"Liberal believers are going to be the people who ultimately bring change to their own religions."

[RainDog]

114. Andrew Sullivan, a Catholic, stated the church should be charged with crimes against humanity

I suppose that makes him a fascist, too, to expect the rule of international law to apply to an entity that is a state.

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/02/04/nostra-maxima-culpa/

...the good folks in the church tried to do something as early as the 1950s and were stopped in their tracks … by the Vatican. The number of souls violated by child-rape in the coming decades would not have happened if all the Popes since Paul VI had acted with more moral sense than most maximum security murderers. (Even the worst prisoners regard child-rapists as the lowest of the low. Popes? Not so much). We’re not talking about priests who are drunks, or priests who fall in love, or break their vows in fallible, victimless ways; we’re talking here about priests committing one of the most heinous felonies imaginable: the systematic rape of children using the authority of the Church as cover.

John Paul II emphatically cannot be somehow removed from this picture. He personally protected one of the worst offenders, Marcial Maciel, who was a serial rapist, drug trafficker, bigamist and rapist of his own son. In fact, John Paul II elevated Maciel to the highest honors of the church – backed by the theocon wing of the American church, from Richard John Neuhaus to Bill Bennett and Mary Ann Glendon. They all adamantly denied that Maciel was anything but a living saint – and he was never prosecuted, merely allowed a gentle retirement from running his order, The Legion of Christ, which continues.

Joseph Ratzinger, when he was Archbishop of Munich, personally signed off on sending a priest to therapy, after that priest had raped several children, never notified the police, never told the parents of the children at the parish the priest was then assigned to, and because of this negligence, was, in my view, complicit in the rape of several more children before the priest was finally caught, arrested and sent to jail. Let me repeat that: the (then) current Pope enabled and abetted the rape of children – and his only way out was to blame a lower official, who subsequently said he’d been pressured. More than that, no one else in the church knows more about this long record of child-rape than Ratzinger. From 2001 onwards, all cases of child rape or abuse were ordered to be sent to his personal office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. And all of it had to be kept completely hidden from the outside world.

I can hear my devout Irish grandmother – who also worked as a cleaning lady for priests, scrubbing her floors day after day till they looked like glass – asking the same question whenever I questioned ecclesiastical authority. It’s a question that simply tells you: do not disobey a priest; do not malign a priest; do not question a priest. And it is that deference, that lingering, profound subservience to the priestly office that also allowed this to happen. Where, after all, were the nuns at St John’s School? Did they seriously not know what was going on? Where were the parents of the deaf boys, when they warned them about Father Murphy as early as 1974? Where are we now as a church if we vaunt one of the biggest enablers of child-rape, John Paul II, to the status of sainthood without a thorough investigation of these matters?

You talk about caring about minorities and the poor, as a political chess piece. It's those groups who are most likely to be abused by the powerful, whether in political or religious life.

Jerry Sandusky's religious organization also provided THE PERFECT protection for pedophiles and the children, who were from disadvantaged families, had no power to go against this "upstanding citizens," including that pedophile enabler Joe. And JUST AS NOW, those who cared more about the institution of Penn State than the lives of those who were abused, DEFENDED THE PEDOPHILES.

This is what you call "fascism." Those who are repulsed by such abuse of power.

What you are engaging in is morally corrupt.