....POPE IS NOT A HEAD OF STATE....
A head of state should be honoured as the person who is ultimately responsible
for his people and their representative. The pope cannot have this entitlement
as he has no population to look after. Even if he were a head of state, he
cannot claim anything like the privileges that others can. He cannot be funded
by taxpayers when he visits a country.
Benedict XVI visited the UK largely at the tax payer's expense in 2010. This was
a state visit. However, the pope is not a true head of State. The excellent The
Case of the Pope published by Penguin in 2010 proves that the Pope is lying
about being a head of state. The pope burdened the tax payer as a result of
lies. Therefore he should be sued for the return of the money. His "country"
shouldn't even be in the atlas books.
And those other religious leaders who want the same treatment should cry
discrimination. They will not get the same privileges as the pope. A landlord
who has grown up on his estate and raised his family on it should get more
credibility than the pope if he claims that his estate is a country. The pope
doesn't even treat the Vatican as an estate.
The pope lied (and still lies) about the Vatican being a state and he claims to
be the head of the Vatican state. As a result, his visit to the UK was funded by
taxpayers as it was disguised as state visit. Two million was taken from the
international fund to help pay for his visit. It is not right that Muslim and
Mormon and whatever money be used to fund his visit. Many religions condemn the
pope as evil or antichrist. It is not right for any country to fund a papal
visit with money taken from divorcees and gay people and others who the Catholic
system suppresses and persecutes. Worse, the pope is availing of taxes paid by
victims of clerical child sexual abuse.
The pope as head of the Church is ultimately responsible for all the cover-ups
made by the Church of clerical sex offences. He must accept that responsibility
but such is his contempt for humanity that he refuses.
The pope is very anxious to pretend that the percentage of abusing priests is
low. The Irish Catholic, page 25 (November 18, 2010) agrees that more than
100,000 children have been victimised by clerical and religious sex abuse in the
Church and that the percentage of paedophile clergy is as high as 9 %. It
expressly state that there is no reason to doubt these appalling estimates.
The pope has misled the world into thinking he cannot be taken to court for
mishandling and covering up and setting out bad laws in relation to clerical
child sex abuse because he is a head of state and sovereign of the Vatican. He
claims diplomatic immunity. Even though the Church uses this trick to keep the
pope immune from legal action, there should still be no protection for the pope
in the international criminal court. The Vatican is not a state. The pope should
be in jail.
It is a crime under international law to pretend to be a sovereign. The Vatican
has a bogus international status internationally that it plays on to get away
with its crimes.
The Lateran Treaty of 1929 made between the pope and Mussolini has been
misrepresented by the Vatican. It does not make the Holy See a state or country
except in the eyes of Italy. But that has not stopped it pretending that it
does. The Treaty is really just a Concordant. It was about the Vatican and Italy
and gave no other country any obligation to recognise the Holy See as a country.
It made many demands of Italy such as to go along with Catholic marriage law and
not to force clerics to go to war. The obligation should be challenged by case
law - it makes no sense for agreement or not the Holy See is not a state.
Italy's secularism contradicts it. The Treaty is invalid for it not only
tries to recognise the Holy See as a state it thinks that it is one when it is
not.
The Vatican has been pretending to be a state since 1929. Why? The best
explanation is that it knew clerical sex abuse was endemic and by pretending to
be a state the pope and the Holy See could be kept out of jail despite being
accessories to this crime and even more so to its cover-up. The Lateran Treaty
of 1929 provided the opportunity for the Vatican misrepresent itself as a fully
fledged state or country. It is thought the Vatican in time came to do this to
enjoy the advantages of international participation such as recognition by the
United Nations. But it would have been able to get that without being
misclassified as a state. The real intention of the Church was to win sovereign
immunity from prosecution. That was so important for it had plenty to hide.
Defenders of the Vatican state that international law can recognise an entity as
a state simply out of tradition and custom. If the entity has been treated as a
state before international law came along, it will treat it as such. So in this
view, the legal principles determining what is a state or not were not rigidly
applied and international law sometimes allows for that. But other entities have
been rejected as states in the eyes of international law. Why should the Vatican
get an exemption? Most of the blame lies with lapsed Catholics ticking the Roman
Catholic box in censuses. The membership statistics are overblown. The Vatican
is not entitled to an exemption on those grounds. It fully recognises that
people who have ceased to be Catholics in their belief are in reality no longer
Catholics.
Though there is room for a liberal interpretation of international law that can
allow a state to be recognised as a state though it does not fulfil all the
legal criteria, this is no help to the Vatican. The Vatican does not have ANY of
the characteristics of a state. It doesn't even have a territory or a
population. If the laws are that liberal they are good for nothing. The Church
itself teaches that laws that are not laws at all are immoral. Yet it
conveniently forgets this teaching when it comes to the Vatican's status.
The Vatican says it is accepted by other nations as a state and that is all it
needs to be accepted as a state!
One reason the Vatican gets treated as a state is because of its alleged
humanitarianism. Humanitarianism however is irrelevant. The Catholic faith
itself desensitised people to the needs of children. It did it before. It can do
it again. It is doing it still in many quarters. The Church cares more about
evil intentions than harm. It cares about the attitude not the pain. That is why
it says its job is to fight sin. It even denies that it is humanitarian. Its
charity is about becoming sin-free not helping people.
The Vatican is simply a palace and a few gardens. It is at most a
non-governmental organisation. It has stolen the sovereign immunity it has.
