Do you think the Pope should resign?

I have an ad for the church of scientology

I have to admit I'm enjoying watching the Catholic Church slowly implode. It's such a relic of the dark ages. Two Catholic churches were recently closed in my area due to lack of attendance, one is now a little grocery store/cafe and the other was bought by musician and is being turned into a sound studio. I hope I live long enough to see The Vatican turned into living history museum like Colonial Williamsburg with college students and actors playing the parts of priests and nuns: The Inquisition trail starts at 3:30 please buy your tickets at the door...

That's some baaaad karma on your horizon

It's been all downhill since John XXIII.

Why stop at the Pope?

The cardinals and the archbishops and the bishops and the priests and the churches and the art and the organisations are all dead in the water without a Pope.

We can leave it to the atheists to organise things I suppose and then everything would be hunky-dory. We could all bask in perpetual regulations for which we had voted.

Bring it on. What's taking you so long? It shouldn't be that difficult to get a consensus on plain common sense.

Right on, Monterey.

Why does everyone think there always has to be a top guy?

If, that's if, the pope was involved in things nefarious, he should go. It's hardly sensible to keep someone who preaches the straight and narrow but doesn't abide by the same. I said "if".

And so on down the line to the cardinals, bishops and priests, presidents, prime ministers, functionaries, ... .

The top guy is God....and he's canning the pope

I'm pretty sure that these sexual abuse incidents have been going on since forever.

I'll only catch that if I can watch Bruno being burned in the Campo di Fiori (and shop the veggie mercato later). For any unfamiliar with him -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

I may be wrong but as far as I am aware of no group in the church have the power to remove a Pope from his office.

In the good old days and if rumors are true those days extended to my own lifetime the way to removed a Pope were assassination and only assassination.

Yeh, that was a quick one, if the rumors were true. (I wouldn't know.)

Yeah, JTT, you're right. Some years back I did some research on the Inquisition in Mexico--yeah, it was there too. Fittingly enough, the archives are located in what used to be a colonial prison --central nodes with what used to be cellblocks radiating out from then(they've taken out the cells and put in marble floors, looks a lot like '30s movies of SingSing). And one of the things that I remember a lot of similar cases happening, was priests and monks telling the native Indio women that sleeping with them was the same as sleeping with god, or Jesus, or would absolve them of all sin. That con apparently worked over and over again

BillRM said:
Yep, that's how they're supposed to have gotten rid of Pope Joan

A Dream of the Last Innocent

If the Pope resigned, and he should,
so too should all of those below him
who have ever known
or had an inkling
that any child
(like the Christchild at Christmas)
innocent and dreaming of the blessings of grace
(like the Christchild at Christmas)
had been defiled by the sins
of someone consecrated by the Church
as able to bless.
Let them search for that brother priest who did not know.
Let them survey, seek and pray
knowing that they themselves did know
and therefore, cannot serve
or step up
to wave at the crowds at Eastertide.
==
I dreamed there was a mountainhut
in some windblown place.
Therein, on his knees for sixty years,
Father Jio, priest,
had done nothing
but contemplate the face of God
and weep as Christ did in the Garden.
Luckily,
they were not able to reach him
before he died
and escaped
with his tears
still in the state of grace.

Joe(....)Nation

whether the pope resigns or not, thr church has to face the fact that the current system of training priests is a pedophile's dream. Young men enter the seminary at puberty, and the object of sexual desire never matures. Celibacy doesn't work, and is not fundamental to catholicism, but came about as a means to control the wealth of the church.

I absolutely agree. IMO, he is just as culpable as the pedophile. No matter what some people may think, he is simply a human being who was part of a conspiracy to conceal a crime after the fact.

If a church can't clean house, it is not setting an example for its followers. Personally, I think that some time in the slammer would be very appropriate.

I disagree. I don't care who he is. He is a criminal, and deserves to be punished.
Maybe they should lock him in a room with all the young men who were molested when they were kids. Now THAT would be justice.!

I can think of some "molestations" of children which are miles worse than the "alleged molestations" as our News broadcasts are calling those under discussion here. I could make a list longer than the longest arm. And containing millions of children who did not survive to be in line for compensation.

Abortions in the USA since Roe Wade are given as 45, 551,703. And officially sanctioned by the State. These are not classed as molestations by the simple verbal trick of declaring the unborn to be not children. And the Vatican seems to be the only source of serious opposition.

In this case, one priest in Milwakee, who must have been known about by others outside the church, is the centre of attention.

One cannot help thinking that there are other agendas in play.

How about the deliberate targeting of children to persuade them to eat food which is known to be bad for them and from which the media, which is making the running here, is deriving the enormous income it does.