Pope Faces “Messes”: Philly, Climate, Children, & Now Hillary, by Jerry Slevin, Christian Catholicism (April 29, 2015)

As a celibate bachelor, Pope Francis perhaps understandably seems unable to shake his problems with women and children. Because of the pope’s contraception ban, too many children are still being “bred” for our finite earth, with its warming climate, to absorb humanely and mercifully. Millions suffer needlessly due to a papal ideology that sacrifices women and children mainly to advance the personal interests of the Vatican and its worldwide hierarchy.

Moreover, some of the “excess” children become easy targets of clerical predators that the pope and his bishops seem unwilling and/or unable to control. This was evident from the recent Philadelphia news confirming the conviction for endangering children of the longtime top priest personnel aide to shamed Philly Cardinals Justin Rigali and Anthony Bevilacqua.

The aide took the fall for his two cardinal bosses, it appears. As the Georgetown Law graduate judge told the aide after his jury conviction, he should have stood up to his bishops, Rigali and Bevilacqua presumably. Instead, she said, Lynn had enabled “monsters in clerical garb to destroy the souls of children.”

Of course, Rigali, and Bevilacqua’s memory, are still held in high esteem by the Vatican. And few Catholics trust US bishops’ clearly inadequate and easily manipulated annual “child protection audits” that Rigali got “straight A’s” on while seemingly surrounded by alleged priest abusers!

And now here comes Hillary Clinton, a new grandmother and advocate for women and children, the Vatican’s forgotten Catholics! As noted here, Hillary Clinton, during her 2008 US presidential campaign, talked a great deal about religion. By contrast, with Pope Francis now on the US political playing field, please note this from Hillary’s recent speech seemingly directed at Pope Francis at the Women in the World Summit in New York:

“Yes, we’ve cut the maternal mortality rate in half, but far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth. All the laws we’ve passed don’t count for much if they’re not enforced. Rights have to exist in practice, not just on paper. Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed. “ (emphasis mine)

Whose “cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases”, Pope Francis, do you think Hillary was referring to? This last sentence was key, as one can see from this video (at 8:55). Hillary emphasized these words through a change in tone, cadence and gesture.

Hillary appears poised to take the issue of women’s and children’s welfare to Pope Francis and his “low tax, less regulation and least safety net” billionaire backers in the US presidential campaign now underway.

Hillary can be expected to resist fiercely letting Pope Francis continue to frame child welfare issues by his conflating, cynically, contraception and abortion or by his obscuring child protection with a diversionary anti-gay marriage crusade or frequent papal calls for a new “anti-ISIS” military invasion of the Middle East. As the pope’s farcical “family-less” Family Synods make clear, women and children are “foreign and minor concepts” for the pope and his celibate bishops. Not so for new grandmother, Hillary Clinton. Amen!