It is a crime for the Vatican to get involved in the UN which mistakes it for a
state. Because of its relationship with the UN, it has been able to poison many
UN policies with its papal rubbish about condoms being useless against HIV and
the duty of trying to stop gay rights to name a few things.
It is a crime under international law to pretend to be a sovereign to evade
one's just deserts. The Vatican used its pretended status as a country to
provide a haven for the likes of notorious paedophile Fr Maciel.
The Pope pretends to be head of state to dodge having to go to court and perhaps
end up in jail. In the USA, the law is said to decree that a pope cannot be
taken to court or jailed because as a head of state he enjoys diplomatic
immunity as a result of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). The victims
of abuse then cannot make the pope and the Vatican answer for their role in what
happened to them.
The Church prescribed mild and ridiculous "penalties" for priestly child abuse
in canon law and plotted to prevent crimes being reported to the police. It was
condoning the evil and insulting the victims. Condoning evil is more pro-evil
than encouraging it. Crimen Solicitationes was a papal document issued by John
XXIII to excommunicate anybody who admitted to the legal authorities that a
priest molested them in a confessional. The Church evidently wanted clerical
paedophilia confined to the confessionals so it could control it better - if a
priest molests just anywhere he will get caught more easily.
Ratzinger in 2001 made it law that all reports of clerical sex abuse were to be
sent to his desk in the Vatican (page 56, The Case of the Pope). He demanded
this under the pontifical secret which blocked bishops from reporting pervert
priests to the police (ibid, page 56).
It is undeniable that Catholics in general operated a system where if a child
made an allegation against a priest that child had to be intimidated or beaten
into silence and disbelieved. The clerical sex abuse was not just a clerical
problem. Catholic doctors, Catholic parents, nuns, Catholic teachers and
Catholic everything created a culture that left priests free to abuse with
impunity. Then people started to love the Church less. People tended to have
less interest in Church teaching. Then a generation came that was willing to
punish the priests through the law for abusing children. The victims began to be
listened to.
The pope refused to make it Church law for a bishop to report his priests who
are abusing children to the civil authorities. A guidance appeared on the
Vatican website saying they should do this if the law of the nation so requires
it, but this was not a church law. It was merely a cynical face-saving exercise.
The guidance soon disappeared. No apologies and no meetings with victims mean a
thing until the pope makes it church law. Why should we believe in this sudden
"compassion" for victims when the Church made no effort to appear compassionate
until people starting standing up to it for a change?
The pope plans to beatify and canonise Pope John Paul II. John Paul was cold and
unhelpful towards the victims of clerical sexual abuse. If Benedict cared for
the victims he would not make a saint of such a monster.
The pope might remind us that he agrees with criminal justice that many
criminals are not under obligation to turn themselves in. He could say then that
he won't do it either. He claims his spiritual message is the foundation of
secular criminal justice. If he teaches that some people should go to jail then
he should be willing to go himself to jail for serious crimes. When his teaching
sends people to jail then he should be willing to turn himself in. He might say
he is under no obligation to do that because the message is not his but God's.
But he made it his own message. So using God as an excuse cannot work. And
besides nobody believes in God's decrees about justice just because God made
them. They believe in them because they have judged them right. The person then
who says, "I believe in the rightness of God's laws" should say, "I believe in
my ability to tell if God's laws are right and I believe that they are." It is
about themselves and not God. The pope cannot avoid having the following
motivation for believing in the laws: he believes because he believes in his
power to judge them true. That, strictly speaking, is what he believes in -
himself. If God made the laws, the pope makes them. The pope makes the laws.
This is true whether he makes them on his own or whether God makes them. It is the
same principle as making somebody else's message your own message. It becomes
all yours then. You might have got it from somebody else but now that you have
made the message your own you might as well have created it yourself.
If you create a code of morality that hurts people - if you give somebody the
jail sentence he deserves you are still hurting him - you should have stricter
standards for yourself. In other words, if the pope agrees you must go to jail
for assault then he should wish he could go to jail for less.
The Church's ridiculous teaching that harmless actions such as masturbating for
a few seconds will take you to Hell to be punished forever if you die made child
sex abuse out to be a sin like any other. The lonely priest could reason, "I am
sinning anyway so why not just molest this child and have some fun?" And indeed
did. Not all child molesting priests were paedophiles - some were just lonely
and warped.
We say hating a person is wrong for it always makes them out to be worse than
what they actually are. For example, to hate black people implies that you think
that they are bad and dangerous just because they have different skin. To
exaggerate human sin or wrongdoing and to declare harmless actions to be gravely
evil and sinful is to hate the sinner.
Christians saying homosexual acts are sinful is to be tolerated in a free world.
But to say they deserve to go to Hell or should go to Hell or that their sin is
very bad constitutes hate. Two men touching hardly counts as anything seriously
wrong. Such talk will need to be outlawed if the country has laws against
incitement to hatred. The Church teaches that homosexual relationships and
sexual activities are to be utterly condemned. To look for the good in them
denies that they are mortal sins and will merit exclusion from God for all
eternity.
No Catholic bishop has the integrity to protest and challenge the pope on what
he is doing to avoid having to answer for his crimes.
We need to see the enemies of reason as our own enemies. That is what they are!
We need to see the pope and the system he stands for for what they are! Then we
won't be taken in by their beatific facades! Their goodness is just superstition
masquerading as goodness. It is superstition masquerading as morality.