Should the Pope be Arrested? – Many scientists, who happen to be nonreligious, are becoming more vocal against the Catholic Church and especially the Pope, even to the point of suggesting Pope Benedict should be arrested.  Should he?

Attacking the Catholic Church seems like too easy a target for academics to attack.  It has literally THOUSANDS of years of history of children being molested, even to before the New Testament was fully canonized!  In the last 50 years, 30 thousand people have come forward, in 30 countries, with allegations against the priesthood for child molestation.  Literally, it’s an organization that has raised an army of child rapists.

Neuroscientist Sam Harris, for example, said in a recent article on the Huffington Post, “I confess that, as a critic of religion, I have paid too little attention to the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. Frankly, it always felt unsportsmanlike to shoot so large and languorous a fish in so tiny a barrel.”

Later in the article, Harris recants on moral grounds.  Think about the context that the Pope was in, who was at that time known as Cardinal Ratzinger.  Imagine the parent who brought their child to the Church of the Thousand Hands, only “to be raped and terrified into silence by threats of hell.”

One victim, in a 2,600 report by the Irish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA), wrote, “One Brother kept watch while the other abused me …(sexually)… then they changed over. Every time it ended with a severe beating. When I told the priest in Confession, he called me a liar. I never spoke about it again.

I would have to go into his …(Brother X’s)… room every time he wanted. You’d get a hiding if you didn’t, and he’d make me do it …(masturbate)… to him. One night I didn’t …(masturbate him)… and there was another Brother there who held me down and they hit me with a hurley and they burst my fingers …displayed scar….”

Orphaned boys and disabled children were, since the beginning of the church itself, abused, as is attested to in a book called Didache, AD 60, written by the fledgling church.  At that time, of course, the church wasn’t called “The Catholic Church”.

As for Pope Benedict, while he was Cardinal Ratzinger he personally oversaw the Vatican’s response to reports of sexual abuse in the Church.  Harris asks, “What did this wise and compassionate man do upon learning that his employees were raping children by the thousands?  Did he immediately alert the police and ensure that the victims would be protected from further torments? One still dares to imagine such an effulgence of basic human sanity might have been possible, even within the Church.”

What Ratzinger did is the definition of immorality itself.  He tried to cover it up.  Witnesses were pressured into silence.  Church authorities were admired “for their defiance of secular authority”, and the offending priests were just shifted around, only to terrorize fresh children in otherwise unsuspecting parishes.

As a neuroscientist, Harris put it like this, “The evidence suggests that the misery of these children was facilitated and concealed by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church at every level, up to and including the prefrontal cortex of the current Pope.”

Prefontal cortex, meaning the Pope was conscious of and knowledgeable about it, and he covered it up.  The scandal isn’t just in the church.  The scandal is the church.

You can view the 2,600 page report from the CICA here: http://www.childabusecommission.com/rpt/