Wouldn’t an american Pope be in a better position to take more control of the american constituency? On the other hand, Those Catholics that were apalled by Law’s handling of the whole scandal might break away if this were to happen.
Not that I am in any position to predict. I ain’t even christian, let alone Catholic.
What I always wonder about with the issue of pedo priests is why the parents didn’t just go to the police. If my mailman molested my kid, I wouldn’t call up the postmaster general, I’d call the goddamn police. Assuming I wasn’t already in jail myself for slaying the mailman.
What Law did or didn’t do should never have been an issue.
“All that happens with child abusing priests is that boys get abused, and not girls, and the parents are happy to get money in exchange for hushing up. the police are never called.”
The above statements are lies. Go to http://www.snapnetwork.org, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests and type “police” in the search engine. Be prepaired to be horrified.
http://www.snapnetwork.org/survivors_voice/clohessy_sfpd_protect.htm
That is indeed horrifying.
Besides the aforementioned attitude of some LEA’s about reported priestly pedophilia (and in the past, about a lot of sex crime in general), remember that in turn the parents of those children were very likely raised in the Faith back when it had even MORE of a “the Church Can Do No Wrong” mentality, combined with a “siege” mentality (a.k.a. “Don’t give the protestants and the secularist liberals any ammo to attack the Church!”). The parents were probably educated with Sister whacking them across the knuckes with her ruler if they dared say anythign that questioned authority, and their parents backing up Sister all the way. Add a salutary helping of “victim’s guilt” (always a component in handling sex crimes) and the parents were easily convinced that it was a freak ocurrence that affected only them, and that having the Church take care of it privately in some wise and holy manner was better than to bring in the police and then have to have a trial and testimonies and cross-exams.
Heck, it’s not even exclusively Catholic. Around here it’s rare that 6 months go by w/o our local scandal-rag reporting that some minister or another has been turned in after any given period of picking off the congregation’s teenagers, until he ran into one that did not buy his line. Heck, we had one on trial lately that had several parents of the girls backing him. People have this bad tendency to think they have to choose between Faith and Reason with no overlap…
Sure there was: they could have stripped him of his office, laicanized him and thrown him on the street. And even that is better than he deserved. Filthy, worthless monster.
Even better, there’s a service in the Latin rite, almost never used (I don’t believe it’s been used in at least a century), called the Rite of Degradation, which is a public rebuke and expulsion for a clergyman who has committed heinous and repugnant acts. Around the time the abuse scandal broke, there were some commentators who suggested the rite be brought back into use. Some pretty powerful language here:
I don’t get it-what exactly did those officers do in that article? Did they show up at court in a show of support, or something?
It sounds from the article like it was kind a cross between that and Hell’s Angels showing up when one of their own is on trial.
In addition, when one searches the site I linked to(www.snapnetwork.org), one will see a large amount of slowness in police responce, lack of care, and disbeliefe. At first I blamed it on the satanic child abuse hoaxs of the 80s, but then I realized that it seems to be more a combination of…well, read the article and decide for yourself.
Sounds absolutely made-to-order for both the molesting priests and for their superiors, such as Cardinal Law, who transferred them to fresh hunting grounds every time the local laity started to rebel at the abuse committed on their children.
And why not exhume the corpse of Karol Wojtyla (I’m not calling him a Pope ever again), and perform the rite on his dead body, for having heaped honors on Cardinal Law, despite knowing full well what sort of man he was honoring?
Can’t speak for any other countries, but here there have been at least two cases here. One in which a priest in charge of a orphanage has been accused of multiple counts of abuse over a number of years. The case has not reached trial yet, but had tried to escape the country a couple of times and has not been defrocked yet.
In the other case an ex-Deacon, who *was *defrocked because of years of scandals, but was left at his post in charge of a catholic orphanage has been accused of murdering a couple that had apparently been blackmailing him, then mutilating, dismembering, putting in a drum and setting the bodies on fire. You know, the stuff movies are made of.
The response of the cardinal? He ordered that everyone, even *suspected *of having any homosexual tendencies be thrown out of the seminaries. Because we all know… :mad:
As noted in the Great Debates thread, perhaps because the abuse of boys gets the most media attention and biggest hush-money payouts, it seems that many people forget that there are many girls and young women abused by priests, too. A Salon story on The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests notes that some people think most of the abuse may involve girls and the focus on abuse of boys allows the Church to shift the blame on “homosexuality”.
[quote]
That answer may make sense to many, since the sex cases that have received the most attention have involved priests who have molested young boys. And turning the scandals into a “gay” issue allows the church to suggest that it, too, is a victim in the scandal. Rather than being responsible for pedophile priests, the church can portray itself as victimized by gays who have sneaked into the priesthood. But it blurs a central fact at the heart of the controversy: No one, including the church itself, seems to know exactly how big the sex scandal really is, who it involves or what role homosexuality plays in child abuse by priests.
At least one well-known clinical psychologist says he believes the victims are much more likely to be girls and women.
“There are far more heterosexual cases than homosexual,” says Gary Schoener, a clinical psychologist who has been diagnosing and treating clergy abuse for 28 years. “The Vatican damn well knows that, and the leadership in the American church knows that.”
[/qutoe]
Hey, I like it … that is the kind of traditionalism I could get behind if only for the entertainment value… BUT it’s no wonder it hasn’t been used in a century… only an invalid is gonna stand still for all of this rigmarole w/o at some point telling the Apostolic Delegate to go fuck himself and the Holy Father too… Too complicated! I kept expecting the next step to be dropping a tray of ice cubes down his trousers, or making him stand on one foot (“As you have made the Church lose standing, so should you not stand firm…”), or covering him in green slime.
Well, as originally intended, the Church would have the temporal authority to compel the hierarch to participate in the rite; after the rite was over, the hierarch would be turned over to the secular authorities, if warranted. I suppose the Church could threaten the hierarch with excommunication if he did not submit to the rite, though how effective that would be would depend on how seriously the hierarch believed in the Church’s spiritual authority.
The rite makes more sense if you are familiar with the ordination process for a bishop; it’s basically the vesting of the bishop in reverse – he starts out in full episcopal attire and at the end is left barefoot and in common clothes.
Maybe they could have someone stand-in for the ex-bishop? A degradation-by-proxy. You’d still get all the symbolism…
That’s something that really bothers me, too. I’m not Catholic, but I was raised a good, Episcopal kid. I remember playing keep away in the pool one summer with a bunch of people including our current priest. I was reluctant, at first, to cover him as closely as I would someone else, although that did change when he tried to give me one hell of a Baptism! :eek:
I was raised to respect priests and their authority. I still remember how naive I was when I was a little girl and how much church meant to me, not to mention how desperate I was for attention. Is it any less horrendous when a little girl is sexually abused? I sometimes get the feeling that in some ways it is so, because that’s women’s lot and women, even girls, are supposed to be tempting to men in ways men aren’t. My city’s heavily Catholic, and I’ve been hearing Pope John Paul II lionized for days. He did a great many good things, but in this contrary Anglican’s eyes, he also did his share of bad, most notably in promoting Cardinal Law and in the way he handled the whole sex abuse scandal in general. I have a niece and nephew in Massachusetts, both of whom are Catholic. I pray things have changed or, if not, that my brother has taught them that in some cases one had bloody well better disrespect a priest!
CJ
that higher-ups in the Church, such as Cardinal Law, weren’t ‘victimized’ by anybody, and the sex(es) of the children being molested was incidental to the shell game Law and other men in funny hats played to move about and conceal molesting priests at the expense of the Catholic children they victimized.