The Paige Patterson scandal continues apace. Every new day brings with it a new revelation about just how terrible the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), his home denomination, really is for women. A few days ago, Al Mohler–one of the denomination’s biggest names–tried to cool that fire a little. Well, he only made it worse. Today I’ll show you what he said and why he probably said it. And I’ll show you how he’s likely only made the SBC’s position worse.

Al Mohler is one of the SBC’s biggest names. He’s been active in the denomination since before I even (briefly) joined it in the mid-1980s. Among a constellation of successes in right-wing Christianity, he’s been a president of the SBC’s flagship seminary (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary), a big name in Focus on the Family, and a member of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW).

As a hardline Calvinist, he’s also one of the “chief architects” of the so-called “Conservative Resurgence,” which is the SBC’s name for the political takeover and complete domination of the denomination by hard-right fundagelicals. He and his fellow architects fought for years, but when they finished the fight, the SBC looked like it does today: authoritarian, utterly and completely regressive, focused single-mindedly on its quest for the sheer domination of American culture, and mercilessly, ruthlessly intolerant of dissenters within its ranks.

Under Al Mohler’s careful cultivation, the SBC shriveled and lost every single bit of whatever good spirit it had ever possessed. They stopped being evangelical and began being fundagelicals.

In one of the biggest settlements of its kind, the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis plans to establish a $210 million trust fund for hundreds of victims of clergy sexual abuse, the archbishop announced on Thursday.

The plan is the result of a yearslong battle and arduous negotiations in one of the country’s most high-profile cases involving abuse in the Roman Catholic Church.

If approved, the settlement will be the largest ever for a sex abuse case involving an archdiocese that has filed for bankruptcy protection and the second largest over all, said Terry McKiernan, co-director and president of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks clergy sex abuse cases. (According to the website, the largest settlement, $660 million, was reached by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and 508 survivors in 2007.)

It has become common in recent years to declare the end of Catholic Ireland. By now, it’s a familiar story: the clerical abuse scandals which made headlines in the 1990s so undermined the institution that it has been on a slow slide into irrelevance since, with Friday’s vote to repeal the country’s ban on abortion the latest — and in some ways, most significant — in a string of losses that have included the decriminalization of homosexuality and divorce and the legalization of same-sex marriage.

The importance of Friday’s vote as a blow to the institutional Catholic Church should not be understated. At times, it seemed as much a referendum on the church’s historic treatment of women as it was about abortion itself. Stories dating back decades of women who had been at the receiving end of the church’s intolerance have not lost their power to rouse public anger.

But if it’s clear that the institution of the church no longer commands the moral authority or the loyalty in Ireland that it once did, the end of Catholic Ireland, too, is an overstatement. Ireland remains defined by its relationship with Catholicism, because it has yet to develop another way to be. What isn’t yet clear is what the social and political consequences of this new relationship with the church are.

DUBLIN — Ireland voted decisively to repeal one of the world’s more restrictive abortion bans, sweeping aside generations of conservative patriarchy and dealing the latest in a series of stinging rebukes to the Roman Catholic Church.

The surprising landslide, reflected in the results announced on Saturday, cemented the nation’s liberal shift at a time when right-wing populism is on the rise in Europe and the Trump administration is imposing curbs on abortion rights in the United States. In the past three years alone, Ireland has installed a gay man as prime minister and has voted in another referendum to allow same-sex marriage.

But this was a particularly wrenching issue for Irish voters, even for supporters of the measure. And it was not clear until the end that the momentum toward socially liberal policies would be powerful enough to sweep away deeply ingrained opposition to abortion.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis warned Italian bishops this week to vet carefully applicants to the priesthood and reject anyone they suspected might be homosexual, local media reported on Thursday.