The Catholic church and this very Pope along with who knows how many previous ones personally approved of child rape by protecting the priests and moving them around. And the people who excuse this nonsense are no better, and may be even worse.
This is simply not true. Just because a lot of people say something over and over again doesn’t make it true. The Pope has never “personally approved of child rape by protecting the priests and moving them around.”
It’s been said time and time again, but I’ll say it yet again. At the time the allegations were coming out (70’s and 80’s), the social science was that child molestors could be “cured”. So they put them in treatment, and reassigned them if they psychologists “cleared” them. This was later found to have been a serious mistake, as the rate of recidivism of child molestors is incredibly high.
When it became clear that the problem wasn’t going away, and that they would likely never be cured, the Church changed its monitoring procedures, disciplinary procedures, and seminary screening procedures. As a result, the child molestation problem in the Church peaked in the early 1980’s, and has been on the decline ever since. Just because there are new “allegations” now (all relating to a former time period) doesn’t mean the problem is getting worse. In fact, it’s getting better, but that fact doesn’t fit in with the media Leitmotiv. There’s no “story” in a problem being fixed or allegations turning up false.
People are falliable – priests, bishops, Popes; this does not weaken the moral authority of the Church. 1 out of the 12 original Disciples was a traitor. We all sin, and our past sins cannot be changed; what we can do is offer sincere repentance and reparation for our sins, to do good in the world and love God and our fellow man sincerely. God is merciful, and would not destroy a wicked city given the presence of just 1 honest man; likewise, we should not seek the destruction of the Church based on an ever-dwindling few.
For those that hate the Church, well, they will always seek its destruction given any opportunity, and I suppose that can’t be helped.
Funny how that happened right about the time people actually started talking about it in public.
No, it’s happening less because the moral stigma to telling people about the abuse is gone, and therefore it’s much harder to get away with it. When the abuse (including physical, non-sexual abuse) was institutionalized you couldn’t speak out against the system, especially in places like Ireland where the Church and the State colluded to cover this sort of thing up.
Ah, “mistakes were made.” It was just a few priests that did it, just a few fallible bishops that covered it up and just a few THOUSAND children affected. Keep waving those hands.
Poor you. How persecuted you are. Those liberals and homosexuals are arrayed in ranks against you, with only your fragile faith to protect you from reality.
So your point is that the Vatican acted unreasonably? Do you believe that if police and prosecutors had gotten reports from this case, they would have acted differently?
Well, I don’t know about Cumberdale, but I certainly think the Vatican acted unreasonably in that case.
As to your question about whether police and prosecutors would have acted differently: Well, I imagine so, since they don’t have the power to defrock a priest, so that option would not have been available to them.
Are you suggesting that being removed from a job where one is responsible for the care of young adults is the same as being arrested and prosecuted? I haven’t read the Declaration of Independence ina while, but I’m pretty sure “Life, Liberty, and Ordination as a Catholic Priest” wasn’t how it went.
Bullshit. In at least one case a priest was moved 14 times. Even if they did think he was cured after the first move, do you really think they were still thinking, “Well, maybe it worked this time,” after the tenth or eleventh failure?
Was this because the priests were continuing to not be cured, or because of the bad PR?
If it has any moral authority, it does. If your God was real, and he and his human underlings were aiding these priest’s offenses again and again, He would be an evil god.
Let’s see, you’ve got the “Let’s not argue about who raped who, we’re all sinners” argument, the “Systemic abuses of power? What systemic abuses of power?” argument, and the “You just hate me because I’m beautiful” argument. Quite a collection.
IMHO, if the Church wasn’t a Christian religious organization and instead was, say, a business or NGO I expect that the very least it would have been broken up in the US, its assets seized and quite possibly the Vatican would’ve been visited by some cruise missiles.
Perhaps it would help to think of priests as members of a union with a fairly strong contract.
I think part of the problem is that people imagine the Vatican as a monolithic entity that can simply do as it pleases. But the Vatican is governed by its own code of law, and it can’t break that law.
I assume that you’d be outraged if you heard that a decades-old bank robbery was being tried, even though the statute of limitations had passed, simply because we felt it was an especially heinous bank robbery - yes? I hope you would, anyway; I shudder to think of someone who would say that we should ignore our own law when we really don’t like the criminal.
In this case, the crime took place in the 1970s; the Vatican didn’t get the case until 1996. And the code of canon law doesn’t permit an automatic penalty to be applied – in order to defrock a priest, there needs to be a trial, with witnesses and a judge.
Is there a statute of limitations on offenses that would warrant defrocking? I’m asking seriously, because I don’t know, and your post seems to imply that there is.
Thank you for these. There’s a limit to how much searching I can do on the subject right now. I would only add that Fr Maciel was never punished until he was in his 90s, and that ounishment was a comfortable retirement. Also has Cardinal Law stepped outside the Vatican yet?
The crimes took place in the 1970s. The Vatican was given the case in 1996. At that time, Fr. Murphy was not “responsible for the care of young adults” in any way. He was retired.
The Church’s own law, very similar to our country’s criminal law, has a statute of limitations.
Under those circumstances, what should the Church do?
No. As a bishop who actively participated in the cover up of abuse he’s still being sheltered in the Vatican with a nice little sinecure even though he’s four years past when others are expected to tender their resignation.
And he still hasn’t disclosed the names of undiscovered abusers he moved around.
The cover up continues at the very highest level of this criminal organisation.
And this is not markedly different from our own, secular laws as they existed at the time. In the past ten or fifteen years, many states have begun to remove statutes of limitation on crimes committed against minors, but at the time this crime took place, the laws the Vatican was using were in line with almost every state’s criminal laws.
So how can you say the Vatican acted unreasonably?