"Cardinal O'Brien has been accused of committing 'inappropriate acts' in his relations with three priests and one former priest from the diocese of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, British newspaper The Observer reported Sunday. O'Brien has been an outspoken opponent of gay rights." —Britain's top Catholic cardinal is skipping the papal election because of new revelations that he tried to bone four different priests. I wonder if reporters laugh when typing this stuff the way I laugh when reading it.

"Pope Benedict, accused by victims' lawyers of being ultimately responsible for a cover-up of sexual abuse of children by priests, cannot be called to testify at any trial because he has immunity as a head of state, a top Vatican legal official said on Thursday." OMG LOL, POPE RATZI, you are TOO MUCH! GOOD ONE.

No but seriously, get ready to get deposed, schmuck.

"While sexual abuse was a 'crime against morality,' the attempt to ordain a woman was a 'crime against a sacrament,'" says Monsignor Charles Scicluna, an official in the Vatican's doctrinal department, discussing recent revisions to Church laws. Although language against the ordination of women was included in a document that mostly deals with pedophilia, that was mostly a coincidence, says Scicluna, and "should not be interpreted as considering all these crimes to be equal. They are crimes of a different nature".

You can blame the surge of child molestation by Catholic priests on "the sexual revolution," says Ross Douthat.

Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the papal household, said today in a Good Friday service that an unnamed Jewish friend" had compared the "attacks" on the Church for its handling of sexual molestation cases to "the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism." Okay! It is important not to keep quiet about injustice when you see it!

"Somewhere underneath all of this there is a root story that has to do with celibacy. The celibate status of its priests is basically the Catholic church's last market advantage in the Christian religion racket, but human beings are not designed to be celibate and so problems naturally arise among the population of priests forced to live that terrible lifestyle. Just as it refuses to change its insane and criminal stance on birth control and condoms, the church refuses to change its horrifically cruel policy about priestly celibacy. That's because it quite correctly perceives that should it begin to dispense with the irrational precepts of its belief system, it would [...]