Of course we do not want to overlook other groups, but I suspect we are.
(The RCC lost my aunt Sue. If they lost her, the lost the vast majority of Catholics, IMHO.)
Dipshit, this is happening because we are paying attention to the RCC. How on earth could that elude you? The people who can “address the issue” sort of need to focus on the issue, or the addressing thereof stops happening.
Name them. I’d like to know what other groups have willfully aided and abetted so many child molestors for as long and as steadily as the Catholic Church has. You take down the Church, you take down, what, 90, 95% of institutionalized child molestation in the US. I’d say that’s a pretty fucking good first step.
Nothing relevant to the topic of this particular thread, which is specifically for the purpose of Pitting the hypocrisy and callousness exhibited by the institutional leadership of the Catholic Church in dealing with this issue.
If you’d bothered to read my post #101 at the top of page 3 of this thread, written specifically in response to your earlier query on this subject, you’d know that in fact, studies have been done on statistical correlation between mandatory celibacy and molestation rates, and they do disprove the thesis, because celibate priests do not in fact sexually abuse minors at a higher rate than the general male population.
The Catholic Church’s molestation problems are clearly NOT caused by the Church’s mandating priestly celibacy. They’re caused by the Church leadership’s irresponsible and vicious mishandling of potentially scandalous situations when they had to deal with statistically inevitable occasional occurrences of molestation among their clergy.
Bullshit. What’s being attacked here is the institutional perverted misbehavior of covering up (and in the process even facilitating and condoning) serious crimes against children.
Sure, some people who don’t like Catholics or Catholicism in any case may be using this misbehavior as an excuse to dump on the Catholic Church in general, but that’s a triviality compared to the enormity of the actual offenses involved here. For an institution that has committed such offenses to try to change the subject with complaints that they’re the unfortunate ones being victimized, because some of their critics are using this scandal as an excuse for a little generic anti-Catholic denunciation, is simply fucking disgusting. Where was all the Church’s concern for justice and fairness and sympathy for innocent victims back when pedophile priests were being deliberately shielded and allowed to endanger other children?
Ah, okay, I get it. Apparently, because we have been criticizing the Catholic Church, the following has happened:
-
Every CPS agency in the nation has started ignoring all forms of child abuse, unless the report is about the Catholic Church.
-
All police departments and district attorney offices across the country have stopped working on abuse cases unless they involve the Catholic Church. And even, on the really off-chance that a DA wants to bring an abuse case to court that doesn’t involve the Catholic Church, the judge will summarily bounce it out of court.
-
Every newspaper reporter in the country is now summarily ignoring all abuse stories unless they involve the Catholic Church.
-
All reporting requirements for teachers, doctors, mental health professionals and the like have been dropped, except for abuse allegations involving the Catholic Church.
We are through the looking glass! Don’t you see people? By talking about the Catholic Church, our entire system of reporting and dealing with abuse has ground to a halt!
Paul in Qatar, you are still an immoral douchebag. Either that, or you have traveled into some alternate reality. Perhaps you should take your comments to the alternate reality SDMB where those things have actually happened.:rolleyes:
On and this:
That is a fucking flat out lie. Nobody gives a crap about every little part of RCC policy. Nobody here cares whether there’s a purgatory or whether the wine turns into blood or whatever. Quit lying about what people are criticizing.
I can understand why it may appear that Catholicism is being singled out. However, seems to me that the reason has less to do with anti-Catholic animus than it has to do with the unique structure of Catholicism as a religious organization.
Certainly there may have been (for example) as many, percentage-wise, molesting rabbis as priests; I simply do not know. What there wasn’t was a larger organization, a hierarchy, to be held accountable. A thousand molesting rabbis is a thousand individual problems; a thousand molesting Catholic priests is a thousand individual problems and a single, institutional problem - namely what is the Church, and the Pope as the head of the Church, going to do about it?
Sadly, the answer appears to have been from all of the evidence “sweep it under the rug” and “be deaf to all calls for action”. This is a huge moral failing.
