Is The Vatican Itself The Primo Practioner Of The "Dictatorship Of Relativism"?

Karl Rove isn't the only conservative right winger who really wants the believe truth can be created by lies. The first step in convincing yourself that your lies are truth is to deny your real truth and project it on others

Freud had this theory that echoed Shakespeare, if one doth protest to loud, one is engaging in projection. Projection is the defense mechanism that allows one to point out that which one unconsciously reserves to, or thinks of, themselves. Projection is not a sign of a healthy connection with reality. The following is by Jason Berry who is the American journalist who exposed the workings of the Legion. He has a similar take on the Vatican, especially our previous and current popes.

Papal princes immune to censure
ANALYSIS: The Catholic Church’s hypocrisy starts right at the top of the organisation

JASON BERRY, Irish Times, 12/04/09

THE DUBLIN diocesan report spotlights the crisis tearing at the Catholic Church’s central nervous system. At issue is the Vatican’s pathological obsession with protecting guilty church officials. (It probably has more to do with protecting the unrealistic idealized official teaching about high church officials. That 'in persona Christi' teaching to be exact.)

Since the 1990s, the Vatican has forced at least 15 bishops and one cardinal (the late Hans Hermann Groer of Austria) to step down for sexual abuse of youngsters. The Vatican has defrocked dozens of priests but not one bishop has been so punished – they have been removed from office but not from the priesthood.

Irish-born Anthony O’Connell, who abused three seminarians, resigned as bishop of Palm Beach, Florida in spring 2002. A titular bishop still, he lives in a South Carolina monastery.

Rome’s double standard cloaks prelates guilty of covering up too. Cardinal Bernard Law, whose duplicity in Boston ignited the 2002 scandal, resigned in “disgrace”. But after 16 months in a Maryland convent, Law became pastor of a great basilica in Rome. (And now helps select his fellow American bishops.)

The Vatican ignores justice to protect bishops in their role as regents to the pope.
The Roman curia’s injustice is embedded in the youth protection charter that US bishops adopted at their June 2002 convention. The charter pledged to remove any priest who abused a youth; it called for lay review boards to monitor allegations. But the Vatican insisted that bishops be removed from the scope of those boards. (Which also meant that in too many dioceses the lay review board was powerless to effect true accountability.)

In 1989, as the first wave of abuse survivors’ lawsuits hit America, the bishops sent canon lawyers to Rome, seeking permission to defrock paedophiles. Pope John Paul II said no. After years in Poland leading the opposition to communism, John Paul wanted clerics who might sin given every chance to repent. No bishop should usurp his supreme authority over canon law. (For all his theatrical ability, John Paul acted in the Vatican with the absolute authority of a director, not an actor. He was the sole creative energy behind the play called Catholicism.)

In 2002, I interviewed a Vatican canon lawyer. He explained that US bishops had failed to hold canonical trials of priests. Moreover, he said with exasperation that diocesan tribunals “violated grandly – terribly – the annulments of marriage”.

I asked what marriage annulments had to do with paedophiles? “Laxity on annulments set up a resistance to special norms [ie, laws] for paedophiles,” he simmered. “The attitude here in 1989, at the Holy See, was that you have legal provisions. Use them.”

Clergy personnel files were being disgorged in discovery proceedings as lawyers for the survivors won six-figure settlements.

Subpoenas would yield documents of canonical trials. If a jury knew the bishop had convicted a priest, but Rome had yet to laicise him, imagine the impact.

The crisis grew in Ireland, Canada, Australia and America – countries that share a base in British common law which allows surgical discovery for lawyers and governments seeking documents. (This is an important point because it let the Vatican spin the global abuse crisis as an Anglo problem.)

Italy’s politicised legal system invests such power with magistrates who are famously uninterested in crimes of the church. The Italian press has comparatively few cases to report – hence, “an American problem”.

John Paul’s long myopia on the crisis complicates his case for sainthood. Why did the pope, so brilliant a force against communism, stand passive before the worst Catholic scandal in centuries? Under pope John Paul, several Vatican congregations processed such complaints. It was a diffuse system, with justice an afterthought.

In 1998, Fr Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legion of Christ order, was accused of paedophilia by eight former seminarians at the tribunal of then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Pope John Paul revered Maciel and the ultra-orthodox legionaries. So did Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the secretary of state.

Scion of a wealthy Mexican family, Maciel built a basilica in Rome while wooing Vatican officials with money, wines, lavish gifts (a new car for one lucky prelate), cementing a power base in Rome. Cardinal Sodano pressured cardinal Ratzinger to halt the Maciel case. The legion website mounted an attack on Maciel’s accusers.

