Church: Still Pathetically Wrong About Almost Everything

Church: Still Pathetically Wrong About Almost Everything
Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle 3/1/04

The publisher of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" accepted a compromise and will drop demands that a similarly named critique of the best seller be retitled.

Theologian Darrel Bock named his upcoming nonfiction nalysis "Breaking the Da Vinci Code." It challenges the basis of the original book, in which Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a child -- but also maps out the incredible and tip-of-the-iceberg myriad ways in which the Church has deceived, denied, crushed, killed, burned, decimated, mauled, covered up, and otherwise degraded and kicked to the basement of consciousness the very living heart of sex and love and humanity lo these past 2000 years so it can maintain its power.

"The Da Vinci Code" publisher Random House Inc. sent a cease-and-desist letter earlier this month to Thomas Nelson Inc. --those creepy religious bonkjobs who also publish the desperately scary teen revisionist "Revolve" bible, among way too many others and my god are they weird -- saying Bock's title was too similar and would confuse consumers.

A follow-up book, titled "Spanking Sad Little Darrel Bock: Incredibly Huge and Irrefutable Reams of Scholarly and Historical and Common-Sense Data Proving Beyond A Shadow of a Goddamn Doubt that the Church Has Been Systematically, Deliberately, and Rather Viciously Lying Its Ass Off About Jesus For the Past Oh Say 2,000 Years As It Works Ceaselessly to Crush the Divine Feminine and Instill Guilt and Fear Like Some Sort of Paralyzing Venom," should be hitting the bookstore in your heart and mind right about, well, now.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2004/02/27/financial1556EST0243.DTL&nl=fix
----------------------------------------------------

Ten Billion Hail Marys And Shut The Whole Goddamn Thing Down.

The National Review Board, a lay watchdog panel formed by bishops from the U.S. Catholic Church, issued two highly anticipated studies documenting the molestation problem from 1950 to 2002. One report is the first church-sanctioned tally of abuse cases: It found there have been 10,667 abuse claims over those 52 years. More than 80 percent of the alleged victims were male and over half said they were between ages 11 and 14 when they were assaulted. About 4 percent of all American clerics who served during the years studied -- 4,392 of the 109,694 priests -- were accused of abuse.

Victims' advocates immediately decried the figures as way incredibly horrifically and obviously low, like duh. "Thousands of victims haven't reported and dozens of bishops aren't telling all they know," said the director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. "They have no incentive to."

Which means we can all assume the number to be more like, say, 10 percent of all priests, or maybe 20, and tens of thousands of more abuses, with the study not even going into all the repressed homosexuality and rampant and hilarious-if-it-weren't-so-sad pitter patter of semi-holy feet between priestly beds at the seminary after lights-out, and the study of course doesn't even hint at the global epidemic of sick sad grope-aholic priests, and only focuses on the US churches, which hey gosh guess what doesn't even begin to account for the tens of thousands of invisible and never-reported boy-gropin' cases worldwide, Italy and Mexico and Spain and countless more, countless thousands of priests who operate in places where they're still protected and highly venerated and considered untouchable and god-like and not the sad sexually repressed dinks they are here, places where they don't freakin' *dare* accuse a priest of even having goddamn genitalia much less copping a feel of little Hector in the confessional every damn day, as the Vatican simmers in its own little bed of pathos and pseudo sanctimony while the universe slowly but inexorably and blessedly pinches it into dust between its gorgeous rosy well-toned cosmic and divinely feminine ass cheeks.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2004/02/27/national0714EST0497.DTL&nl=fix