Roster of Catholic celebrities who publicly pressed the Vatican to make the notorious pedophile Marcial Maciel a saint shortly after his death: opera singer Plácido Domingo, Florida governor Jeb Bush, US senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Professor Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School, and Steve McEveety, producer of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ". Glendon, the US ambassador to the Vatican under President George W. Bush, described Maciel as a man of “radiant holiness” who had been defamed by “irresponsible journalists.” Priest Richard Neuhaus, editor of the conservative religious-affairs magazine First Things, announced that he had conducted a “scrupulous examination of the claims and counterclaims” about Maciel’s alleged child molestation, and “I have arrived at a moral certainty that the charges are false and malicious.”
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
