Although he may no linger be sheltered from secular prosecution, a Catholic man who makes his living as a priest can bugger all the boys he wants and he will not receive the worst retribution the church can deliver, excommunication. Same for bishops have who engaged in racketeering by covering for pedophile clerics. Sister Margaret McBride is a law abiding Catholic woman who works at the Catholic St. Joseph's Hospital in Arizona. A patient with a heart condition too grave for her to be moved was informed that her early term pregnancy was going to be 100% fatal for her and the fetus. McBride exhibited sufficient decency and basic ethics to assist the woman in saving her life via an abortion. The caring nun who did her duty as a medical caretaker has been excommunicated by the man organization for saving the life of a fellow human being ( click here).
The medical ethics director of the Diocese of Phoenix stated that McBride "consented in the murder of an unborn child. There are some situations where the mother may in fact die along with her child. But -- and this is the Catholic perspective you can't do evil to do good. The end does not justify the means" -- we'll get back to that particular example of shallow cynical hypocrisy later.
The Catholic clergy that protects its own men is abusing the women. It is the long-term aim of the Papacy to increase the abuse by making it ever more difficult to obtain an abortion until it is impossible (info here). Until the mid 1800s early term abortion was tolerated. In the USA a current directive supposedly allows abortion to save the life of the mother, but the action of the Arizona bishop indicates this is merely a transitory phase. What the Vatican really wants is already in force in El Salvador, where the church backed a total ban on abortion with absolutely no exceptions. There women are being prosecuted and jailed for performing abortions on themselves after they show up for emergency medical care following their desperate acts (click here). The need for this hard-line policy is logical Catholic theology wise the mother has been baptized and will arrive in heaven, because fetus has not been so graced it must have priority. Catholic doctrine is so execrable that it demands that once a woman is pregnant she is along for the ride even it means her death (http://www.catholic.com/library/Abortion.asp). If she got that way by being raped, that's just too bad. It is in no way an exaggeration to state that that is the barbaric, pitiless world these man brutes want to bring to us here and abroad.
Atheistic antiabortionists are a rare species, so ~99% of those who oppose abortion claim that their deity is prolife (at least when it comes to the unborn). This is a lie as big as they get. Assuming for the sake of discussion that a creator deity exists, the Bible at no point condemns abortion. It does not do so in the Hebrew Testaments, which is why there is debate among Orthodox Jews about the procedure. Jesus had nothing to say on the issue, nor does it come up in the rest of the New Testament. The absence of an injunction against abortion in the book that goes to lengths to specifically ban a whole lot of things explains why the Roman church did not get around to an outright ban until the 19th century (in response to the advent of democratic modernity), and has even inspired a few fundamentalists who take the Bible literally to deny that abortion is a grievous wrong in the eyes of God (the rise of conservative Protestant opposition to abortion got underway some years after Roe v Wade in response to the continued rise of cultural secularism).
Nor does the real world provide evidence for a prolife creator. Quite the opposite. I laid out the stark facts in a ground-breaking paper in the journal Philosophy and Theology. About 100 billion people have been born. The human reproductive system is so badly designed that it is more death machine than source of life. It appears that a majority, perhaps three quarters, of conceptions have failed to come to term. A large portion of embryos are too genetically defective to successfully implant, or they spontaneously abort shortly after implantation. It may be that such abortions, rather than failures of conception, explain why most acts of sexual intercourse during a woman's fertile cycle do not result in pregnancy. The number of unborn who have died due to the creator's incompetence is in the area of two or three hundred billion. Matters following birth do not improve. About half of the children have died while children, the great majority from torturous diseases, most of the rest from malnutrition and other natural disasters. That's fifty billion dead kids. The earth that many believe a loving God created is a death trap that manages via assorted ruthless methods (detailed in the PT paper cited above) to kill off most of the young. So many die that matters could not be worse, a higher juvenile mortality rate would have crashed the population.
Remember how the medical ethics director of the Phoenix Diocese justified his abuse of McBride with the seemingly sensible assertion that "you can't do evil to do good. The end does not justify the means?" It is not possible to overstate how superficial -- and how cynically hypocritical -- the statement is. According to the dogma of the Bishop's church, God's great plan to move human souls to heaven requires them to first dwell on a planet so defective that it tortures tens of billions of children to death [reference is above]; in other words his creator is doing evil on a fantastic scale because his utopian ends justify his terrible means. The hard truth is that there is no evidence that a god has done anything to alleviate the terrible suffering and death of the immature, and to conclude that such an entity is prolife is intellectual and moral madness.
Also insane is the idea that abortion should be rare if it exists at all. When this inanity leads to bans founded on the notion that abortion is murder the result is to only make a lot of women miserable. The research shows that abortion is always common whether it is banned and dangerous or safe and legal (info here). Let me explain why to those who do not understand. You see, women suffer from a serious flaw -- they are human beings like the rest of us. So one way or another many find themselves unwillingly pregnant, and a major portion are bound and determined to not go through with it and one way or another don't. Prohibitions do remarkably little to change this paradigm it's like outlawing alcohol so abortion bans only serve to torment countless decent women and labeling them as murderers while making the simple procedure dangerous. That is the definition of cruelty.
The core reason that antiabortion Catholics as well as evangelicals wish to force women to bear their babies to the point they die is not morality which their faiths don't have all that much of. It's about control. The control includes domination of woman by misogynist, authority obsessed men. But also control of society by brute intimidation. The goal is a global culture where sex is limited to married heterosexuals who are not using contraceptives. It's a crass power play dressed up in false morality. And if there is one thing the Roman Church is about it is power. Since its take over of the Roman Empire the Vatican has been obsessed about achieving as much dominance as it can manage to gain and then to hold onto. The process has required an amazing series of criminal actions. The excommunication of the good-hearted nun is not the lone act that out of the blue requires the destruction of Catholicism, it is the latest of a long line of bad behavior described in numerous accounts including The Vatican Exposed by Paul Williams -- that when put together as a whole condemns the institution.
The displacement of relatively tolerant polytheism with an unusually (for the time) oppressive single faith theocracy in the Roman Empire.
Operation of a slave state until the 1800s.
The invention of anti-Semitism as expressed by forcing Jews to wear identification and live in ghettoes, ethnic cleansing, restriction of livelihoods, forced conversions and executions (based on normal demographic growth rates Jews should currently number a few hundred million, that they are just a few million is largely due to Christian bigotry).
The continuation of anti-Semitic attitudes up to the 1950s.
The destruction of the Gnostic Cathar religion of southern Europe by war, forced conversion and execution.
A series of Crusades against Islam and Orthodox Christians. The wars included mass atrocities and terror tactics against civilians (info here).
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