THE Britain Pope Ratzinger is due to visit next month was branded this week as a sex-obsessed “hedonistic wasteland” by an influential figure in the Roman Catholic church.
Edmund Adamus claimed the institutions of family and marriage had been whittled away by 50 years of pro-gay liberal reformers.
The aide to Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, warned against sex outside marriage and the “false fruits of cohabitation”.
Edmund Adamus
And, according to this report, the director of pastoral affairs at the Westminster diocese railed about the weakening of male and female roles by the “feminisation of masculinity” and girls adopting a “laddish culture”.
His remarks were condemned by gay rights campaigners as “insulting” and “gratuitously offensive”.
Adamus labelled Britain:
One of the most anti-Catholic landscapes, culturally speaking, more even than those places where Catholics suffer open persecution. Our laws and lawmakers for over 50 years or more have been the most permissively anti-life and progressively anti-family and marriage.
He urged churchgoers to:
Exhibit counter-cultural signals against the selfish, hedonistic wasteland that is the objectification of women for sexual gratification.
In “biblical language”, he told Zenit, a Catholic news agency with close links to the Vatican, that the UK is a haven for euthanasia and abortion:
Britain, and in particular London, has been and is the geopolitical epicentre of the culture of death. Britain in particular, with its ever-increasing commercialisation of sex, not to mention its permissive laws advancing the ‘gay’ agenda, is such a wasteland.
Adamus nevertheless imagines that most Britons are looking forward to the Pope’s four-day visit which begins on September 16.
It would, he said, be a “kindly light” in a time of shadows threatening the family.
A spokesman for the Diocese of Westminster said the views expressed by Mr Adamus:
Did not reflect the Archbishop’s opinions.
Peter Tatchell with an anti-pope banner (click on pic for the hysterical fundie report which featured the photo)
Peter Tatchell, a leading figure behind the Protest the Pope coalition, said:
The suggestion that gay equality laws make Britain a moral wasteland is insulting but not unexpected. Â The Pope supports legal discrimination against gay people. He says we are not entitled to equal human rights.
Ben Summerskill, chief executive of gay rights group Stonewall, said the comments were “gratuitously offensive”.
And Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the National Secular Society, added:
This anti-Catholicism of which Adamus complains is shared by most British Catholics.
Hat Tip: Stuart W
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
September 4th, 2010 at 12:25 am
Hello in there Edmund. What colour is the sky in your world?
September 4th, 2010 at 12:29 am
hey people in Britain aren’t any more obsessed with sex than the average fundamentalist bible thumper who seem to never shut up about sex and what consenting people do in their own time and place, also this whole “hedonisim” thing that religious idiots accuse us of, it’s not like the pope lives in pot noodles and microwave meals or bread and water on a dailly basis while living in a shithole housing estate or shanty town somewhere the vatican is a lot more decedant and hedonistic than Britain or anywhere else on Earth so they cal fuck right off.
September 4th, 2010 at 1:13 am
Wow Zombie i nearly died before I got to the end of your sentence running out of breath don’t disagree with the content necessarily but you might like to think about popping in some punctuation here and there to make it comprehensible then peeps might get a little more out of it tho I am getting a little sick of gays protesting like their some badly persecuted and discriminated against group it’s like they’re getting as fundy as the bible bashers sometimes equality laws are just that – laws – and they needn’t react to idiocy protesting against them……GASP……
September 4th, 2010 at 2:16 am
Hot kitchen, then sod off, I think.
September 4th, 2010 at 3:00 am
Edmund Adamus is lucky he was not alive when England was the kind of totalitarian theocracy he thinks it should be. If he had instructed Britons to disobey the laws of Great Britain in order to obey the laws of the foreign head of the world’s largest organized crime syndicate, he would have been among the 300 priests hanged for treason by Queen Elizabeth I. The same is true of the BBC’s head honcho who has turned that publicly-funded organization into a propaganda bureau for the Papal crime syndicate.
Does England have laws prohibiting hate-mongering? If so, those raving haters of human rights should be prosecuted under such laws.
September 4th, 2010 at 3:44 am
Not only that, but is it really the intelligent thing to do? To offensively criticize the very people who this snivelling catholic’s big Pope is visiting, at tax payers expense?–the very people he’s insulting are the ones paying for this outrageous little religious fascist to come and stand on their soil. Is this the level of intelligence of these priests? That they insult and offend the citizens of a country their grand exalted leader is visiting? and paying for?
