To be perfectly honest, I have nothing but contempt for the Catholic Church as an organization. Catholics themselves (meaning the people who adhere to that church) can be and are among some of the most wonderful people I've ever met. But on the whole, the RC Catholic Church promotes faithlessness in favor of ritual.

If you are raising your kids within any church, remember that children all have a built-in hypocrisy detector. The gross hypocrisy of the Catholic church in recent years with regard to the pedophilia, will do nothing but drive your children into a faithless life. Let's face it, you can't hold up priests as role-models (and they are defacto role models - no matter what you think) for your children and expect your children to be okay with that once they know all the facts. All Catholic priests and bishops are to one extent or another implicated in the massive cover-up of these crimes.

It just goes to re-iterrate my comment that ignorance is usually the spark that lights the fire in comments like yours Joel. If you truly dont know what you are speaking of, ... i recommend you DONT .. my father was a priest. So tell me about your fantastic role models. Gimme some examples of the seemingly flawless role-models in your faith dude.

Easy guys and girls! Lets nip this in the bud BEFORE it goes south!

Angel its personal for you so consider that when you reply and try not to take it as a personal attack.


Joel just a word of caution about generalizing! We can't hold all in the catholic heirarchy culpable even though many are, many also are not!

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Matthew 22

37Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'[2] 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'[3] 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." !</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">

I stand by what I say.

I do so because any priest that stood by (even if not guilty) and watched the vatican's unwilling cooperation and non-apology offered by the pope and remained a priest should be ashamed of their association with the church and were I in their shoes I would distance myself from it. No one here has ever heard of "guilt by association?"

I'm not saying church leaders in my church don't occassionally fall from grace, but when they do we excommunicate them and turn them over to the police. We don't sit back and merely say "It's unfortunate, but should be handled internally by the church." which in reality would amount to no punishment at all for their crimes.

not to get off the subject but by law Joel i was Guilty by association many of times....and went to jail many nights or just got harassed because of it....mostly by cops