Okay, this just takes the wafer: at the Good Friday service in the Vatican, the preacher to the papal household likened the focus on priestly sex abuse scandals to anti-Semitism.
While individual priests committed the abuses for at least the last 50 years, the hierarchy (from diocese to Vatican) was more concerned with covering up the crimes and protecting their institutional reputation than doing anything that would stop the pedophilia.
And it seems, according to the Reverend Raniero Cantalamessa, that the recent calls for Church to man up and acknowledge the facts and apologize with humility and sincerity amount to persecution on a scale suffered by the Jews through history.
(Considering that the Church itself was in the forefront of centuries of anti-Semitism, this is particularly ballsy.)
While Cantalamessa attributes the comparison to an unnamed and possibly apocryphal “Jewish friend”, his asseveration was egregious enough to prompt a Vatican PR flack to engage in damage control—distancing the Pope (who has been personally linked to the scandals in his pre-pontifical roles) from it as well as trying to ’splain that the preacher didn’t really mean to equate calls for accountability with, you know, pogroms or the Holocaust.
I have to say that Holy Week, and particularly Good Friday, is a bizarre time for such dissimulation. Just another nail in the cross.
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