[lbo-talk] "Satanic ritual abuse" again

John Lacny jlacny at earthlink.net
Thu Apr 29 12:29:13 PDT 2004


There's a witch-hunt -- quite literally -- going on within the Catholic Church in Toledo, Ohio:

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/nation/8546459.htm?1c

A priest was arrested last week for the murder of a nun back in 1980; the paper here (in Pittsburgh -- and the same people who own the Post-Gazette own the Toledo Blade) has been saying that this priest was actually a suspect at the time. I don't know if this is true.

What I will say with certainty -- and I'm going on record, here on the Internet for everyone to be able to see, forever -- is that the charges brought by this woman against priests in Toledo are totally ludicrous. She claims that priests did all kinds of bizarre things to her when she was a child:

"The woman described satanic ceremonies in which clergy members placed her in a coffin filled with cockroaches, forced her to swallow what she believed to be a human eyeball, and penetrated her with a snake 'to consecrate these orifices to Satan.'"

I have no doubt that the broad outlines of the pedophilia allegations against Catholic priests in recent years are true, and based on what I know (though I haven't been paying much attention, frankly), there's little doubt that bad priests were protected by many in the hierarchy. Nevertheless, the opposite danger -- of wild false allegations to which no one should give credence, but which the church and the secular authorities will follow up on for fear of being accused of coddling pedophiles -- is now very much in force.

It's also another example of how so many of the trappings of Reaganism have been brought back under Bush. Not just the evil functionaries of the regime itself (Abrams, Negroponte, etc.), but even cultural phenomena like its bizarre popular panics (e.g., satanic ritual abuse) are revived not only in outline, but in detail. I pity anyone who ends up on the receiving end of this stuff.

- - - - - John Lacny http://www.johnlacny.com

People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!



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