Today in Just Like Jesus Would Do

[Trigger warning for clergy abuse, sexual violence, kidnapping, Christian supremacy.]

It's another banner week for the Catholic Church, as the BBC prepares to air a documentary detailing that, over a five-decade period between 1939 and 1989, as many as 300,000 Spanish newborns were stolen from their parents and sold for adoption, and as a grand jury in Jackson County, Missouri, indicts Bishop Robert Finn and the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph for failing to report potential child abuse after the December 2010 discovery of child pornography on Rev. Shawn Ratigan's laptop.

The BBC documentary is based on a recent investigative report, which found that the babies "were trafficked by a secret network of doctors, nurses, priests and nuns in a widespread practice that began during General Franco's dictatorship. ... It began as a system for taking children away from families deemed politically dangerous to the regime of General Franco, which began in 1939. The system continued after the dictator's death in 1975 as the Catholic church continued to retain a powerful influence on public life, particularly in social services."

Hundreds of families who had babies taken from Spanish hospitals are now battling for an official government investigation into the scandal.
Several mothers say they were told their first-born children had died during or soon after they gave birth.

But the women, often young and unmarried, were told they could not see the body of the infant or attend their burial. In reality, the babies were sold to childless couples whose devout beliefs and financial security meant that they were seen as more appropriate parents.

Official documents were forged so the adoptive parents' names were on the infants' birth certificates. In many cases it is believed they were unaware that the child they received had been stolen, as they were usually told the birth mother had given them up.

...The scandal came to light after two men, Antonio Barroso and Juan Luis Moreno, discovered they had been stolen as babies. ...When the pair made their case public, it prompted mothers all over the country to come forward with their own experiences of being told their babies had died, but never believing it. ...In some cases, babies' graves have been exhumed, revealing bones that belong to adults or animals. Some of the graves contained nothing at all.

...Many mothers who gave birth there claim that when they asked to see their child after being told it had died, they were shown a baby's corpse that appeared to be freezing cold. The BBC programme shows photographs taken in the Eighties of a dead baby kept in a freezer, allegedly to show grieving mothers.

Cases are being investigated on a case-by-case basis, ostensibly because "amnesty laws passed after Franco's death [mean that] crimes that took place during his regime are usually not examined," but, quite obviously, the fact that the Catholic Church is a highly influential institution that generally avoids rigorous scrutiny of its institutional crimes all over the globe has a little something to do with the lack of a national investigation, too.

That well-documented immunity from legal consequences is what makes the case in Missouri all the more remarkable:

"This is historic," said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, author of Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church.

"In terms of the Catholic Church, this is an extraordinary move which is going to signal that the times have changed," said Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. "Neither people nor government are going to put up with any kind of activity that looks like a coverup."

The charges were announced Friday at a news conference by Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker.

"This is a significant charge," Baker said. "To my knowledge, a charge like this has not been leveled before."

It's a misdemeanor charge. With a maximum penalty of $5,000. And it's being discussed as "historic" and "significant." I would be hard-pressed to conceive of something that could more pointedly underline the appalling void of meaningful criminal consequences faced by the Catholic Church for its institutional abuse of children and systemic protection of child abusers and traffickers.

I would be equally hard-pressed to come up with a more perfect and horrifying argument for challenging Christian privilege and the reflexive presumption that anyone who self-identifies as Christian must be a good person.

Such fairy tales do not help anyone; least of all Christian children.

[Commenting Guidelines: Please take the time to make sure any criticisms are clearly directed at the Catholic Church leadership and not at "Catholics," many of whom are themselves critical of the failures of Church leadership.]