The Catholic Church: Mafia Dons

The Catholic Church to me is like the mafia. Or a pimp. God's pimp. Why?

Well for one, they have people convinced that you can only get to God through them. You do as they say, you give them your cash and you get access to God's word and what it means and insight to what he actually wants. Ergo, the pimp comparison. They peddle spirituality and have an iron-fisted monopoly over it.

But why the mafia? Well it's because the Catholic church has every single devout Catholic by the balls. They have full power over them from the moment they're born to the day they die. Much like in real life, you have to pay "protection money" (religious sacraments) regularly in order to keep your soul from going to hell. Which of course, only the Catholic church can prevent because they're the only ones that can forgive your sins and magically turn the wafers and wine into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ.

Is there any moment in a Catholic person's life, where they can go without the Catholic church and not go to hell? The Catholic church makes you need them if you want to avoid eternal damnation. You don't get baptized when you're born? You go to hell. You don't perform communion every week? You go to hell. You don't get your final rites? You go to hell. That to me, isn't faith. That's blackmail.

Finally, for your reading pleasure, the Church's links to the actual mafia. Link

FRANK KEATING, the chairman of the Roman Catholic Church's National Review Board, which is monitoring the church's response to the priest sexual abuse scandal, resigned last week after comparing some recalcitrant bishops to ''La Cosa Nostra.'' 

Is it unusual for the Catholic Church to be compared to the Mafia? 

The comparison is certainly one byproduct of the scandal. But it is far from a new phenomenon.Last August, an Associated Press article quoted State Senator Ernie Chambers of Nebraska as saying, ''The Catholic Church is more effective as a criminal enterprise than the Mafia.'' Jimmy Breslin, a Newsday columnist, writing in January about a Long Island priest convicted of child molesting, said that a lengthy sworn statement by the priest ''shows the inside of the Catholic Church coincides with that heard on a bug in any Mafia clubhouse.'' 

Jeffrey Anderson, a lawyer who represents people suing priests and bishops over abuse, even evokes the mob for legal purposes. He has filed civil racketeering suits against church officials. 

''If they're going to act like mobsters, we'll go after them like the Mafia,'' he said in one interview.In fact, the Mafia comparison is a longstanding trope in anti-Catholic rhetoric, said William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. 

A visit to the league's library shows that Mafia-church comparisons go back to anti-Catholic screeds dating at least to the late 1950's. There is, for example, Emmett McLoughlin, author of a 1962 book, ''Immorality in the Catholic Church'': 

''American gangsterism during Prohibition days was largely a Roman Catholic monopoly,'' he writes. ''From these days into our time emerges the Mafia, totally Roman Catholic in fact and in origin.'' He even quotes an unnamed former priest as saying ''some priests in the Chicago area said Mass in the morning and slipped into the Mafia for the rest of the day.' 

In Italy, the church-mob theme is more serious. The church-as-Mafia theorists gained some grist when Vatican financial advisers in the 1980's were alleged to have had links to the Mafia. In Sicily, where the pope has thundered against the mob, anti-Mafia priests carry on the campaign, sometimes risking their lives. By contrast, prosecutors recently have not spared bishops and priests. DANIEL J. WAKIN