And so it was that a week of revelations (heh) concerning the Catholic Church and child sexual abuse rape started with a huge, $660 million payout to victims and their families and ended with a rental of the chilling, heartbreaking and utterly infuriating (and very, very good) documentary Deliver Us From Evil.

Some fun facts from the film:

• over 1 billion dollars have been awarded the victims of child sexual abuse rape and their families by the Catholic Church; I guess now that figure’s closer to $1.66 billion, right?
• the villain of the piece, “Father” Oliver O’Grady, who effectively destroyed the lives of dozens of children and their families, was not just protected by the Catholic Church but lives today in Ireland, unincarcerated and free to roam anywhere, including places frequented by children
• O’Grady recounts his story with not one whit of demonstrable remorse or any awareness of the monstrosity of his crimes
• the Catholic Church knew, they fucking knew, to the highest levels, and not only didn’t take appropriate action but engaged in a massive, secret cover-up which will never be untangled
• the administration of George Bush has granted diplomatic immunity to the leader of the Catholic Church, preventing him from ever having to address these unspeakable crimes and denying the victims the answers and justice they very much deserve. “No child left behind”? The children of your citizens — your voters, your taxpayers — were raped, you assholes

There comes a point where your heartbreak and anger over the stories of the rape of children’s bodies by Catholic priests and the rape of their humanity through the systemic cover-ups by the Catholic Church hierarchy bleed into stories of the rape of children’s minds by the stridently religious of all stripes — could Jesus Camp and Deliver Us from Evil be the feel-bad double-bill of this new century? — and you think “well, we’ve reached the nadir of human perversity with this shit.”

But oh, no. Your imagination isn’t sufficiently depraved until you go one step further, to decry restitution to the victims of institutionalized rape! Warning: Not responsible for the incalculable levels of fury resulting from reading the above-linked article:

We’re all disgusted by clerical sex abuse, and we’re certainly all sick of hearing about it.

If there was a hell, these monsters would surely have a reservation. If there was a god, they’d be ashes already.

While we’re dealing with defenders of The Faith, please don’t get me started on Father Foxnews and his mediagenic bullshizzle, in which we’re supposed to swallow the myth that this abuse wasn’t widely known, if not ignored. And this from a fartweasel defending an organization which actually takes out rape insurance, for real? It’s abundantly clear that we’re in nightmare territory when the horrific rape of children by priests is considered secondary to the “unfair” “persecution” of the oddly and conveniently fragile Catholic faith by critics.

It’s faith which created the environment for abuse, faith which created misplaced trust, faith which kept victims silent, faith which prompted the cover-ups, faith which utterly corrodes the spirits of those victims programmed for belief and faith which, in this particular practice, is run more like a crime syndicate than a salvation.

And let’s not forget that these evil motherfuckers are the ones who claim moral superiority over the rest of us consenting adults who do no harm to anyone.

†

But let’s put notions of child abuse and punishment into the blender with a dash of cultural just-plain-nuttiness and end the week off on a happier note, ‘kay? I give you…

(Video tip courtesy Gawker)

…the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (Cebu, Philippines) and their stirring, if not thrilling, rendition — complete with really superconvincing, tranny girl-in-distress-with-male-pattern-baldness — of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”:

You Hear The Door Slam And Realize There’s Nowhere Left To Run
You Feel The Cold Hand And Wonder If You’ll Ever See The Sun
You Close Your Eyes And Hope That This Is Just Imagination
But All The While You Hear The Creature Creepin’ Up Behind
You’re Out Of Time — “Thriller” by Michael Jackson