That was rhetorical, actually. I knew he hadn’t, because I hadn’t read about his arrest.
Five years is ridiculously short for a crime that is perpetrated against children, particularly considering that it’s hardly unlikely that such a criminal would still be in a position with easy access to children after only five years.
I admit that I am quite shocked to find out that the Church believes that it is OK for a priest to remain a priest after committing some of the most horrifying crimes, as long as five years have passed since the crime occurred. It’s the Roman Catholic Church; not a secular court of law. I thought they at least paid lip service to the idea that they were responsible to a higher power.
I don’t find the analogy to a bank robbery to be valid in this case. The crime of molesting a child is not similar to the crime of holding up a bank. If I found out that, say, a teacher had been responsible for molesting children twenty years ago (or a mere five years ago, for crying out loud), and the crime had just been discovered, I would fully support charges being pressed against that teacher. If there is a statute of limitation preventing such charges, then that statute should be removed.
I think this discussion is getting somewhat bogged down in the discussion of this one case, though. Is it your assertion, Bricker, that the Church never left priests guilty of sexual molestation in positions where they were responsible for children? Because I believe this to be false.
At the very least, the teacher should be removed from the classroom.
But there were such statutes. All across the country. Some were as little as three years; some as long as seven. All were similar to the Church’s.
So my question to you is: how can you call the Church’s law unreasonable, if ti essentially mirrored the secular law that this country had in place?
And you say that you’d fully support pressing charges against that teacher – even though a statute of limitations existed? You’d really be in favor of saying, “Screw the law, let’s get 'im!”
“The Church?” Yes, individual dioceses did.
“The Vatican?” Not that I’m aware of.
I’ve never understood how the laws of the church held any relevance in the US in these cases. The priest or priests broke the law in the US, why aren’t they tried in a US court? Were they? If the church moved to cover up crimes or used their international status to move the priests outside the reach of the US, are we unable to bring them (the priests) to justice?
I don’t pretend that I’ve followed the cases closely but I don’t remember hearing about priests going to jail.
Sure. And in this case, that had already happened. The crimes happened in 1974, and by 1998, the priest was no longer in the classroom. In fact, based on the accusations, he was placed on leave and never given another job.
I’ll go further and say the Catholic Church is a criminal organisation and the Pope will burn in hell for what he’s been party to. Both should be treated as criminals for actively covering up criminal activity.
As you appear to feel comfortable defending a criminal organisation and one of the prime organisers of the cover-up I’m sure you’ll continue. You’re fooling no one though. Certainly not God.
If the only people aware and involved in the coverup remained at the diocese level you’d be correct.
However, once it got to the office of the “Rat” and other high officials and still covered it up, it becomes “The Church”.
Sure, priests went to jail. The name “John Geoghan” may jog your memory. He was killed in jail after being sentenced to prison for indecent assault and battery.
Interestingly enough, two rape charges were dismissed against Geoghan because… drum roll… the statute of limitations had run out. By the Vatican? No, by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
And that was the law. Seriously-- should the trial court have said, "Yeah, OK, that’s the law… but this guy is so especially slimy that I’m just going to write, "…but not for him…“at the bottom of this indictment. Fuck him, let him appeal if he doesn’t like it!”
I believe that both laws were unreasonable. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
As for your final question: No, I would fully support removing the statute of limitations so that the teacher could be prosecuted. I believe that a law preventing such a thing from occurring is a bad, unjust law, particularly in cases where the teacher or priest is still in the position of encountering children on a regular basis.
And should the Massachusetts judge that dismissed rape charges against Geoghan because they were past the statute of limitations also burn in hell?
The “Church” has laws? I thought that it was a private organization. It might have private rules and regulations, but as far as I’m concerned, those should have no bearing in a real court of law(or what you call “secular law”). Those rules and regulations had damn well better mirror real law or be changed immediately.
I think by not extending the statute of limitations the Vatican is acting unreasonably. If a 10 year old gets raped, he has until he’s only 15 to report it. That’s unreasonable. I think that when the Vatican starts issuing orders that victims speaking publicly about these incidents get excommunicated (per tagos’ link), that’s acting unreasonably, and continues this culture of silence and punishing the victims while protecting the rapists.
In this matter, the church stopped protecting its flock in favor of saving its own hide. That is despicable for an organization that has become home, community and family to billions of people. “Oh, five years have passed - there’s simply nothing that can be done!” is disgusting bit of hand washing that Pilate himself would be proud of.
Um… seriously? You don’t see any problems with saying there’s a five year statute of limitations, discovering a fifteen year old crime, repealing the law, and then immediate prosecuting? Nothing about that strikes you as … unfair? Unconstitutional, even?
Also, similar to what Czarcasm is saying, defrocking a priest is not like a criminal punishment in which the priest gets thrown in prison. It’s just throwing him out of the priesthood. I don’t really see why secular criminal law should apply to such a consequence, or why we should consider similarities between Church regulations and criminal law when we’re talking about it.
Although I will go further and say that I do think that priests (and anyone else) who molest children should suffer criminal consequences in addition to being defrocked.
I am not suggesting that the statute of limitations be dispensed with immediately upon discovery of the crime. I am suggesting that the statute of limitations was unjust to start with and should have been dispensed with on those grounds; i.e., it should never have existed in the first place.
Why is that?
A union can have an agreement that no one is fired from his job without a hearing and credible, sustained finding of misconduct by an independent panel, while the “real law” says an employer can fire anyone any time for any reason.
Which should control?
But it did. You can’t wish away history.
So you do what states (and the church) have done more recently – you amend the statute of limitations to remove it from crimes against children. So going forward, this won’t be a problem.
But you still can’t prosecute offenders for what they did whilew the old law was in effect. Right?
What I’m getting at is simple: the same laws you complain the Vatican followed also existed (and were followed) in the states. Why is only the Vatican a target for your outrage?
Well, the Vatican is a country, able to make its own laws just as the states in the United States can.
Why do you believe those laws can simply be ignored? I didn’t quite follow that. What makes one system of laws valid and applicable, and the other something that you believe can (and should) be changed at the whim of the moment?
And states that had similar laws? Did they also “act unreasonably?”
Again, what about states that have such laws? Were they also disgusting?