. . . about bishops and nuns.

Criminal trial in Philly, Peoria bishop compares Obama to Hitler (sic), and Vatican takes on U.S. nuns. How dumb and irrelevant can the Vatican be?

What, no condemnation of pederasty, no instant censure of over-top sermonizing? The Vatican approves of pederasty, is indifferent to what’s playing in Peoria? Apparently.

You decide if this makes sense. Ongoing, longstanding over-the-top pronouncements by nuns’ leaders over many years finally motivates the glacially speeding HQ of the world’s biggest, longest standing, most intricate and many-faceted religious organization, unparallelled in global sweep, to do what? Investigate nuns’ leaders. And a Chicago columnist is thinking Philadelphia and Peoria? You decide.

Yes. The Philly trial provides a sickening display of moral cancer in the world’s biggest, etc. religious organization, which has what to do with the sisters? It’s a war on them? Rather, a war between them and the Vatican, which is supposed to butt out until people forget about the moral cancer? A tough sell, to be sure. Major problem. But not to obscure every other problem.

That sermon in Peoria. Lesson #179 in the problem of comparing people to Hitler, even if you speak of lesser indignities that point to greater ones on their way, lesser infringements leading to greater, etc. But you can’t win talking that way, and you don’t need Hitler for your case in point. Better stay with, say, Bismarck, whose Kultur Kampf sounds more like what’s happening here and now:

The German term Kulturkampf (help·info) (literally, “culture struggle”) refers to German policies in relation to secularity and the influence of theRoman Catholic Church, enacted from 1871 to 1878 by the Prime Minister of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck. The Kulturkampf did not extend to the other German states such as Bavaria. As one scholar put it, “the attack on the church included a series of Prussian, discriminatory laws that made Catholics feel understandably persecuted within a predominantly Protestant nation.” Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans and other orders were expelled in the culmination of twenty years of anti-Jesuit and antimonastic hysteria.[1]

Bismarck sought aggressively to secularize Germany. He was a man on a mission, in which he succeeded, created one glorious reich where there had been rival and barely cooperating duchies and the like. Thing is, he could not abide churchly competition.

More later, perhaps, on the current Bismarcking of Obama’s country by him and his devotedly secular allies, among which he is obviously very comfortable, thank you.

See also the Catholic Encyclopedia on this pregnant subject.