It’s more of the same; the deeper they dig into the Irish Catholic Church, the filthier it gets. The latest news is a revelation from the senior cleric in Ireland.

Cardinal Sean Brady, primate of all-Ireland, admitted he was present at meetings where two abused teenagers were made to sign vows of silence.

He was part of a cover-up. In a case of known sex-offender priest, Brady helped conceal the truth about this monster by compelling the victims to silence. And now he shows no guilt, saying “Frankly I don’t believe that this is a resigning matter.” Why? Because he was only following orders.

I’ve heard that excuse somewhere else, before.

Wow. Bill Donohue is going to love Andrew Brown. Brown has written a defense of the Catholic church titled “Catholic child abuse in proportion“; you can tell right away exactly where it is going to be going. ‘Only’ 4% of American priests have been accused of sexual abuse of a minor, and as much as 27% of American women report a history of childhood sexual abuse (to quote just a pair of statistics he uses), therefore, Catholic priests aren’t that bad. Which means…

Certainly the safeguards against paedophilia in the priesthood are now among the tightest in the world. That won’t stop a steady trickle of scandals; but I think that objectively your child is less likely to be abused by a Catholic or Anglican priest in the west today than by the members of almost any other profession.

He doesn’t mention any statistics on any other profession. So kids are more likely to be raped by your local policeman, college professor, grade school teacher, construction worker, farmer, dentist, carpenter, plumber, doctor, or whatever than your local priest? Brown hasn’t shown any evidence at all that that is the case. And I think he would have an even tougher job trying to demonstrate that rapists in these other professions do it while carrying out their duties, or while wearing a uniform of propriety in quite the same way priests do.

As for this claim that priests now have tight safeguards…I haven’t seen any evidence at all of that. The Catholic church doesn’t seem to be cleaning house at all, nor does it have any history of doing so; the pattern has been to hide and protect abusers in their ranks, until they are dragged out into the light by secular investigations.

And then Brown goes ahead and lists a series of reasons why the pattern of Catholic abuse has been regarded with an especially deserved horror. Doesn’t he even read what he writes?

So why the concentration on Catholic priests and brothers? Perhaps I am unduly cynical, but I believe that all institutions attempt to cover up institutional wrongdoing although the Roman Catholic church has had a higher opinion of itself than most, and thus a greater tendency to lie about these things. Because it is an extremely authoritarian institution at least within the hierarchy, it is also one where there were few checks and balances on the misbehaviour of the powerful. The scandal has been loudest and most damaging in Ireland, because it came along just at the moment when the church was losing its power over society at large, and where it was no longer able to cover up what had happened, but still willing to try. Much the same is true in the diocese of Boston which was bankrupted by the scandal.

Hmmm. Andrew Brown is a member of a beleagured institution, journalism, which by his own argument should have just as large a proportion of people who carry out child rape in the execution of their responsibilities as do Catholic priests. I think he therefore has a responsibility to turn whistleblower and report all of his colleagues who have gone out to interview children and abused their authority to obtain sex. Surely, the Guardian must be harboring nests of pedophiles that the newspaper protects by shuffling them out to distant assignments when their crimes become excessive.

Stop protecting child-raping journalists, Brown, and come clean. You’ve convinced me, they must be just as bad as the Catholic priesthood.

There are two very encouraging facts about this article on scientology in the NY Times.

One is that it got published. Once upon a time, newspapers and magazines hesitated to criticize scientology at all, because they’d immediately sic an army of lawyers on the publication, and any journalists involved face some fierce harassment. They probably still do that, but their triumphantly oppressive days are over.

The other is this fascinating disclosure.

The church is vague about its membership numbers. In 11 hours with a reporter over two days, Mr. Davis, the church’s spokesman, gave the numbers of Sea Org members (8,000), of Scientologists in the Tampa-Clearwater area (12,000) and of L. Ron Hubbard’s books printed in the last two and a half years (67 million). But asked about the church’s membership, Mr. Davis said, “I couldn’t tell you an exact figure, but it’s certainly, it’s most definitely in the millions in the U.S. and millions abroad.”

He said he did not know how to account for the findings in the American Religious Identification Survey that the number of Scientologists in the United States fell from 55,000 in 2001 to 25,000 in 2008.

That’s a rather precipitous fall. If they can keep shedding believers at that rate, this will be scientology’s last decade.

It certainly isn’t the Netherlands.

This isn’t news any more. News would be an official Catholic organization that wasn’t a front for repressed perverts and apologists for child abuse.

A young child at a Boulder pre-school has been kicked out for an awful crime. The child was enrolled in a Catholic preschool, and also has two mommies. I’ll leave you to guess which of those two is the awful crime.

