Wowwwwwwww

[Content Note: Rape culture; clergy abuse; homophobia; misogyny.]

Wow wow wow: "Former highest-ranking U.S. cardinal blames 'feminization' for the Catholic Church's problems."

Last week, Cardinal Raymond Burke delivered a whopper of a manifesto in an interview with something called "The Emangelization," which seeks to restore a sense of manliness to men in the church. In the interview, Burke offered a lengthy meditation on what he perceives to be the problem with the modern church. Most of them began, he said, with the advent of the women's rights movement during the 1960s, which pushed for female participation in the Catholic Church. He derided it as "radical feminism."

When that happened, the "goodness and importance of men became very obscured," which gave rise to a "very feminized" Church, he said: "There was a period of time when men who were feminized and confused about their own sexual identity had entered the priesthood; sadly some of these disordered men sexually abused minors; a terrible tragedy for which the Church mourns."

Got that? Radical feminists turn men gay, and gay men rape children. Which is a terrible tragedy that the Church mourns—presumably when the Church isn't busy covering it up and obstructing investigations and denying accountability and giving harbor to rapist priests.

These two reprehensible tropes—that homosexality is caused by advocacy for gender equality, and that gay men are sexual predators—have been debunked and exposed as the putrid garbage they are so many times that there is no way an adult human being alive in the United States today could possibly subscribe to these execrable notions out of sheer ignorance. They are promulgated exclusively by people with intolerable, hateful agendas built primarily around hating women and gay men.

While he directs most of his ire at "radical feminists," he also appears rankled by ordinary women doing ordinary Church activities. To him, that act alone constitutes the dangerous feminization of the Church that has alienated, disenchanted and made men sexually confused.

"Apart from the priest, the sanctuary has become full of women," Burke continued. "The activities in the parish and even the liturgy have been influenced by women and become so feminine in many places that men do not want to get involved. Men are often reluctant to become active in the Church. The feminized environment and the lack of the Church's effort to engage men has led many men to simply opt out."

How can men possibly be expected to participate in a space where the deity, his sacrificial son, that son's twelve BFFs, the author of every single book of their holy text, the pope, every cardinal, every archbishop, every bishop, every priest, every deacon are all men, but women are allowed to say things and wash dishes? No wonder men are running for the hills.

Everything about this is spectacularly terrible, but I just want to underline that a prominent cardinal in the Catholic Church blamed the Church's institutional sex abuse cataclysm on feminism. Because omfg.