LUDIC LOG

Nothing is more delightful than watching an institution come to terms with the inevitable consequences of their actions, unless it is watching them scramble desperately to blame those consequences on someone, anyone, other than themselves. Witness the stock market crash or the Enron debacle: given the atmosphere of naked greed, the money mania that overwhelmed any sense of restraint or realism, and the lack of checks in the form of regulation, what happened in both cases was as predictable as the tide. Yet, when the bottom finally fell out, those responsible and their paid mouthpieces fell all over themselves to pin the responsibility on anybody but who they saw in the mirror every morning. Surely, it was the fault of freemasons, of immigrants, of regulation-happy Democrats, of stubborn unionists, of consumers without the foresight to invest in the market. It was hard to tell what the problem was, but it was anything -- anything -- but unrestrained market capitalism; there was, therefore, no reason to make institutional changes.

Right now, those of us without a personal interest in how easy rests the head under that absurdly phallic mitre are watching with detached amusement the Catholic Church's desperate attempt to perform damage control in light of recent revelations about the role of the priesthood in spoiling the childhood of many a future baseball color man. Now, it's not really a new development, this notion of clerical fondness for underdeveloped tail; indeed, it's so commonplace that it's been the stuff of blue jokes for at least the last two centuries, and the so-called "Bad Popes" are thus termed in the Catholic Encyclopedia not because of their prediliction for amassing wealth, waging war or doing away with their enemies, but because they were rather too fond of the sins of the flesh. The new development is the decreasing tolerance for these activities by the public. Of course, it would seem that sexual dysfunction on this scale is as inevitable as Black Tuesday, built in to the very structure of the Catholic heirarchy -- the responsibility for a community's sexual health being entrusted to a class of eternally chaste men; the placement of children under the authority of those with no normal sexual outlet allowed to them. It hardly seems like a surprise at all, in fact. It's a wonder it doesn't happen more often.

But, of course, the Church, in order to preserve its interests and prop up its arbitrary authority, cannot admit this, nor can it alter thousands of years of tradition and argumentation and drop the ludicrous ban on married priests. So the race begins to find someone to blame it all on, to locate a safely unpopular group to scapegoat, some poor defenseless sucker -- preferably someone your target audience doesn't like to begin with -- to stick in the neck. And who better than perennial scapegoats the gays? Already doomed to a persecuted life and an uncomfortably warm afterlife by the church, already percieved by Catholics and Protestants alike as a slightly subhuman lot that poses a serious threat to our children, they're a natural to take the fall for the crimes of the Church. It's not our fault, say the church elders, who for decades have conspired to protect collar-wearing pederasts; it's the fault of all the homosexuals in our midst. We aren't responsible, say the cardinals and bishops who shuttle sexual predators from flock to flock rather than cast them out; the responsibility lies with the fact that the serpent of sodomy has burrowed into our collective heart. Indeed, Cardinal Adam Maida of Detroit remarked, "It's not truly a pedophilia-type problem but a homosexual-type problem". In case you missed the subtle theological wrangling there: pedophilia is not a pedophilia-type problem.

If the Catholic bosses manage to sell the world on the idea that their nurturing, harboring and protecting serial child molesters is really the fault of a creeping, insidious homosexual element that's wormed its way into the priesthood, well, good luck to them. I was going to type "God help us all", but it's a false hope; He never has before.