It’s not the right-wing reactionary doctrine of the Catholic Church that atheists hate most of all, it’s the sheer seemingly endless hypocrisy of them selectively banning and campaigning against peoples legal rights, and then not just flouting the laws with their immoral behavior but also actually spending more effort covering up their misdemeanors rather than focusing on help the victims healing.
The stories concerning disreputable and obnoxious priests never seem to stop coming. In last week’s Miami Herald, there was an excellent article by Ana Veciana Suarez in which she details a story about Father Pedro Corces who has been suspended from his post of pastor of St. Rose of Lima after a group from the parish presented a 129-page report to the Archdiocese of Miami filled with allegations of sexual impropriety. She writes quoting a parishioner “The archbishop is not upset at what the priest has done but that it has been uncovered. The church isn’t upset by the sins of their priests but by the fact that the faithful have had the audacity, the temerity, to bring this up.”
The report, along with dozens of pictures, copies of receipts, and 28 appendices, claims that Corces replaced the maintenance staff with workers who included “a felon and prostitute, Santeria practitioners, promiscuous gay practitioners and people who openly mock the Catholic faith.” And also that Corces became romantically involved with a maintenance worker who slept at the priests house, and that the two men shared “frequent, lavish trips and dinners.”
Corces has not been charged with anything, and an independent investigation may even disprove some of the allegations. but that is not exactly the point here. Archbishop Wenski of Miami gave no hint of regret for the lack of 0versight or indeed any apology whatsoever in a letter published Friday, and instead he just laid into the parishioners behind the Report. He wrote accusing them of “Slanderous gossip, calumny, detraction — all sinful behaviors — have fomented division in the parish and school communities.”
