1115.org

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If someone had the poor taste to take the clergy abuse scandal, and mine it for cheap laughs on the stand-up comedy circuit, they might decide to cast public pronouncements by papal spokesmen in the vein of White House spin.

Remember how no one suffers more from the Iraq war than George and Laura Bush?

A really insensitive comic might decide to see if he could draw some laughs by saying that, in the clergy abuse scandal, certainly there was some suffering by the victims, and by their families, but it was the church that suffered the most.

Lo and behold, then, a miracle of trans-substantiation. Before our very eyes, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, “the Vatican’s No. 2 official”, is transformed into a cheap, cynical comic:

The abuse crisis has caused “so much suffering for the victims, for the families of the victims and above all to the church because it was a contradiction with the great educational mission of the church,” Bertone lamented during the 30-minute interview in the frescoed Treaty Hall of the Apostolic Palace.

The touch of comic genius, of course, lies in that “contradiction with the great educational mission of the church”. Note how rampant repeat buggery by the servants of the church, aided and abetted by the active protection of the bishops of the church, caused suffering for all concerned only because the church happens to have a great educational mission, and repeat buggery contradicts that mission.

There was nothing ethically or morally wrong with priests engaging in said repeat buggery, and the church conniving to protect only the buggers and not the buggered, and acting only to maketh the buggers lie down in fresh pastures. The only problem was that practicing, condoning and facilitating repeat buggery was off-message.

And this is Pope Benedict XVI’s hand-picked No. 2 official in the Vatican. Innocent bystanders could be forgiven for thinking that the church is once again as venal and corrupt as it ever used to be in the good old dark ages.

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U.S. dioceses have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in claims since the crisis began six years ago in Boston, where Cardinal Bernard Law ultimately resigned as archbishop. Nearly 14,000 molestation claims have been filed against Catholic clergy since 1950 — a substantial chunk of them in recent years.

Catholics in Boston had hoped Benedict would visit their city in the wake of the scandal. Bertone said Benedict, who will turn 81 during next week’s visit to the U.S., is fit but could not meet all the invitations from U.S. cities and had to limit himself to Washington and New York.

“The pope is well, everyone sees it, all those who are near to him see his freshness,” Bertone said.

If Bertone has indeed taken White House podium spin as his role model, then he just told us that the pope is gravely ill.

But putting aside why the pope is choosing not to heal one of the church’s deeper wounds by visiting Boston, what’s with the pope’s closest aide — an aide who has been close to him for years — waxing lyrical in public about the pope’s “freshness”?

I hope you’re not thinking what that poetic outburst by Bertone might suggest to hopelessly corrupt and unredeemable souls: “Could Bertone be buggering Benedict?”