Yeah, I Know...Old News...Pope Ratz Is Fallible

This morning, the New York Times treated us with two stories about the pedophile priest scandal plus an editorial for good measure. 1) “Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys” by Laurie Goodstein; 2) "Abuse Scandal’s Ripples Spread Across Europe” by Katrin Bennhold, Nicholas Kulish and Rachel Donadio; 3) Editorial: “The Pope and Pedophilia Scandal”. So now that everyone knows that the Roman Catholic Church has been actively trying to keep all this pedophilia a secret, now that we know the RCC has been more interested in protecting its own corrupt ass than keeping children from harm, and now that we know all the high mahoffs in the Vatican, right up to the present pope, have been protecting pedophile priests and throwing the abused kids under a bus, we are left with two interesting issues: 1) Why are so many RCC priests pedophiles? 2) What is the Doctrine of Infallibility? Numero Uno: As you may imagine, I have my own theory. Many men who are attracted to the priesthood in the RCC are stunted in their emotional growth. Pedophiles are at least 85% heterosexual and researchers say the emotional development of many pedophiles is arrested. Ergo, with all that arrested development running around in the Roman Catholic Church, you are going to find a lot of pedophiles in the RCC. And, let me say, it’s not the requirement that RCC priests be celibate that is the problem. It’s the guys who are attracted to that kind of life that is the problem. Numero Duo: The Doctrine of Infallibility Okay. The RCC says that the Holy Spirit part of the Trinity would not allow the church to be wrong in its beliefs or teaching. Therefore, the teaching of the RCC is infallible. And not only that, when the Pope teaches with the authority of being the Pope (ex-cathedra), he also cannot be wrong. And when a pope is found to be wrong, then he simply was not speaking or teaching ex-cathedra. Now here is why all of that is bullshit. Everything in the Bible, everything taught in every church anywhere has been written and/or taught by a human being. All teachings taught are taught by human beings who err all the time. And just because a human being says, “God told me”, does not make it necessarily true that it came from God. And just because a human being says, “this is a perfect teaching that God himself handed down to me” does not necessarily make it true. The human being could be crazy as a loon. We all can take whatever we want on faith that it is a true teaching of God. But since all religious teachings have been handed down by a human being, we really don’t know if it is a true teaching of God or not. And that is why no human being can say for sure that a teaching is from God and therefore is infallible. It may be a teaching from God, or it may be a lie some guy is telling, or it may be a nutty vision. But since we are human beings, not one of us knows for sure. Not you, not me, not the guys at the Vatican Council in 1870 who defined the infallibility of the Pope, and certainly not the Pope. So believe what you like. But for sure, no one in the God-business has a pipeline to God. God-business guys are flawed human beings like the rest of us. And no religious teaching is infallible because all of it has been reported by a human being, and you know how reporters are.