The ink hadn't even dried (or whatever the digital equivalent of that dead-tree era metaphor is) on author Daniel A. Olivas' moving New York Times op-ed piece on OC's worst-ever pedophile priest, Eleuterio Ramos, before Bill Donohue, the president of the long-irrelevant Catholic League, began complaining.
See, Donohue is the type of guy who believes anyone who brings up the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal is anti-Catholic because those molesting priests were homosexual, they molested long ago, and everyone else does it, so why concentrate on priests? It's a strategy he tried on me, leading to a smackdown that was as easy for me to do as dig up OC pioneers who were Klan members.
Yesterday, Donohue sent out a commentary to his donors railing against Olivas and the Times, charging them with being “malicious.” Laughably, it has as many holes in it as the arguments to make Junipero Serra a saint.
Donohue tries to gloss over Ramos' career to his nonagenarian followers by saying he “was suspended from ministry in the 1990s,” implying that church officials briskly took away Ramos' priestly faculties upon finding out his pederast ways. As usual, Donohue didn't even bother with a quick Google search: Weekly readers know that Ramos never lost his priestly faculties, and was only removed from active parish life after a civil suit forced Diocese of Orange officials to fish him back up from the Tijuana parish where they had deposited him after molesting another boy—and this after 15 years of shuffling him from parish to parish after every molestation. But why bother Donohue with details?
The lace-curtain Irish also whined “Why the obscene drawing of a priest whose head resembles a creature from Hell?” Um, maybe because Ramos WAS a creature from hell? What else would Donohue call someone who admitted to molesting at least 25 children, who organized gang rapes of kids both for his perverse pleasure and to punish little girls who complained about him? And even worse are Ramos' many defenders—Archdiocese of Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony least of them, mind you—who knew of Ramos' crimes yet let him escape the law? But why bother Donohue with details?
But the funniest part of Donohue's screed is his old canard of timeliness. “When reports surface, in almost every instance we are hearing about old cases,” Donohue whines. “But now, given the latest round of documents gathered by the authorities involving the Archdiocese of Los Angeles under Cardinal Roger Mahony, we are being treated to more stories.”
Donohue, like so many of his senile followers, has always missed the burrito for the beans on this one. The biggest scandal involving the pedo-priests wasn't the rapes themselves but the coverup, and the fact that virtually every pedo-protector has escaped legal sanctions for allowing rapists to run wild. Every sane person in America should call for the heads of the Catholic hierarchy—you know, because aiding and abetting child molestation is illegal and immoral.
But why bother Donohue with details? Heckuva job, Brownie!
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