Who else in this world would fling self righteous shit into the faces of the very people who are opening their doors to for a so called state visit? Get active, Brits, and shut these little religious parasites up, protest in the streets, fling shit back at them! If I was in Britain now, I’d be there, throwing rotten eggs at this vile and putrid leech that lives off the blood of the people and then insults them for allowing it, and I’d be happy to be arrested for it.
September 4th, 2010 at 5:14 am
‘And, according to this report, the director of pastoral affairs at the Westminster diocese railed about the weakening of male and female roles by the “feminisation of masculinity†and girls adopting a “laddish cultureâ€.’
I was watching ‘The Runaways’ last night: not a bad film, and it was interesting to see both what has improved since the 1970s and what is depressingly more or less the same. This ‘adopting a laddish culture’ statement, though, immediately took me back to the movie and reminded me of Joan Jett being told that girls don’t play electric guitar. That patronising attitude of ‘you must behave this way because you are a female, and we say so’ has always been the main impression I got of religion. It was one of the reasons I used to get in trouble for refusing to bow my head in prayers at infant school. Children aren’t stupid: they know when they’re being insulted and dismissed.
September 4th, 2010 at 5:29 am
From humans down to viruses, nature has one intention, survival of the species. That is accomplished with sex. When you’re a teenager you listen to pop songs about true love and imagine perfect happiness with your soulmate. That’s your hormones lying to you. Once you fulfil it’s wishes it feeds you to the wolves.
Mayflies have it worse, though, they fuck, then die. Male black widows, oh! How horny do you have to be to become baby food to get your nut? Male Praying Mantis get their heads eaten during orgasm (some call that a myth but I’ve seen video pre-PhotoShop).
Whatever “meaning” you find in life is a gift, like BDuke fighting for gay rights and a world free from religion. Tough, determined, fearless individuals can really make a difference in the quality of life. The bad news is that evolution doesn’t give a fuck about quality, in fact the milestone evolutionary steps were achieved when things were at their worst. (CroMagnon v. Neanderthal)
It’s hard to be a freethinker when your balls are thinking for you. But if we were all logical, we would never fuck that girl without a condom, and humans would die out for personal convenience. Therefore, our immature stupidity is a function of our survival. Go figure.
NeoWolfe
PS. I see Harwood reappeared during my boredom and overtime, and that’s okay. I am certainly not the watchdog of freethought, (I might be interesting in the position if I was invalid) but I will call him out on any future ?Rush Limbaugh spin bullshit.
September 4th, 2010 at 6:13 am
The Vatican religion has a lot of nerve accusing the UK of being anti-life. Some months ago I warned a Catholic priest that the mosquito he planned to swat was my reincarnated grandfather, and he went ahead and murdered him anyway. This was the same priest who denounced the abortion of a pre-human soulless tadpole as murder. In retaliation for such hypocrisy, I am considering spending time in a supermarket, and every time I see someone buy a can of insect spray, I hope to protect the reincarnated souls he is conspiring to kill–by whatever means is necessary.
September 4th, 2010 at 8:27 am
Funderpants, I don’t think that gay people are complaining about persecution and discrimination in this case, at least not directly. Adamus seems to be implying that the gays, or rather modern Britain’s refusal to persecute and discriminate against them, are responsible for some kind of descent into moral darkness.
How Catholic leaders have the brass neck to call out anyone at all on their moral behaviour is beyond me.
September 4th, 2010 at 9:19 am
The same old nonsense from the catholic mafia. Just because some of us have reasoned that religion is utter bollocks and should be ignored, we are to blame for a decline in morality – of which the catholic church is a beacon
Admus says “anti-catholic” like it is a bad thing! I’m proud to be anti-catholic and anti-woo.
September 4th, 2010 at 9:40 am
The very next article
http://freethinker.co.uk/2010/.....h/#respond
is a report of a catholic priest repeatedly raping a woman’s daughters and these cunts have the audacity to lecture the rest of us on morals.
September 4th, 2010 at 9:58 am
The only people obsessed with sex are religiots. Everyone else just “does it”.
I think Adamus hopes his papal arse-greasing will blaze a trail for Satan’s Little Helper, attenuating his opposition. He doesn’t see how his words provoke rather than silence.
September 4th, 2010 at 10:01 am
I thought the troll had been flushed. I’ll be back when he is.
September 4th, 2010 at 10:15 am
@Graham
I’ve an idea that would really embarrass Ratty and spoil his British junket. If everyone who’d suffered catholic clerical sexual abuse got organised and simply stood as a group at his every appearance, who would the public keep their eyes on? Assuming it’s not exclusively covered by the BBC. Not ranting and raving, just a dignified silence.
