Scandal-ridden Irish Catholic Church is imploding

My friends,

The developments in the Irish Catholic Church child sex-abuse scandal over just the past few days have been nothing sort of astonishing.

While the dwindling band of "the faithful" have expressed their outrage in every form and through every medium imaginable, we now -- finally -- see government officials, judges, and even police commissioners on the attack against the sick clergymen, and women, who have desecrated the Church with their decades of attacks on helpless children -- and against those who even more disgracefully have covered up these crimes against humanity's most innocent.

It is an absolutely stunning spectacle in a nation where it was once an "honor" to kiss the rings of those atop the Church's hierarchy, men whose words were weighed with gold -- the kind they use to bejewel themselves as self-proclaimed "princes of the Church."

Even the "resignation" of high-ranking bishops in Rome has done almost nothing to promote any forgiveness of the guilty, or lessen the anger of the betrayed Catholics of Ireland.

Instead, the volume has grown louder, with a bishop's supposedly contrite resignation statement -- and his explanation that he is doing it to "heal the wounds he "may" have caused -- resulting in "too little, too late" scoffs by pew-sitters.

More than that, their anger over the evils that have gone unchecked for years have brought calls for trials, jail sentences and the payment of reparations to thousands of victims.

Pope Benedict XVI, as expected, has done as little as possible to provide any meaningful redress to the entire scocking outrages. He has accepted a few resignations, the moral equivalent of removing a dead light bulb from its socket -- without putting in a new one.

He has no plans -- and apparently, not the moral courage -- to travel to Ireland and make a personal appeal for forgiveness. Instead, he will write a "pastoral letter" to Irish Catholics. Big deal.

"As ye sew, so shall ye reap" is perhaps the Biblical lesson to the recent mind-boggling developments in the Irish Catholic Church scandal. The Church has nobody to blame except itself.

And now, there is nobody else who must emerge from the cloistered rectory and stand in the spotlight to face judgment by Irish society at every level, lay and religious alike.

Our Loving Father is all-forgiving of His Dear Children who come to Him with a sincere heart. Sadly, even as they drop from fame to infamy, the sincere are in short supply among the power-brokers of the Irish Catholic Church.

God bless you all!

-- Father Tim