Now, there certainly are other hierarchical institutions out there that have failed to the same extent over the same issue, but none that have the same degree of pretentions to embodying moral virtue for their adherents.
Here’s a couple of things I’d like to see the Church do about this:
Everyone in the Church hierarchy should voluntarily do what mandated reporters are required by law to do, with exceptions made only for preserving the privacy of the confessional. Any report of child abuse that comes to someone in the Church should be immediately turned over to the secular authorities. No delays to investigate the credibility of the report- the civil authorities can do that themselves.
Can the Church make a rule saying that penance for a certain sin has to involve doing something in particular, or are penances always up to the priest giving them? Even if they are up to the priest, I presume the Church can set guidelines on what the penance for particular sins ought to involve. There should be a rule or guideline that penance for molesting children should include confessing to the secular authorities and accepting whatever penalties secular law gives for what you did. Someone who says he has repented of molesting children, but who has not confessed what he did to the secular authorities, should not have his repentance taken seriously if it didn’t include accepting the legal consequences of what he did.
A “mob” is generally defined as a disorderly or unruly crowd. I don’t see any disorder here. This is a reasonably civil discussion of what the Catholic Church has and hasn’t done about the problem of child sexual abuse by priests.
Even the discussion off this board seems remarkably civil to me, given the subject matter. Where are the reports of anti-Catholic violence brought on by this? Are churches needing to hire extra security because of the death threats that priests are receiving? Congress is having to do that because of threats related to health care reform.
Your suggestion is rejected.
The Catholic church is not a despised religious minority. The church is a very powerful organization with tremendous fiscal resources. Over the years the church has chosen to campaign against potentially life saving stem cell research, against birth control that can prevent sexually transmitted diseases, against assisted reproductive methods that have brough joy to millions of people and against half a dozen measures or behaviors that harm no one.
To listen to that selfsame organization, that organization that has climbed up on a moral high horse and lectured millions of people about rational actions such as taking birth control bills or taking a shot of methotrexate to end a dangerous ectopic pregnancy as if such actions were akin to Nazi behavior is ridiculous.
The church hierarchy set itself up as moral arbitors for the rest of us. To find out that members of said hierarchy failed to take even the most basic of actions to protect true innocents (and not some goddamned cells in a goddamned petri dish) well they can go screw themselves.
This is the same lousy rotten organization that gets itself all worked up about genetically flawed fertilized eggs but has clearly actively aided the horrible mistreatment of real human beings.
I fail to understand why someone does not understand why people are angry. If anything most people should be even angrier at what is unfolding in front of us.
Frankly, I don’t understand why clergy and other Church workers aren’t also mandated reporters, particularly those who are also teachers.
LavenderBlue is correct, you have to remember they believe the church’s teaching authority is infallible and they are literally the moral guardians of the human race. Pope Benedict has written extensively on the human conscience itself, that it must always be subordinate to the Roman Pontiff. Andrew Sullivan was having conniptions about this a couple years ago. If their method of dealing with this problem was cover-up and shuffling and in some instances having victims sign life time binding oaths to never reveal to secular authorities the abuse, it is not to be questioned. Just the other day prominent conservatives in editorials have stated, who are they to question the Pope, who are they indeed.
The authorities are continuing their usual work of prosecuting and trying alleged child abusers, even if they are not Catholic priests. They’re not focusing on child molestation in the Catholic Church to the exclusion of looking for other child molesters.
I don’t care. Is this sypposed to be another spin on the “everyone’s doing it” defense? The focus is on the RCC because they apparently have the most offenses and the worst record of doing something –ANYTHING – about it. Also, they have some sort of “problem” dealing with the expected flak. Just what the holy fuck did they expect? They have a record of shielding child rapers. They have a record of forcing the child victims into what they call “perpetual silence”. Again, what the fuck did they expect?
The problem isn‘t one of chastity or lack of chastity, the PROBLEM is they do no throw out the bad ones. Instead, they move them somewhere else to do it all over again.