September 4th, 2010 at 10:22 am
Will the RCs still at least let us love our dogs? I only ask as the other lot have apparently put out a Fatwa on Fido etal: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/n.....in-tehran/
Does Cat Stevens still accept royalties for “I Love My Dog?”
September 4th, 2010 at 10:54 am
As for the BBC.
Because of my business interests, myself and a group of associates joined the picketing of the Texaco oil refinery at Cardiff during the fuel protests of 2000. Every tanker driver was spoken to at the gate and a minority chose to press-on, motivated I suspect by financial concerns. At no point was there any unrest. I often found myself chatting good-naturedly to a police officer stood alongside me. When I got home and watched the last local news bulletin for the day at 22.30 I did not recognise the scene they described. Violence, intimdation and the sort of behaviour that loses public sympathy. This event was a serious challenge the the government and they obviously could not allow themselves to lose. I believe the BBC were coached as to what they should report. I always trusted them until this and now we see its chief executive, Mark Thompson, visiting No.10 ahead of Ratty’s visit, pleading for funds……..
September 4th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
@Broadsword.
I gave up trusting the media way back in 1982 during the ASLE&F strike. I was at Aylesbury one day during the strike when it was reported that an NUR driver was going to book on duty and a train would be run to Marylebone. I saw this man cycling up the road to the station where there were about 50-60 news crews. As the man came in sight, as one, the news crews ran down the road towards him like a mob on the rampage. The poor driver was so intimidated by the sight of these people that he turned round and cycled away as fast as he could. That night it was reported on the news that he had turned away as he was intimidated by the massed ranks of ASLE&F pickets. Not only were there no “massed” pickets (I saw 2 pickets), this poor man never got close enough to the station to see them, all he would have seen were the news crews running towards him.
September 4th, 2010 at 3:12 pm
@Broadsword,
The tv in this country is shameful. Esp the pc ridden BBC.
Even the newspapers are just an endless succession of half stories and trite celebrity updates. Whatever happened to the campaining jounalists like Jon Pilger and Duncan Campbell?
September 4th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
In fact, I can understand.
September 4th, 2010 at 5:35 pm
I see Mr. Madamus is protesting at the “objectification of women for sexual gratification”, perhaps he could define objectification for me as I’ve never seen a definition that makes any sense, I wonder how he feels at being shoulder to shoulder with the hardline feminists on that ? What they both really mean is that they object to women making decisions about what to do with their own bodies that they disapprove of.
September 4th, 2010 at 9:07 pm
Well said, Thornavis. More “weasel words”. The religiots don’t “objectify” women: they think that they should stay at home, keep their mouths shut, do what their husbands tell them, and produce as many little sprogs as they can before their reproductive apparatus gives out!
September 5th, 2010 at 10:04 am
“His remarks were condemned by gay rights campaigners as “insulting†and “gratuitously offensiveâ€.
Surely, in the society we say we want, he is allowed to be as offensive as he wishes. We are always saying how this or that cult is taking someone to court for being offfensive. Don’t let us too be branded with the anti-free speech label, please!
September 5th, 2010 at 1:28 pm
“Exhibit counter-cultural signals against the selfish, hedonistic wasteland that is the objectification of women for sexual gratification.”
And instead objectify women as walking incubators with no capacity to make their own decisions and bodies so horrendously unclean they are not allowed on the altar when the Eucharist is present?
“Surely, in the society we say we want, he is allowed to be as offensive as he wishes. We are always saying how this or that cult is taking someone to court for being offfensive. Don’t let us too be branded with the anti-free speech label, please!”
No one ever said he couldn’t make his gratuitously offensive comments. There’s a difference between pointing out something is offensive and trying to prevent someone from saying it.
September 5th, 2010 at 6:31 pm
harwood said:
“I thought the troll had been flushed. I’ll be back when he is.”
(smile) Tell me doctor(?) which of the following would fit your definition of “troll” the best:
a) a freethinker who exposes psuedo-intellectual frauds when the misrepresent facts and make false accusations.
or:
b) a “brain amputee” (your words) who when exposed for the fraud that he is, picks up his ball and pouts all the way home.
If you answered “a” then I am proud to be a “troll” in your book.
If you answered “b”, then there is a paradox because when the troll is flushed, you won’t be able to come back. Ironic, isn’t it?
NeoWolfe
September 6th, 2010 at 1:30 am
Pardon me if this question has a slightly obvious answer, but doesn’t sexually abusing children fall into the category of “sex outside [of] marriage?”
Just wonderin’…