Katha hits a homer

The Catholic church has been in the news these days, and as a non-Catholic I really have no dog in the fight, as one of my colleagues says. Still, I found Katha Pollitt's article right on, particularly this:

"Most Catholics take a flexible view of the church's teachings on sexuality. They use birth control — how else could Italy, Spain and Poland have among the lowest birthrates in the world? They divorce and remarry, use condoms to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, undergo in vitro and other banned fertility treatments and even have abortions. Yet there were the bishops, holding the whole health care reform bill hostage to their opposition to abortion rights, advising on the crafting of language right in the halls of Congress."

Or this:

"The difference is, when other professionals who work with children are caught out, justice takes its course. People are fired. Licenses are lost. Reputations are ruined. Sometimes jail is involved. No human institution is perfect, and it would be foolish to suggest that incidents are always investigated and that abusers who don't happen to be priests are never protected by colleagues or superiors. Still, it's probably safe to say that if a principal was accused of overlooking a child molester in his classrooms or recycling him to other schools, nobody would compare his suffering to Christ's."

And this:

"The church has yet to learn that lesson. There is a positively Nixonian smarmy truculence in the response of church hierarchs to the ongoing scandal, which now involves Pope Benedict XVI."

Maybe there's another side to the story, but I can't see it.