pope parries abuse critics

Pope Francis has strongly defended the Catholic Church against criticisms leveled in the child sex-abuse scandal in which it has so prominently featured. "No one else has done more" to root out pedophilia, he said.

The Catholic Church is perhaps the only public institution to have acted with transparency and responsibility.
No-one else has done more. Yet the Church is the only one to have been attacked.

The egregiousness of the assertion leaves me gob-smacked, not least because Francis has built something of a reputation for being kind and straightforward.

To the best of my knowledge, no one is saying that fucking or otherwise abusing little boys and girls doesn't go on elsewhere, but the fact that it goes on elsewhere is hardly a good reason for defending against the fact that it goes or has gone on here... here in the Catholic Church; here for century after century; here where mountains of evidence shows church hierarchy did everything in its power to keep the matter under wraps, to deny, to move offending priests from parish to parish without punishment; here where payoffs replaced any real contrition ... here where, if critics are anything like me, it is purely exhausting to reiterate and reiterate and reiterate the irrefutable evidence when yet another fabrication is floated on public waters.

Francis has been warmly received for his down-to-earthiness, his hope that the church would return to its charitable and compassionate roots, and his desire to care for "the least among us." But suggesting by implication that the church should now be let off the hook because of all of its 'hard work' is like an oncologist who announces proudly that some of the patient's cancer has been removed.

Even if the pope's words are more political ploy than substantive truth (gotta do something to placate the curia and end the financial hemorrhaging), still, there is something utterly despicable in it.

Still, I don't suppose Joseph Goebbels felt any honest remorse either.