The Devil Made Me Do It

Funnyman Flip Wilson played the line for laughs. But OMG what the hell is wrong with people who keep getting suckered in by all the religious shysters and charlatans of the world? Enough already.

It's always the same story, isn't it. Some guy (very rarely a woman) decides he's got God's personal phone number in his back pocket; he suckers the crowds in; then fleeces the sheep, uses and abuses them, and I don't mean just metaphorically. Lots of those holy boys just can't keep it in their pants.

You remember all the televangelist scandals; the priest abuse scandal; the FLDS; and on and on and on, and way back into history. Of course, not every believer is guilty of abuse and deceit, but so many leaders have been, and tragically, faithful people keep falling for the same old song and dance. This week, a new scandal comes to light involving a highly influential Catholic priest, as the NYT reports:

The Legionaries of Christ, an influential Roman Catholic religious order, have been shaken by new revelations that their founder, who died a year ago, had an affair with a woman and fathered a daughter just as he and his thriving conservative order were winning the acclaim of Pope John Paul II.

Before his death, the founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, had been forced to leave public ministry by Pope Benedict XVI because of accusations from more than a dozen men who said he had sexually abused them when they were students. . . .

In Catholic religious orders, members are taught to identify with the spirituality and values of the founder. That was taken to an extreme in the Legionaries, said the Rev. Stephen Fichter, a priest in New Jersey who left the order after 14 years.

“Father Maciel was this mythical hero who was put on a pedestal and had all the answers,” Father Fichter said. “When you become a Legionarie, you have to read every letter Father Maciel ever wrote, like 15 or 16 volumes. To hear he’s been having this double life on the side, I just don’t see how they’re going to continue.”

Father Fichter, once the chief financial officer for the order, said he informed the Vatican three years ago that every time Father Maciel left Rome, “I always had to give him $10,000 in cash — $5,000 in American dollars and $5,000 in the currency of wherever he was going.”

Father Fichter added: “As Legionaries, we were taught a very strict poverty; if I went out of town and bought a Bic pen and a chocolate bar, I would have to turn in the receipts. And yet for Father Maciel there was never any accounting. It was always cash, never any paper trail. And because he was this incredible hero to us, we never even questioned it for a second.”

Why do we humans keep getting suckered in this way, giving up all our freedom and good sense to follow some peckerwood who claims to speak for God? Guess it feels safer that way than having to figure things out on our own. Check out the comments section on this story in the Dallas Morning News: even with the truth laid out on the table, lots of people still just don't get it.

But of course, corrupt as the Catholic Church is on these matters, the Protestant side has no room to gloat. Mike Signorile is hot on the trail of further revelations in the ongoing Ted Haggard scandal:

A Colorado Springs bail bondsman and sometime bounty hunter who has been investigating New Life Church and Ted Haggard for several years appeared on my show late on Friday and told me
that he now has information on ten more cases of sexual misconduct on the part of Ted Haggard and that three of these involve minors. He also said that New Life Church had suppressed from the media an earlier case of a pastor at the church (which has many pastors under the senior pastor) who was convicted of sexual assault against a child under the age of 15 and got off easy
with help from the church, only to later have his probation revoked. The convicted pastor then illegally left the country, he said, and he speculates that New Life Church may have helped him do so. . . .

Brown said that it’s clear that local law enforcement has been intimidated by the New Life Church and by all the megachurches of Colorado Springs, which is like the Vatican of the evangelical movement. He noted that Ted Haggard continually bragged about how he had friends in the district attorney’s office and police department.

So you see how things are. Men reach great heights of power, influence, and wealth slamming other people for sexual sins - all the while actively, consciously, deliberately wallowing in the very things they say are oh so terrible.

And I can never forget that just a couple of weeks after I buried my husband, all the grief and shock still fresh, the last Pope came out with this brilliant pronouncement: gay marriage is, he said,

part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man.

Me and my husband and the little dog, living our life, quietly, peaceably, lovingly, way out on the prairie - an evil, insidious, sinful thing?

Oh no. That's the devil's talk. Not God's.