No Country should welcome the POPE

Pope Ratzinger, Benedict XVI, paid the UK a state visit in 2010. This man as head of the Church is ultimately responsible for all the cover-ups made by the Church of clerical sex offences.

Suppose you believe in responsibility. If you make cars, you are not responsible if people buy cars off you and drink drive and kill pedestrians. If cars were unnecessary you would be. You are making something for people to abuse. People can take care of their own spirituality without religion. Many people live without the Catholic Church. It is not necessary therefore its pope is to blame for the priests abusing children and should be hauled before international law and put on trial. Those who propagate the Church and who give it money are also responsible.

The pope lied (and still lies) about the Vatican being a 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 is very anxious to pretend that the percentage of abusing priests is low.

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. It's charity is about becoming sin-free not helping people.

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).

The pope was invited to the UK and welcomed despite his grave derelictions of duty when he was head of the CDF in Rome. He was called, "Your Holiness" by everyone - ugh! He allowed the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable people by clergy to continue and then wilfully shielded and protected the abusers not to mention the conniving bishops he promoted and assisted. All this was carried out with immunity from civil prosecution. The Church worked to make sure this immunity would be kept intact.

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 Vatican has a bogus international status internationally that it plays on to get away with its crimes. The Lateran Treaty of 1929 helped 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.

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 simply a palace and a few gardens. It is at most a non-governmental organisation. It has stolen the sovereign immunity it has.

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.

Religious beliefs that may disturb others should be kept private. The pope comes with the message that they should not. If he doesn't mention the message, he still promotes it in the sense that he represents it.

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!

The popes faith is based on dark doctrines such as original sin which accuses babies of needing pardon for it in baptism, everlasting punishment, God having the right to let grave evil befall us and to make vicious viruses, the blood of Jesus Christ sacrificed for our sins and many many more. The most dangerous aspect of such doctrines is how the Church says they are mysteries we cannot fully understand for God is smarter than us. With such an outlook, any evil doctrine could be condoned.

Such doctrines are disturbing. But even the more seemingly benign doctrines of the Church such as that Jesus was the founder of the Catholic Church are offensive to Muslims. Many Muslims will not be offended. However, they should be if they believe Islam is the one right religion. The Muslim who is not bothered is less of a Muslim.

The Church doctrine that God works to change people from within means it should tell depressives that God loves them. Telling them that is alleged to be intended to help them. It is not unless the Church has proof that God can change people. It will only make them feel worse. They will feel that they are letting God down by being unable to feel happy with him.

The Protestants in Northern Ireland were right that the Republic was ruled by Rome and the priesthood manipulated the government to take away civil rights such as the right to contraception from the people. The priesthood is ultimately to blame for all the trouble in the North. They caused division with their church rules. Catholic children were taught separately from Protestants. Nobody was allowed to go to Protestant worship or to take Protestant communion. To teach that it is a serious sin for a Catholic to believe Protestant doctrine is just a hate doctrine. The priests implemented the evil rules of the pope. Ireland should not welcome the pope.

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.

There is nothing about Catholicism that entitles people to welcome its pope anywhere. The Church does not correct people who think its good works are humanitarian. They are not. The Church does them to please God not to help. It hides its real nature and steals prestige and has stolen the honour it has of the Holy See being recognised as a state.