The Roman Catholic Church likes to think of itself as the one true church, a notion that does not sit particularly well with most non Roman Catholics, including me. Understandably, people expect an institution that makes such an audacious claim to hold itself to high standards; when, instead, they find child abuse, systematic cover-ups and hypocrisy, it does little for any of the RC Church’s claims, let alone the pretension that it is the one true church.

Ruth Gledhill reports the imminent implosion of the RC church:

Catholic Church ‘imploding’ over child sex abuse.

That is the view of a senior journalist in Rome over the latest round of revelations of the extent of paedophilia among Catholic clergy.

Unsurprisingly, no-one is more smugly satisfied over the troubles in the RC church than Christopher Hitchens:

The Great Catholic Cover-Up

The pope’s entire career has the stench of evil about it.

On March 10, the chief exorcist of the Vatican, the Rev. Gabriele Amorth (who has held this demanding post for 25 years), was quoted as saying that “the Devil is at work inside the Vatican,” and that “when one speaks of ‘the smoke of Satan’ in the holy rooms, it is all true—including these latest stories of violence and pedophilia.” This can perhaps be taken as confirmation that something horrible has indeed been going on in the holy precincts, though most inquiries show it to have a perfectly good material explanation.

Hitchens, as an atheist, likes to indulge in play-morality, and, so, is eminently unqualified to give an opinion on what is evil; for an atheist, such categories are merely preferences induced by the occasional stray spasm of a neuro-mechanism. The fact that Hitchens has said something about a church that is not all wrong, in itself means that there must be something really rotten afoot.

At the moment, the storm for the RC Church has just begun; for the institution to survive, it will need a long-overdue pruning – a pruning that would have to remove and bar homosexuals from the priesthood (60% of the cases involved priests who were sexually attracted to male adolescents). If it happens, there will be great wailing and gnashing of teeth among liberals.