Vatican fail

From AP today:

A newly revealed 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police — a disclosure with the potential to fuel more lawsuits worldwide against the Vatican, which has long denied any involvement in cover-ups.

Sinead seconds the motion

Sinead O'Connor, wonderful ripper-upper of Pope pix, caught the same thing I did in the Pope's recent remarks. (I'm ashamed to say I found this article on the Huffington Post. Yes, I was so bored by the after-Xmas slump that I visited the awful Huffington Post. So sue me.)

What set us both off was the way the popey guy referred to child buggery as something that was was an accepted thing in the 1970s. Here's my post. Here's Sinead's. 

And in case you don' t want to visit those links, this is the actual quote from AP that set us both off: 

"He said that as recently as as the 1970s, pedophilia wasn't considered an absolute evil but rather part of a spectrum of behaviors that people refused to judge in the name of tolerance and relativism."  

This is one seriously confused fellow. Too bad he's in a position of authority. But hey, I know -- let's not think of him that way. I know, I know! Let's think of him as a batty janitor who works at the vatican. This way it's just the batty janitor sounding off. Feels better already, doesn't it?  

UPDATE: And PZ took it up the following day. But the best take-down of the popey guy over this was at Ed Brayton's blog, Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Click here to read it.