BY EWIN JAMES

CATHOLICS and non-Catholics are hoping that Pope Francis will finally begin the painful but needed cleansing of the church of sexual perversion and abuse, and the corruption that has allowed the perversion and abuse to have continued for so long. The sexual abuse of mainly young boys has continued for years because there is a culture of corruption in the church that has turned a blind eye to abuse and covered it up. This is complicity in crime.

The hierarchy of the church would like us to believe that it doesn’t condone the sexual abuse of children by priests: it is just errant priests indulging their vices without official knowledge. That is to take us for fools.

A Reuters News Agency report on March 8 said of a priest who abused boys for years in Ireland: “The investigation revealed a bully priest who manipulated and abused people wherever he went, and a church hierarchy that, after receiving complaints about him, moved him on to places where he found new victims — a pattern that recurred in its handling of abuse cases worldwide. After Fortune’s death, and although there was little legal precedent, O’Gorman took a civil suit against the Diocese of Ferns and Pope John Paul in 1998. In it he cited evidence that Fortune’s crimes were well known but that the Church did nothing to limit his access to children. The diocese apologised in 2003 and paid O’Gorman 300,000 Euros in compensation.”

In the same Reuters report, under the headline “Sex abuse: scandal the Catholic Church cannot shake, it said: “Victims’ groups say that the Vatican had a policy of not reporting abusive priests to secular authorities, citing evidence such as a letter sent by its head of clergy to a French bishop in 2001, commending him for not denouncing a pedophile priest who had been given 18 years jail for abusing young boys.”

In some jurisdictions in the civilised world, what some priests have done to boys would have landed not only them in jail but also their leaders for knowing and doing nothing about their crimes or covering them up. Denying reports of, and evidence of priestly sexual abuse, moving priests from parish to parish to avoid detection and refusing to turn them over to the law is clearly enabling the committing of crime. It is sheer luck, not the grace of God, that some cardinals of the Roman Catholic church are not in jail.

So there is great hope that the new pope will begin the sordid task of leading the church to clean up itself; but that hope may be in vain, like the hope of a fish sprouting wings and flying. Over the long life of the Catholic church it has harboured corruption and licentiousness that have resisted the efforts of the most determined popes to remove. Especially in the Middle Ages, the church was plagued by simony — the sale of ecclesiastical offices and services — and adulteries and concubinage; many popes threw up their hands in frustration over their failure to dislodge these evils.

In Europe at the time, whether the church needed the money or not, it sold the cardinalship and the bishopric to those who could pay; even to families with boys as young as 11 years old. Pope Innocent 111 (1160- 1216) said of a greedy archbishop that he had a purse where his heart should have been.

As greed goes to the gutter, the men who bought the offices were some of the worst scoundrels. Will Durant says in his book The Age of Faith: “Such appointees were men of the world; many lived in luxury, engaged in war, allowed bribery in episcopal courts, named relatives to ecclesiastical courts and worshipped mammon with undivided loyalty.” (Will Durant, The Age of Faith, page 541).

Bishops and priests committed sexual sins with glee. Some knowingly consorted with the wives of their parishioners, to the fury of some husbands; one man reportedly surprised a priest in bed with his wife. A few made attempts on the lives of some priests. Other priests and bishops kept concubines openly; and some elevated their illegitimate children to high offices in the church. You think I am making this up? It is all there for you to read in history. Many popes tried and failed to rein the evil in; they left it to run its course.

So why should any hope that the new pope will clean up the church of sexual abuse and corruption be taken with any seriousness? Does he even want to? His two predecessors are revered as men of learning and integrity, but they did nothing.

Perhaps the reason why the wickedness of the Catholic church has persisted for so long, and the church resisted reform, is due primarily to heretical theology, not depraved men. Bad belief leads to bad behaviour.

The Roman Catholic church is built not upon the clear teaching of scripture, but upon the teachings of men who deceive the biblically ignorant by appealing to scripture. The church is idolatrous. It venerates Mary, praying to her to help the faithful; this is worshipping a creature. It says she was immaculately conceived, was without sin, had no other children after the Christ and was bodily assumed into heaven — something for which there isn’t a scintilla of biblical evidence.

It says that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ whenever they are blessed and administered to the faithful by a priest. And that the pope is the successor of St Peter, to whom Jesus gave the keys and upon whom the church is built. So such teachings occur nowhere in scripture and lead only to immoral behaviour.

For Pope Francis to cleanse the church, he would first have to reform it by taking an ax to the doctrinal foundation of monstrous falsehoods that have created and nurtured corruption for centuries. I doubt he can do this to the church in which he was born and which has sustained him for over seventy years.

Ewin James is a freelance journalist and pastor living in Florida.