If you get pregnant by your priest, that is *your* fault, not his.

So don’t tell anybody because A) You need to make it right with the Lord, B) The congregation will be upset and C) If the court says he has to pay child support, he’ll have to leave the church. Clearly, you need to give that baby up for adoption and never speak about it again.

That’s what I have learned so far from an upcoming Dan Rather Reports on HDNet about coerced adoptions.

…Marc Mezibov is an attorney who represented a woman who claims to have been manipulated into handing over her newborn for adoption in 1965 when she was 16 years old. But the story is much more sordid than that.

In a lawsuit filed against the Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati in 2004, Mezibov’s client, known as “Jane Doe”, claimed that the father of her child was her parish priest.

“The priest and her elementary school teacher, who’s a nun, and her parents, are all telling her basically, ‘You need to get things right with the church’,”Mezibov told me. “And to do the right thing means to keep quiet about the parentage of your child and not to bring any trouble to the church’s door.”

Mezibov says his client was intimidated into relinquishing her parental rights to the baby and as a result had been separated from her child for about 40 years.

“She was told, ‘The fact that you have this out-of-wedlock child with a priest is your fault and your fault alone. The public must never know that the father of your child is a priest.’”

“And the priest told her, ‘Look, you have to do the right thing. The right thing is — give up the child — don’t ever tell anyone that I was the father. And, by the way, I’ll have to leave the church if the church is required to pay child support for this child.’” (cont.)

Way to go, Catholic church! Yet again, you look totally moral and up front and not sketchy at all.

How is this even still an institution? When was the last time something positive came out of the church? The Orthodox Christians in Russia try to hide their flagrant disregard for the poor, the Catholics here won’t let lesbians grieve for dead loved ones, the Catholics everywhere molest little boys and cover it up. And now we find out when a priest gets a girl pregnant, the answer isn’t “confess his sins and leave the church” but “blame the girl and ship her off to get rid of the baby” and everybody, including the girl’s parents, consent to it.

All of this is going down in God’s House.

Ok.

Maybe I can’t get the City of New York to act right at all times. Maybe I can’t keep the Upper West Side under control. Maybe I can’t even keep my building in order. But I definitely know what’s going on in my own apartment. So what’s up, God? How do so many people follow a god who supposedly “has the whole world in his hands” but can’t even keep his own truth-bearers on the straight and narrow in his own apartment? Yeah, I totally trust that god.

Power to create the entire universe and everything in it? Sure.
Power to keep his representatives on Earth from screwing up people’s lives for the sake of their own skin? Notsomuch.

Get it together Jesus and fix some of this mess you’re letting folks create in your name. Otherwise, I’ma just hafta keep on being an atheist and looking at all of you crossways and crazy.