Australian Journalist asks, "Why not bomb the Vatican, and riddle the Pope with bullets as he staggers out of the flames?"



Bob Ellis, a political journalist writing on Australia's state-run media website - ABC - offers this thought experiment:

No-one has yet suggested bombing the Vatican and pursuing the Pope through the sewers of Europe till he is caught and riddled with bullets in order to stop priests buggering choirboys in Boston, Chicago, Dublin and Sydney. But a precise mirror image of this is how we behaved in Afghanistan.


If we bomb it flat, we were told, and pursue Bin Laden through the caves of Tora Bora and the mud huts of Waziristan until he is caught and riddled with bullets, al-Qaeda won't hijack planes and blow up trains any more. And the world will live at peace.

This can only make sense in the mind of someone who is consumed by an inner demon.  One would think that an obvious difference between Bin Laden and Benedict is that while Benedict does not want priests to commit child abuse, Bin Laden does want his followers to kill Westerners.  Likewise, while all followers of Bin Laden are presumptively committed to killing Westerners, Something like 99% of all Catholic priests have never committed any molestation.

What does it say when a journalist can use a mighty big brush to smear all Catholics as child molesters in an attempt to exonerate someone who actually constructed a plan to commit mass murder?

It is worthwhile, I think, to make these connections, of how forgivingly we treat the First World rich and the contrasting way we treat the Third World poor. How we treat the crimes of Christians and of heathens in very different ways. It shows how crazy we have lately come to be, and how justly we are despised by the Islamic world, and the Communist world, and many of our former colonies.


If we do this violence to the Taliban for the way they treat their women and children, why not the Catholics too?

Why not bomb the Vatican, and riddle the Pope with bullets as he staggers out of the flames?

Institutionalized mass murder or a small minority of homosexuals having sex with teenagers - there's really no difference there when you want to simultaneously accuse the West of racism for being too harsh on Bin Laden and too soft on the Catholic Church.

This is what passes for deep, critical thinking in certain quarters.

Mark Shea offers this on Ellis' demented screed:

This, among many other reasons, is why I find it so hard to credit the constant recommendation of MSM journalists that I get down on my knees in gratitude to them for their sterling and knightly high purpose of Reforming the Church. To quote Robert Bolt's St. Thomas More, "This is not Reformation. This is war on the Church." And it is using abused children as human shields. These people have not the slightest interest in knowing or caring what they are talking about. Point out that a slanderous misrepresentation of Pope Benedict has not a dram of truth to it, and the reply is: "So, once again, you fail to see the real issue here, and are more concerned about the problems of the Church and its survival, than of ridding the organization of pederasts and their enablers." Because, of course, the only way to Save The Children is to lie about the Pope. Conversely, any attempt to say, "But the Pope is not the Bad Guy here" is to ignore the victims. It's classic mob mentality.

And:

Every one of us has things we can look back on in our lives and regret. Benedict is no exception. He gives every indication of regretting his failure to appreciate the magnitude of the filth that has infected the Church and his sin of omission (a rather small one, in my judgement) when that filth occurred in his archdiocese. I, for one, am willing to forgive it, since I've had my own dealings with the Accuser when it has come to my own failings. But the Bomb the Vatican and Machine Gun the Pope crowd have no moral failings. They are fully of steely righteousness--like the authors of the French Revolution. They will, if they get their way, kill a lot of people to usher in the Perfect World. And they will assure us, every step of the way, that they did it For The Children.