Actually, emotional hyperbole is exactly what you have resorted all over the place once you had no more to say with regards to the actual topics in discussion. Now, the catholic church has never claimed to be free of sinners, and no catholic has made that claim on any topic in which you have rushed in with your arsenal of "catholic priests are pedophiles! let catholics shut up!" and similar weapons of "debate".
What emotional hyperbole? Some guy told the world that he is gay, and some people jumped in with Christianity, Catholics, etc. I have responded by simply noting well-known historical facts and connecting those to current hypocrisy. Do I expect those who dragged in religion to cheerfully accept the hard facts I have presented? Of course not; they are not the most pleasant of facts. But I do hope that my detractors will at least acknowledge the significance of some of my comments:
(a) An immoral pope is not just some regular" member of the church who happens to sin. One must keep in mind that he is the leader and, especially for Catholics, is in a very powerful position: stuff about infallibility and so on.
(b) The priests who have recently been unearthed as pedophiles were always protected by the church leadership, which simply bribed the victims to be silent and then moved the priests elsewhere to continue their nasty activities. The leadership is as guilty as those who used the "confession box" to rape little boys.
(c) The rot is actually very deeply rooted in the history of the church and its leadership, and it is this history---right up to today---that Catholics need to first deal with before they run around looking for folks to stone.
Continuing with the historical connection ... RE: "some medieval pope" I mentioned Alexander only because he seems to have been an "outstanding papal example", with his uncontrolled fucking, murders, and greed for money. An "all-rounder" in iniquity, one might say.
But there are other popes who similarly "distinguished" themselves. For example, in the matter of just fucking, I think it would be hard to beat the record of Pope John XII, who had them coming and going at such a rate that it is said the Vatican resembled a brothel. I don't know if James Brown was a Catholic, but this pope very much fits his "
Sex Machine" song. He seems to have operated on the principle that if anyone could be still for long enough, he'd plug them. Who or what didn't matter; any and all most welcome. A real "equal-opportunity" kind of guy.
Not surprisingly, his death was at the end of a knife wielded by a fellow who caught the "celibate" Holy Father in the act of blessing his wife with the papal tarimbo. Still, perhaps the pope had been dealt a bad hand right from the start: his father also happened to be his grandfather, and one of the women he regularly fucked was his own mother. He could well be pope who established papal incest as "acceptable".
Since we are here discussing
homosexuality and the alleged upright & historical attitudes of the Catholic church, it is worth noting that there is the official attitude and there is the hidden attitude. The latter generally starts with Pope Benedict IX who fucked large numbers of both men and women, and, for good measure and a change of pace, sometimes threw in the odd animal. His own successor (to whom he sold the papacy) accused him of numerous rapes and murders.
Pope Sixtus IV too "distinguished" himself in ways that are relevant to this thread, i.e. fucking men in addition to women. As regards the latter, even his own sister was fair game.
People know of the recent Pope John XXIII, but the 15th Century one with the same name wins on "colourful style". The Vatican Council----his fellow shepherds of the flock!---threw him out of office, on charges that included heresy, simony, schism and immorality; the last of these consisted of piracy, rape,
sodomy, murder and incest. He was found guilty on all charges. And people think there's too much depravity in today's world!
On such men, referred to as the
Vicars of Christ--and supposedly infallible!---is founded the Roman Catholic Church. True, times have changed, and it is no longer acceptable for the leadership to show a cavalier attitude and lead-from-the-front in indulging in rape, murder, incest, sodomy, bestiality, etc. But the roots remain, which is why, until they were caught, the church leadership went to such lengths to protect priests raping little boys.