We’ve seen how, in general, great crimes can go unpunlshed (a la George Monbiot) far more easily than the little ones. Here’s a new wrinkle in the annals of deviltry, so to speak. Apparently, you can rape your little, uh, heart out as a priest, as long as you make it to your golden years, at which point, you are just too old to be punished for your crimes. We’ve already seen how Father Lawrence Murphy (serial rapist of deaf boys) was exiled to a cabin in Wisconsin to “live out the rest of his priesthood in dignity.” (“Dignity”, of course, meant luring adjudicated youths to said cabin and…you guessed it.) The clearly sociopathic Fr. Marcial Maciel, commander of his own Vatican-endorsed cult and rapist extraordinaire, seemed to have escaped punishment for his lifetime of wrongdoing by 1) handing out envelopes of cash and 2) getting old. In the New York Times today, Daniel J. Wakin and James C. McKinley Jr. report that Canon lawyer Msgr. Charles. J. Scicluna met with plaintiffs in Mexico in 2004 and told them ‘Father Maciel is already an old man. In what way can one punish a priest who is already so old?’ Nazi war criminals and Roman Polanski? Y’all should have been priests.