Excerpt:

Rome’s misogynous declaration, tossed into its new guidelines on reporting clerical sexual abuse, did more than just highlight the Church’s hoary horror at the idea of women priests — or its penchant of late for sticking its papal slippers in its mouth every chance it gets. It also pointed up an increasingly spiteful rhetoric of bigotry. When Argentina last week legalized gay marriage, the country’s Catholic bishops weren’t content to simply denounce the legislation; they used it to argue the sub-humanity of homosexuals and lesbians, the way many white Southern preachers weren’t ashamed to degrade African-Americans during the civil rights movement. Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio not only called the new law “a scheme to destroy God’s plan,” he termed it “a real and dire anthropological throwback,” as if homosexuality were evolutionarily inferior to heterosexuality.

Read the full article | Print this article