So we have the Pope’s signature on a letter saying that the Church had to be careful in deciding whether to defrock a confessed child rapist because of the need to “consider the good of the Universal Church.” In other words, Ratzinger was having trouble deciding whether or not the need to kick out slimeballs was to be prioritized over protecting the Church’s reputation.

Of everything that’s been said about this, the best is Andrew Sullivan: “It’s over now.”

Yeah. It’s over for the Catholic Church now. My bet is that a few decades from now this will be remembered as the point where the Church took a blow it would never recover from. The Catholic Church will go on existing, and will no doubt have millions of members for the remotely foreseeable future, but it’s so large that that would be true even if 95% of Catholics left the church tomorrow.

And they will leave. A Slog blogger has written about how his grandma left the church in the 90s over the scandals that happened then. But this is 100 times worse than the 90s. I fully expect membership statistics for Catholicism to drop by hundreds of millions in the next few decades, as what’s happened sinks in, as people connect the dots, and as more and more people decide “okay, it’s past the point where my family has any business being upset if I stop going to mass.”

Partly because it’s the Pope. But partly because Catholic leaders, because they’re freaked out and started saying things to defend themselves that showed how utterly morally corrupt they are. Instead of adopting a sane damage control strategy, something like “We don’t agree with everything that’s been said about the Church in this controversy, but we realized we’ve handled this poorly and are taking steps to make sure those mistakes are never repeated,” they’ve accused everyone involved in airing this story of being evil agents of the atheist-homosexual agenda engaging in petty gossip equivalent to what the Nazis did to the Jews (how petty gossip can be the same as mass murder I’ll never know). Luke posted Jon Stewart’s take, but Stewart is off his game here. The video is only worth watching to see that the rhetoric of Catholic leaders is too absurd to make jokes about. And Stewart didn’t even use the quote from the Spanish bishop warning that 13 year olds will “provoke you.”

Even the less absurd defenses of the Church make no sense to anyone who thinks about them. As one of Sullivan’s readers pointed out, other churches can get rid of bad priests in a day if necessary. There’s no excuse for the Catholic Church’s inability to do the same.

Again, this is hardly the only black mark on the Church’s reputation. But for a long time, the Church has had people convinced that everything bad it had ever done was either in the past (crusades, inquisition, that orgy involving the chestnuts) or perfectly normal things for a religious organization to do which would be bigoted to object to (lying about condoms and AIDS). This, though, is something ongoing that ordinary people can understand and can’t be defended as a normal part of religion.

A final embarrassment could come if a country in Europe decides it’s willing to arrest the Pope. Dawkins and Hitchens are trying to make that happen in Britain. If a British court won’t do it, maybe a German one will. I doubt the Pope would actually be arrested, but he might find himself with a Kissinger-like inability to travel to certain countries for fear of arrest, and if that happened, people would be occasionally reminded of it so long as the Pope is alive.

The one thing I may be wrong about is how this will play outside North America and Europe. The Church is already floundering there anyway, it’s strength is in the developing world. I would be surprised if this scandal had no impact there, however. Anyone who knows more about that angle than I do, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.