Maher vs. the pope

I don't tune in to the Bill Maher show on HBO because I figure those who do so regularly bear at least some slight resemblance to the racists who used to show up for lynchings, aiming thereby to vent hateful bigotry and satisfy lust for the pain of others.Maybe that's unfair. Maybe the audiences are just liberals looking for a smug laugh at the expense of people who don't think like they do. But how then do you explain why they would ever return to "Real Time with Bill Maher" after despicable rants such as the one I happened to catch recently on a show taking him to task for it?Making reference first to the arrest of polygamists suspected of having sex with children in Texas, Maher said that "whenever a cult leader sets himself up as God's infallible wingman here on Earth, lock away the kids. Which is why I'd like to tip off law enforcement to an even larger child-abusing religious cult. Its leader also has a compound, and this guy not only operates outside the bounds of the law, but he used to be a Nazi and he wears funny hats. That's right, the pope is coming to America this week, and ladies: he's single.""Now, I know what you're thinking," the comedian said. " 'Bill, you can't be saying the Catholic Church is no better than this creepy Texas cult. For one thing, altar boys can't even get pregnant.' But really, what tripped up the little cult on the prairie was that they only abused hundreds of kids, not thousands all over the world. Cults get raided; religions get parades. ... If you have a few hundred followers, and you let some of them molest children, they call you a cult leader. If you have a billion, they call you pope."There's more, and it gets worse, although all of it is in line with other of Maher's anti-Catholic outbursts. The ones I've read are juvenile, pornographic portrayals of the church as gay men leading deluded fools who have never let go of childhood fantasies.It's true, of course, that it's not just Catholic-bashers such as this culturally influential TV host who have found something awful in the sex scandal that has cost the church some $2 billion paid out to victims. I once heard a deeply religious Catholic man express agony at what the guilty priests did and what he considered the inadequate response of the church hierarchy. He felt there had been a betrayal not just of the trust of millions, but of sacred purpose, of God. Yet he did not assume the scandal summed up the whole of the faith, or that love could not produce a more holy future.And I am at least one non-Catholic who thinks Pope Benedict XVI (who was never a Nazi, by the way) is helping that cause with his expressions of shame for what happened, his criticisms of the complicit bishops and an encyclical mentioned by Helen Alvare, a professor of law, on PBS's "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer."Alvare headed up a commission that worked for a year to address the abuse issue. While she herself felt church leaders had not understood "how deep the horror was for a family," she also felt there has not been an understanding of what a "vast program" has been put in place to reduce risks. She thinks the pope has helped recovery in an encyclical telling church members "to give every human being in your path the look of love they crave, and charity ... and to share not just with your family, but the broader society, to love in a self-sacrificial way."No doubt Maher could make a nasty joke out of those sentiments. Others might get it that while people like him create something malevolent out of past evils, making future evils more likely, those responding to the pope create a great good.(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)