The lefty blogosphere, as well as elements of the mainstream and international press, has been abuzz with investigations into the seedy details of Terry Jones and his tiny church in Florida. Has he been buying property on the church’s dime? Did he file his tax returns properly? Was he run out of Germany on the proverbial rail after trying to run a larger organization there like his own personal cult? (warning, the Spiegel Online piece linked there is a hell of a nasty hatchet job).

Even more startling than the press and blogging fixation on the backers of a tiny, non-violent form of political protest has been the level of governmental pressure, arguably even harassment, of the people looking to conduct it. The FBI showed up to interview the pastor. Immaculately dressed Florida Governor Charlie Christ called on Jones not to start a smaller fire than many people use to roast weenies over Haloween. Defense Secretary Robert Gates phoned Jones to try and stop the protest. Even President Obama felt the need to publicly condemn the harmless burning of a small pile of paper, putting a good boot into American Atheists while he did so.

And of course, foreign governments feel the need to meddle with an entirely internal American matter.

But wait; it gets better. The Vatican has a position!

Burning the Quran would be an “outrageous and grave gesture,” the Vatican said Wednesday, joining a chorus of voices pleading with a small Florida church not to burn Islam’s holy book on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Hmm, yes, those paragons of moral virtue at the Vatican condemned burning the Koran. Being good-natured I’ll leave the issue of their credibility vis a vis relations with the Islamic world aside (*cough*Crusades*cough*) for the moment.

Still, all this concern over a tiny protest at an even tinier church? All this poring over documents in search of financial irregularities because someone wanted to make a name for himself with a bonfire? Really?

Isn’t there any more important scandal in the world of religion we could be discussing?

How about, say, this one,with a hat tip to PZ Myers:

‘No Belgian church escaped sex abuse’, finds investigation
Child sex abuse by clergy or church workers has taken place in every Roman Catholic congregation in Belgium, according to an independent commission investigating paedophilia allegations.

Yes, that’s right, the global pedophilia network sometimes referred to as the Catholic Church has been exposed in yet another nation, this time Belgium, home of waffles, in which an investigation discovered that, and I swear I’m not exaggerating, every single solitary Catholic church in the country had at some point been home to the sexual abuse of minors by clergy or staff.

Every. Single. One.

This is of course only part of a far, far larger conspiracy to cover up, even facilitate the sexual abuse of children, going back many decades and reaching to the highest corridors of power within the Vatican.

Well, maybe it was just the Belgian branch of the church that was this deranged, right? Well, no… and in Ireland the sheer depth of the depravity found in the Catholic organization is rocking their society to the core.

Even the police aided and abetted the sexual abuse of children, deferring to the Church’s authority and refusing to pursue cases against molestors in robes. The moral exemplars in the hierachy, meanwhile, coerced children into taking vows of silence against their abusers.

Perhaps these cases are too distant for a direct comparison, though; I mean, the koran burning was to happen here, on American soil. That makes it our problem, right?

Fair enough. How about this example, then:

On the morning of January 14 in Seattle, Ken Roosa and a small group Alaska Natives stood on the sidewalk outside Seattle University to announce a new lawsuit against the Jesuits, claiming a widespread conspiracy to dump pedophile priests in isolated Native villages where they could abuse children off the radar.

“They did it because there was no money there, no power, no police,” Roosa said to the assembled cameras and microphones. “It was a pedophile’s paradise.” He described a chain of poor Native villages where priests—many of them serial sex offenders—reigned supreme. “We are going to shine some light on a dark and dirty corner of the Jesuit order.”

Don’t worry about it, though! The Church is on top of the matter (no jokes please). How seriously do they take it? Well, look how they deal with it under their own, precious, extremely harsh church law: raping a small child is every bit as serious as ordaining a female priest.

Yes, their priorities are clearly straight, and so are ours, when an international, decades long global conspiracy to aid, abet and cover-up the sexual abuse of children makes so much less news than one sad, attention-seeking man starting a tiny fire.

But hey – I hear that Terry Jones might have lied on his tax returns! News at 11! Let’s get that (not-quite) koran burner!