That caused Dublin native Paul Lennon, an ex-legion priest and therapist in Alexandria, Virginia, to launch Regain, a website showing how Maciel’s psychological tyranny shaped the legion, whose priests abused young men at the order’s novitiates in Dublin and Ontaneda, Spain. In 2001, cardinal Ratzinger persuaded the pope to give his office central authority for handling paedophiles.

When the Boston scandal erupted in 2002, pope John Paul called clergy abuse “an appalling sin” yet he absolved bishops for “lack of knowledge” and scorned “the advice of the clinical experts”.
In late 2004, with the pope dying, cardinal Ratzinger ordered an investigation of Maciel. In May 2006, as Pope Benedict XVI, Ratzinger dismissed Maciel from active ministry after at least 30 men testified to their abuse.

The Vatican communiqué ordered Maciel to “a life of prayer and penitence” while praising the legion. The legionaries’ statement compared Maciel to Jesus, accepting his new cross in “tranquility of conscience”. Nothing was admitted.

Maciel, the greatest fundraiser of the modern church, oversaw a $650 million budget. When he died last year, the legion announced that he went to heaven. There was not a word from the Vatican. (C'mon, Maciel covered his bases. He molested girls as well. Only 'gays' don't get to go to heaven.)

In February, the legion revealed that Maciel had a grown daughter out of wedlock. Journalists in Spain and Mexico have since reported Maciel had six children by two women.

A Mexican attorney has demanded compensation for Maciel’s progeny, arguing that legion officials have long known of Maciel’s double life. How could they not?

The Vatican is now investigating the legion. If Pope Benedict fails to deal with this organisation, his papacy will go down as a “dictatorship of relativism” for its own betrayal of justice. (He has already earned this assessment in spades.)

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Here is the practical effect of projection as taken from Wikipedia. (I know, I know, it's wikipedia, but this definition is accurate.)

Projection is considered one of the most profound and subtle of human psychological processes, and extremely difficult to work with, because by its nature it is hidden. It is the fundamental mechanism by which we keep ourselves uninformed about ourselves.

A little further a long in the article it states this:

One modern, radical view of projections is that they are prerequisites for normal social functioning. A person incapable of ascribing their own feelings to other people has great difficulties in understanding them. (The difference is one is consciously aware of one

's own feelings) Unfortunately, human beings have done great harm laboring under the delusions of projection. This is especially true for historical cases of projection between ethnic or cultural groups, for example in Apartheid or Nazism.

Projection is closely related to denial, and is in fact built on denial. Denial in this sense is the inability to acknowledge the pain in a situation or emotion. The problem with the our hierarchy is that they are have built a clerical system and a religious institution which has enshrined these two defense mechanisms as a sort of divinely inspired method of operation. This is why Benedict can rail on an on about the dictatorship of relativism in secular society, while enshrining the exact same thing in Canon Law, or in the case of abusive priests and bishops, ignore Canon Law completely. It is truly crazy, but I guarantee he doesn't see it.

Wait for the soon to be released report on the Legion. It will be loaded with denial and projection in it's attempt to separate the Legion from Maciel's personality. The Legion is, in the core of it's methods, totally reflective of Maciels personality and should be banned or reconstructed. Unfortunately John Paul connected with something in Maciels personality and let this cancer run rampant in the church for too long. Too long in this case means too long in order to avoid more of of the Vatican's definition of scandal. The Vatican will find itself incapable of issuing an honest and truthful report because the Legion to closely mirrors the Vatican. In the interests of appeasing it's own unconscious sources of anxiety it will white wash the Legion while minimizing Maciels' influence.

At the same time, to feel back in touch with righteous authority it will skewer the LCWR through Levada's CDF investigation, while Rode's investigation will be made to seem mild in comparison. In the end the Legion, not the LCWR, will be allowed to march on.

Check out this article from the blog "Life-after-RC" to get a feel for how the Legion recruits and operates, and why it leaves so many damaged people in it's wake. Predatory sexual abuse is at it's core about abuse of power, and using power to convince members to allow themselves to be abused is the modus operandi of the Legion, especially in Regnum Christi. In the world of pedophiles this is called grooming. In the world of the Legion call it is called recruiting for Christ.

In the world of psychology it is called manipulative abuse dynamics.

Catholicism is a very sick system at this point in it's history. Asking us to ignore this truth for the sake of Jesus is not obedience. It's pathological self preservation.