And, thanks to the LAW, the RCC may yet have to answer for the crimes and the cover ups – but I’m not holding my breath. Sure, the law has caught a few individual rapers, but has so far failed to connect the dots to these offender’s superiors – the ones who actively ran and oversaw the cover ups.
They were the biggest and the worst. They were the ones, against which some people FINALLY came forward against. Any other theoretical hypothetical group that might be out there? No. Hang these bastards, and then hang the other bastards. But what you are saying is no more than a deflection. “Don’t pick on me, someone else may be doing something (but not as much and not for as long a time). I say bullshit on that argument.
There is an old joke about the old bull and the young bull. The punchline says “let’s walk down and fuck them all”.
Mt variation here would be, let’s take our time, concentrate on one organization (the guiltiest and the worst), and as we go along, hang the others too (if there is anythong there). All in due time.
And you seem to be saying in this last little thing, don’t do a damn thing. We are attacking the perverts and the scum that protected them. We are attacking the long standing “policy” and the LETTERS OF INSTRUCTION FROM POPES that sanctioned it and made it “church law”. Those letters have ben linked in a couple of threads here already. Fucking read them. Their ONLY concern was silence and damage control (for the RCC), and to hell with the victims. Read the fucking things.
Meanwhile, I plan to just see how the arrests and trials go (if anything does happen).
Oh, and I’d like to see no more of this, ever. The Pope should announce that any such oaths taken in the past are null and void and were never valid, and that no one who works for the Church should ever administer such an oath to anyone ever again. He could say that no one will go to hell for breaking such an oath. Anyone who was given money or other compensation on condition of making such a vow shouldn’t have to give back the money, because asking them to take such a vow was wrong.
That probably won’t happen. Doing that, would be admitting they were wrong. Even more so, since these “letters of direction” were written by cardinals and popes, well there goes the whole “infallible pope” thing. I don’t foresee Benedict revoking any of those orders, or lifting the “perpetual silence” demands.
I don’t understand that one either. Aren’t Catholic school teachers held to the same legal standards as other teachers?
Gah. Probably just another example of the church preaching one thing but practicing another.
The Catholic church has no problem telling elected officials to vote against stem cell research or to make abortion illegal under all circumstances or against gay marriage.
They are unelected body but they want to have a say in the governance of many societies.
But when it come to actually obeying laws (particularly those clearly governing punishment of pedophiles) then the church shrugs, obfuscates and essentially completely ignores such laws.
Papal infallibility applies only to certain teachings about faith and morals, not to everything a Pope does or says. I also haven’t heard of a Pope personally trying to swear anybody to silence about their abuse (I know, I probably wouldn’t if it had happened, but that doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a Pope would do personally). They could (but probably won’t, I agree with you there) revoke their demands that victims keep silent without getting rid of the doctrine of papal infallibility.
I’d also like them to lose the “poor, persecuted us” shtick, and acknowledge that this scandal exists because some people in the Catholic Church hierarchy did wrong. I know, they probably won’t do that, either. But I won’t buy it that they have done “everything they could” unless they have admitted that they have done wrong. They tell Catholics that confession is necessary when you’ve done wrong- well, here’s a chance for them to walk the walk.
Incidentally, I haven’t heard of anybody responding to Rabbi Bramly’s arrest by claiming that the police, his accusers, or the media outlets that are publishing the story are antisemites. The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (of which the synagogue he was working at in Arizona is a member, and whose seminary he attended) isn’t crying out about how this is antisemitism. I’m a Conservative Jew, and I don’t think antisemitism is playing a role in that case.
I honestly don’t know the answer to that one. I’d be curious to find out whether there is a distinction between regular teachers in Catholic schools vs. priests or nuns who work as teachers in Catholic schools.
But as far as I’m concerned, there shouldn’t be an exemption from mandatory reporting based on the religious affiliation of the institution or the religious duties of the teacher. Protecting kids (and other vulnerable people) is more important.
In some states, they are. Some states restrict clergy-penitent privilege in cases of child abuse.