fell during the same week this year, and said he was led to think of the Jews.

“They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence, and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms,” said Father Cantalamessa, who serves under the title of preacher of the papal household. Then he quoted from what he said was a letter from a Jewish friend he did not identify.

“I am following the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful by the whole world,” he said the friend wrote. “The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt, remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”

Quite the contrary, if any institution should feel a generous measure of guilt at this point, it should be the Catholic Church, and it should apologize to us all for the immoral acts it has both condoned, turned a blind eye to and exacted on humankind through these 1,800 or so years. Not to mention the less unseen, but just as disastrous, effects of teaching young children that they are created innately and spiritually sick and commanded to make themselves better by believing (however forced and obligatory that belief may be) or else face the fire. And in such a lowly spiritual condition, children are taught that confession is where they are to by reconciled to God, who, presumably, made them sinners to begin with. At least Protestantism claims to offer direct access to Jesus without a necessary, and also presumably, an equally or possible more sinful, intermediary, as we have learned, and it’s in this sad context that the sex scandals with children only begin, making them, at once, even more internally wanton and deplorable than just the physical act itself.