I’ve decided that, at least in the United States, the religiously devout really do have the interests of rationalist nonbelievers at heart, at least as far as providing us with (a sick, unseemly sort of) entertainment goes. They strive ceaselessly and tirelessly, without remiss, on holidays, weekends, and during the work week, to provide us with new episodes of the tragicomic—though mostly tragic—reality-show farce that is religion, and at their own expense. We might just as well call them the Falstaffs of Faith.
In the Roman Catholic cult, aging, supposedly celibate yet surely (concupiscently) turgid priests in frocks and beanies hide behind screens in confessionals and eagerly (probably pantingly) parse accounts of the sexual misdeeds of their flock members, and have the nerve to impose “penance” on them, even as dioceses continue to declare bankruptcy to get out of making payouts to their own sexual abuse victims. In the United States alone, by 2012, the Catholic Church’s victims numbered as many as 100,000, and payouts to them had amounted to as much as $2.2 billion.
Presiding over an obscenely wealthy institution with a documented history of mafia-linked bank scandals and Holocaust profiteering, the Vatican’s supreme cult master styles himself after, and even adopts the name of, a long-dead (earnest and wonderful, even if believing) penurious Italian from Assisi, and wins plaudits from the public for creating a Vatican “tribunal” at which to try bishops accused of sheltering child-raping priests. (We are supposed to consider this “progress,” as if we needed priests at all.) Last year, the Vatican admitted to defrocking 848 priests and sanctioning 2,572, in the more than 3,400 cases of child abuse it has dealt with since 2004.