When God died, the official cause was elderly enfeeblement; after reading Frédéric Martel's exposé of infamy in the Catholic church, I suspect that the old boy committed suicide in remorse, aghast at the crimes and un-Christian sins of organised religion.
Although Martel's book is published just in time to spoil a pious conferenceon clerical paedophilia convened by the pope, the abuse of minors is not all that St Peter's pharisaical heirs have to answer for. The Vatican combines a venality that the mafia might envy with a bigotry worthy of Steve Bannon(who not coincidentally was in Rome for last week's gathering), and to this already foul mixture it adds an unctuous hypocrisy. The moral fraudulence of the church is Martel's subject: having spent four years sleuthing in all corners of the Catholic world, he establishes that during the past few papacies the fieriest critics of homosexuality – the cardinals who regarded Aids as a divine judgment, condemned the distribution of condoms in Africa, called gender theory an abomination, and ignored peccadilloes like those of the Cuban priest who administered a special blessing to the penises of little boys – were themselves unabashedly gay.
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