Yeah, I think it’s time. Echidne of the Snakes asks who…

should listen to the U.S. Catholic bishops as the arbiter of morality.

She said it here.

That these are the guys (and by invocation of their own infallibility clause it’s all guys) who are standing in the way of reproductive rights for women, universal marriage, fertility treatment, and cellular-level medical research, not to mention abstinence even in marriage except for procreation, all on the basis of their own moral authority…

It’s just starting to sink in that it’s not that these would-be emperors have no clothes — there’s room and possibly even need in society for moral religious philosophy and guidance. No, what’s getting me isn’t that they have no clothes at all, it’s that they have no pants!

And just to be clear I’m not saying every male member of the Catholic hierarchy is a pedophile. I am saying, however, that the intersection between public ideology on the one hand and a genuinely, theologically well-intentioned but catastrophic institutional forgiveness of biological reality inside that hierarchy has lead almost inevitably to abetting pedophilia.

Which might have been tolerable were pedophilia a minor flaw like depression, burnout, alcoholism, or even plain old incompatibility with a particular congregation or posting. But in both the most corporeal and the most etherial senses pedophilia simply isn’t the administrative problem the church chose to treat it as, for, evidently, centuries. Instead it’s a direct refutation of nearly all the principles the Church uses to distinguish itself and its clergy from other religions and other denominations. It also directly undermines any and all claims it may ever have had to be an arbiter of morality.

The irony I should be lecturing the Catholic church on morality speaks not so much to my nominal depravity. All my talk about sex and “kink” and so on are actually part and parcel with a fairly strong and reasonably well-informed sense of morality that I’m able to express with some consistency through word and deed both publicly and privately, and so I’m actually not at all depraved. The irony, instead, is that while morality is my hobby it’s supposed to be their job!

That I can now be suspicious (with what I fear to be strong foundation) that the real reason Church leaders permit neither marriage for priests nor ordination of women as priests is out of fear that heterosexual married men and women would neither tolerate nor be tempted by pedophilia… and that I can now be suspicious that the currently embroiled Pope was elevated not despite his history of condoning pedophelia but instead because his history was well-understood within the hierarchy, is probably all that needs to be said about how little moral authority remains with them.

It needn’t be this way. It needn’t have been. But it evidently really, really is.