Without a doubt, Private Eye, the Brit political-satirical periodical, has done well with this current cover on the Vatican’s issues with its aging pedophiles.

If you wish to download this profane image to pdf format to make your own post card or poster a a glossy to frame for your bathroom wall, see below (& pardon the expression.)

Meanwhile, the National Catholic Reporter which has been on top (again, scuz) of this story for decades, has an instructive takeout in this week’s edition on the late Fr. Marcial Degollado, “the greatest fundraiser of the modern Roman Catholic church,” the founder of the fabulously wealthy  Legion of Christ , “a secretive cult-like religious order now under Vatican investigation.”

The respected lay (pardon, again) Catholic publication describes the V’s favorite priest as an extraordinary payoff artist who took jillions from rich Mexican widows of the faith and greased the palm of Rome to ignore the facts that he was “a notorious pedophile” all the while a priest who “fathered several children by different women” and “a morphine addict who sexually abused at least 20 Legion seminarians from the 1940s to the 60s.”

The Italian newsweekly L’expresso estimates the Legion’s new worth at 25 billion euros, with, according to the Wall Street Journal, a $650 million annual budget, a good percentage of which was expended by the redoubtable Fr. Marciel, the combo pederast and out-of-wedlock father, who in 1994 was hailed by Pope John Paul II, a big buddy, as “an efficacious guide to youth.”

The Catholic paper does throw a bone to the present much-picked upon German Pope by reporting that as then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then in authority to investigate questionable moral behavior in religious orders, swam against the stream of intense Vatican pressure to look the other way about Fr. Mariel, against whom formal canon law charges for sexual abuse of seminarians by eight ex-Legionaries in 1998, and eventually succeeded, in 2004, of launching an investigation. Ratzinger became pope in 2005 and banished Maciel from the ministry in 2006, so don’t say he never did ‘nothing.

The mega- bribes, which are described as offerings “for your works or charity,” were spread like cash confetti around the Vatican,  including to three-big shot cardinals “who allegedly received subsbtantial payments” but declined to comment to the National Catholic Reporter. (A canon lawyer told the newspaper that “an expensive gift, like a car, need not be reported” but gifts directly to the church for a “pious case” do. However, under canon law 1302,  a large financial gift to an official in Rome would not need be reported if funds were given for the official’s “personal charity, that is not a pious cause and need note be reported.” Thus the wily sex-priest dispensed his bribes with religious impunity.

“The Marciel case and the trail of money he reportedly gave cardinals raises profound ethical questions about how money circulates in the Vatican,” the Catholic newspaper said.

For more, see the website of The National Catholic Reporter, ncronline.org.

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