In recent weeks, Pope Benedict has had to deal with some damned serious allegations, some of which have been documented in two official Irish government reports concerning the way his Church leaders in Ireland have systematically played down reported cases of clerical sexual abuse of minors.

New, similar scandals which have come to light in his own country, Germany - including one in the very town where he taught at the university and where his brother was choirmaster of a famous boys' choir. (The Pope's brother now "feels bad" about having "smacked" some of the choirboys under his baton. Hhhm.)

In Italy, cases of priestly pedophilia are also coming to light; more than  80 of them, according to prosecutors.

(In one case, the priest defended himself on the grounds that he sincerely believed it was not sinful for him to have sexual relations - provided it was not with a woman. Reminds me of what the priests who taught me used to say in the 60s; "never get caught in a car with a woman." A car full of kids, well, that was a different story, I guess.)

It's becoming clear that in his role as Archbishop of Munich in the late 1970s and early 80s, the Holy Father was guilty of the same pedophile-shuffling that was the  church's policy in Dublin, Boston, and elsewhere.

Hallelujah; the victims of child rape and torture are finally receiving a small measure of justice.

Can we please now turn our attention to the endemic physical, psychological, and spiritual abuse that almost anyone who went to an American Catholic school in the 1940s, 50s, or even the 60s can recall; the regular abuse of schoolchildren at the hands of the female religious, "The Nuns."

I do not want to compare getting smacked across the face in public, having one's head pushed into a (flowing) water fountain, being forced to kneel on grains of rice for an afternoon, having a whole clove pressed into one's tongue for talking, being called a "mackeral slapper," informed pointedly that one's parents were doomed to hell, or being hit across the palms with a metal scale, to being raped and sodomized by one's spiritual advisors--and being told it was your fault, not believed, directed to remain silent, and watching your victimizer waltz away to another assignment, to do it to other kids. None of that compares with being a teenaged girl working in a rectory and being impregnated by a priest, either. (The last happened to a friend, not me. The resulting offspring would be in his or her forties by now. But hey, it wasn't aborted. And the resulting forced marriage, was, I'm sure, blissfully happy.)  Not at all comparable.

But what happened to the male and female victims of physical abuse at the hands of brothers, priests is not nothing, either.

It was Christ himself, I believe, who said that a person who destroyed the faith of a child should be drowned with a millstone around his or her neck. I know that my faith (and my sense of self, sanity, and emotional wholeness) was damn near destroyed by the physical and psychological abuse that was either inflicted upon me or that I witnessed regularly --itself a form of torture--during the eleven years that I could stand being a pupil in a regular American Catholic school. (During this time, I met and was taught by several decent, moral priests and nuns, some of whom I still count as friends today; I must make that clear.)

Let's talk about the culture of child abuse that is denied, minimized, or treated as a joke in the popular culture at large, by the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

It's about time.

(You can read more about my time in Nun World in The Soul Workout, coming in May from Central Recovery Press and currently available for pre-order.)

http://centralrecoverypress.com/zencart/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=2