According to teachers at Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School, a meeting was held Tuesday to discuss the issue. The staff was told a student would not be allowed to re-enroll because of his or her parents’ sexual orientation. The staff members were also told not to talk to the media.

Another interesting twist is that the staff at the school are described as “disgusted” with the decision; it came from on high, straight from the priests at the archdiocese. It’s a case of the more secular staff knowing what the decent thing they ought to be doing is, and the religious buffoons using their holy dogma to do evil.

Back when we bought our house, one of the things that we liked about it is that it’s a somewhat quirky place, with an odd layout and a few old 50s touches. One thing I didn’t care for is the decor of the upstairs; it’s got this vivid scarlet carpeting everywhere, and one of the bedrooms was (it’s been repainted now) wallpapered with bright green shamrocks. I joked that we could open a brothel for leprechauns up there if we wanted to make a little extra money.

You know, if I’d been moving into the Vatican, instead, I’d probably have made a similar joke — all that garish, gaudy excess and all the men wondering around in flamboyant dress would have probably moved me to joke that we could open a brothel for gay priests here.

What do you know, it’s true. There is a gay prostitution scandal in the Vatican right now. I am in awe. On top of the child abuse scandals in Ireland and Germany, this is just icing on top of a rotten, wormy, corrupt cake.

And this afternoon, I’m going to have to sweep the upstairs bedroom for any sneaky leprechauns.

Allow me to purge a few interesting stories from my mailbag:

• Keshia Canter was working the drive-up window at a burger joint when a sanctimonious customer handed her a pamphlet.

  Scripture tells us that when a man looks on a woman to lust for her he has already committed adultery in his heart. If you are dressed in a way that tempts a men to do this secret (or not so secret) sin, you are a participant in the sin. By the way, some rape victims would not have been raped if they had dressed properly. So can we really say they were innocent victims?

  To answer the question, yes. Yes we can. If a woman walks in front of me stark naked, and I rape her, it is entirely my fault. I have will and a desire to treat people fairly, and no amount of sexual provocation justifies violence and abuse.

  This particular attitude is another reason to throw “scripture” in the trash.

• In a scenario that plays out all the time, a student at a private Christian school was outed as gay. The kid was ordered to the school office and summarily kicked out.

  There is a poll with this story, asking whether the school can kick students out for their sexual orientation. If it’s a private school, yes they can — it’s a silly question. The only answer, of course, is simply to never send your kids to private religious schools. You should recognize the problem with a school established to promote superstition anyway.

  Unfortunately, that isn’t all there is to the story. The parents are religious morons, and instead of loving their child for who he is, they want him to “repent” and plan to send him to a church “cure”.

  You can choose your school, but you’re stuck with the parents you get. Isn’t that a shame?

• There is an airport in Liverpool named after John Lennon, which is nice. Not so nice is the fact that the UK has a law, the Crime and Disorder Act, which apparently makes religious irreverence illegal — which ought to mean John Lennon is illegal, too. Anyway, Harry Taylor left some cartoons mocking religion at the airport, and then…

  The leaflets were discovered by Nicky Lees, the airport chaplain, who told the court she felt “deeply offended and insulted” by their contents.

  She has a right to be offended. Being offended does not justify what happened next: Taylor was arrested and charged with three counts of “religiously aggravated harassment, alarm or distress”. I guess you can offend atheists in Great Britain, but offend a chaplain, and you’ll find yourself in court.

  Good one, UK. You’ve got insane libel laws, and now it turns out you provide special privileges to shamans, too.

• I suppose it’s not fair to pick on the English when we’ve got our share of idiots in Minnesota. Our governor, Tim Pawlenty, has been trying to destroy something called General Assistance Medical Care, which provides support for 30,000 of the poorest people in the state (of course — he’s a Republican!) Among the many inane excuses Pawlenty gives us that the state of our citizens is God’s will (of course — he’s a Republican!). Seriously. He’s making it an important principle of his administration.

  One of the first principles that we should turn to always, and remember, is that God is in charge.

  Now here’s the ironic part. Many religious leaders are opposing Pawlenty’s heartless campaign, and I commend them for it. Keep fighting for the poor — I would have thought that that was an important principle in Christianity. However, this reason, from Lutheran pastor Grant Stevenson, is ridiculous:

  Governor, please stop talking to us about God. The governor is going around saying, ‘God is in control.’ We elected you to be making decisions for this state that will help everyone in this state. Things that will lift up the poorest in this state. Don’t pass this off on God. That’s no God we’ve ever heard of. And please stop lecturing us about God. It’s offensive.

  All right, pastor, come down from that pulpit. You lecture your flock every week about God, and you have no better knowledge of that imaginary being’s will than does Governor Pawlenty.