I think it’s rather that the mandatory celibacy requirement (along with the No Women rule) keeps away a lot of normal people who feel called to preach Gods work and do pastoral work, so that the Catholic Church suffers worst from a shortage of priests, leading them to accept people that should be weeded out.
Additionally, there are many documented cases of the Church hierarchy covering for child molesters: Bishops again and again transfer accused Priests to another diocese, making investigations byt eh police difficult, and also transfer convicted priests into new dioceses and put them again into contact with children. (Likewise, the Church hierarchy unoffically pays for “housemaids” that sleep with priests, even for abortions, but will not budge if a priest wants to be released from his vows to marry a woman he loves honorably. And illegitmate children of priests are not officially recognized).
I’m curious - does the Catholic Church have its own version of Internal Affairs or Military Police? And if so, why the hell aren’t they doing their jobs?
Right. It may be it’s the organizational circle-the-wagons reaction with the capacity to apply it on a large scale that has a “multiplier effect”. What a pastor or rabbi could do in maybe one or two congregations before becoming unemployable, a priest enabled by his bishops could do across a dozen parishes over a lifetime. A Protestant congregation where this happened, back in the old days when these things were kept hushed up by society in general, would “quietly” dismiss the pastor and tell him to get out of town, but they would not outplace him. He would then be on his own to find another pastoral job where they would not want to hear from his prior employer, or would have to try to start his own church and recruit followers. At worst, a perv pastor could dominate his flock cult leader-style and stay on there until someone dared blow the whistle, and the damage would be limited to that specific population. A priest OTOH would be moved right along to new parishes and new potential victims, and in turn have the possibility of rising up the ranks to become an enabling bishop.
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Alessan: I guess Bricker may know better about that – My impression AFAIK is that the disciplinary structures are relatively limited at the diocesan level (plus would be subordinate to the bishop anyway), and even at the Vatican level they became comfortable parts and defenders of the statu quo, more concerned with watching over organizational and doctrinal-discipline issues (e.g. Are you running a collective farm on Church land, or are you claiming the Pope’s not legit ’ cause the Mass is not in Latin anymore).
IMO the Church fell back onto an archaic and self-serving notion of the meaning of the “sin of scandal”. By which I mean the main culpability for causing disrepute to the Church and making the flock lose faith should NOT be in the action of publishing (and maybe sensationalizing) wrongdoing in the Church, but in the action of the primary wrongdoing itself; and rooting out such corruption can’t be done effectively if priority one is avoiding “scandal”.
Even as the problem became called to their attention, the Church’s response was that the priests be channeled to the Church’s own internal counseling programs to then return to duty – repeatedly. Sort of how lay celebs keep going in and out of “rehab” for their drug/drink issues. Many in the RCC hierarchy still held on to the old notion that the clergy should NOT be handed over to the civilian legal system. Again, IMO this interfered with the ability to deal directly with the problem.
Now, AFAIK nothing prevents a confessor from telling a penintent confessing his sins: “Part of your penance, to have your sin forgiven, is that you make amends to those affected by letting them take you before civilian justice.” But then again I’m not Pope and these sorts of ideas would probably keep me from the job.
Well for the Maritimes, they had Lahey clean it up, however . . .
Unfortunately, although the Roman Catholic Church has addressed the issue internally, it has perferred to not be transparent, which raises a lot of questions a to whether or not they have been covering up or not dealing with the problem appropriately. That’s why the Lahey matter is so serious.
That’s a phrase oft-repeated as if it were universal truth, but it’s not necessarily so. From the victim’s standpoint it certainly is very often about power (or the lack of it than anything else) but from the perpetrator’s standpoint, the power is generally just a tool to achieve their goal, which may be revenge, degradation, lust, a desire for intimacy, or dozens of other, and mixed, motivations.
But one would logically lead to the other; over time, pedophiles would accumulate because they aren’t being weeded out. Even assuming that the protectiveness of the church towards them didn’t attract them, which I find unlikely.
As for actual hard evidence; this seems to be the sort of thing people are reluctant to study carefully, no doubt because they are afraid of what the data would say.
I think that’s a likely reason. The top-down hiring of priests also takes power away from the parishioners in that they can’t just quietly among themselves not reup someone’s contract, but have to go up the ladder to complain. People won’t often do that unless there’s something really bad and obvious going on, whereas if they had the power to get rid of the minister, the small things could add up and be talked about more.
Just as it’s easier to let an employee go than to call the cops even if you’re suspecting something hinky.
I think it would also be worth looking at not just the amount of pedophiles in the priesthood, but also the incidence of acts. You could, hypothetically, have a higher rate of actual acts while the amount of actual pedophiles is statistically normal.
That aside, I think i’d probably argue that pedophilia in the priesthood being statistically the same as married men is unexpectedly high. I would have said that we should be expecting the rate to be lower, rather than the same, and so a finding that they are comparitive doesn’t really strike me as a particularly good claim.
“Most of his patients, Groth points out, were not sexually deprived at the time they committed rape,” whcih suggests that the results of his study would not necessarily apply to the priesthood. Nor does it address child porn viewers who at some point or other may also be opportunistic child buggerers.
I occasionally read a website about the doings of the Catholic church and now I note that they are starting to yell “homos attracted to teenage boys” instead of “pedophiles attracted to children”.
I suspect that the rapes committed by actual pedophiles may differ from those committed by adults on adults. For one, pedophiles cannot obtain their sexual preference except through rape.
I saw the movie made about this-I understand the movie was not shown in Canada. Anyway, Mt. Cashel seemed o be a little bit like a prison camp, with sexual abuse thrown in. I know several Cnadians who quit attending church, because of the revelations coming out of this case.
In any event pedophiles come in all flavors-there was an ex-MA state police sergent caught (he was soliciting what he thought was a 15 year old boy, on line). There was also the case of one catholic priest James porter, now deceased) who admitted to abusing over 100 children in his career.