Catholic Church Gives Pedo Preists A Second Helping ... er, Chance ... in South America

The BBQ Pit
21

Yep. Just like cops killing black men is America’s problem. (Unlike the U.S., however, Pope Francis appears to be actively seeking to remedy the problem.)

A central record tracking system may, indeed, be one of the changes that the pope’s commission recommends and he institutes. The presumption in any organization is that people will follow the rules. Bishops have been charged with making sure that no one reporting to them will continue to abuse kids and the bishops who allowed that to happen in the 90s have been censured and removed from positions of authority. So far, we have claims that there have been five examples of bishops who have apparently violated the rules. (We still have no evidence in four of the cases that the pedophilia came to light before the transfers and we have no timeline for when the transfers occurred.) Setting up a personnel system to monitor that sort of thing takes time and resources.

In the 1980s, the U.S. conference ordered that priests no longer be transferred to parishes if accused of molestation. Out of 280+ diocese, the bishops in fewer than a dozen failed to follow those instructions. Since then, the bishops who ignored those instructions have lost their authority. So, from the perspective of the Vatican, the rules were followed by the vast majority and those who ignored the instructions were punished. It is possible that, with those examples, the Vatican did not see the need to add one more bureaucracy to the church to accomplish what was occurring through normal procedures. If bishops are still dodging their responsibility, then the church very much should set up one more bureau to manage the problem.

22

NM, thought better of it.

23

No.

24

Doesn’t he have to sign off on every bishop? And a bishop is responsible for all the priests in his diocese.

25

And?

Clohessy has found five examples of a system failure that reflects on ten bishops. (There could be more and Clohessy could be right that it is a “massive” problem, but so far no evidence has been produced that that is the case.)
Has Clohessy taken his evidence to the church? Or did he call a press conference so that the pope, himself, has just been informed of it? The pope has already set up a commission to find ways to prevent this sort of thing. Did Clohessy take his information to them?
There are just under 2900 diocese in the world with several hundred more “bishop level” divisions of religious orders. We may be talking about a total of five bishops behaving improperly, (since the sending bishops might have concealed the problem from the receiving bishops).
If that is the total number of bishops violating their trust, that is human malfeasance, not systemic error. I agree that any bishop who dropped the ball should be sanctioned and any bishop who deliberately flouted the rule should be punished. I also agree that the pope’s current commission should be examining ways to prevent such failures in the future, but the evidence, so far, has not demonstrated that “the church” is simply sending pedophiles out to wreak havoc.

26

Apparently not. But it occurs to me that in this day and Information Age, it would not be problematic for the Vatican to have and maintain a daily-updated computer database, not only of all Catholic priests and bishops, but of all 1.25 billion Catholic communicants, flagging any who for whatever reason are to be denied communion. Holy Father Is Watching You.

27

Holy Father, do not look away!
For the priests with the altar boys play!
If you plunge your aspergill
To feed base, primal urge, you’ll
Risk the wrath of the Ancient of Days!

“Touch these little ones not,” sayeth He!
"It were much thing the better for thee
"To be tied to a millstone
"By thy naughty boyfillstones
“And be drowned in the depths of the sea!”

28

Yes.

29

This is like claiming that there were no major terrorist attacks while George Bush was president. It’s only true if you ignore the giant, flaming, wreckage of the last time that the Catholic church was caught shuttling pedophiles from parish to parish. That was just a few years ago, remember?

30

That was over two decades ago and, in the U.S., steps were taken to prevent it. Then, fourteen years ago, it was discovered that the steps were being ignored in a dozen diocese, or so. Further steps were taken to bring those bishops in line. Now, there is a claim that some bishops are still continuing the old practices, but the evidence presented, so far, does not provide a picture of church wide, systemic flouting of the updated rules.

31

Yeah, by 2002, the RCC pedophile priest scandal hit the news at a level that made it impossible for even us non-Catholics to ignore.

a) Enough time has lapsed since then that it seems rather absurd that we’re still waiting around to see what “changes that the pope’s commission recommends and he institutes.”

Especially since tomndebb points out that it has been aware of the problem since the 1980s.

And since 2002, it’s become clear that it wasn’t particularly a U.S. problem. Every year or two since, it seems another country pops up with its own homegrown version of the scandal. From Ireland to Australia, this has been happening all over.

b) Once widespread violation of the rules has been found to occur, you don’t just carry on with a “presumption…that people will follow the rules.” Once that happens, the onus is on those in charge of the organization to be proactive about preventing recurrences.

c) If it’s a rule whose violation entails serious consequences for people, you must be proactive anyway.

I work for a Federal agency that is responsible for some household-level demographic surveys. Information is collected from those households on the assumption that their confidential responses will be protected. And because this matters, we don’t just assume that people will follow the rules.

We have annual training about protection of the data that is in our custody. It’s boring as shit to have to hear the training yet one more time when you could practically recite it by heart, but as a result, we all can practically recite it by heart, which is kinda the point. We’ve got an institutional culture that reminds us over and over about the importance of adhering to these rules. And we have review boards to make sure that information isn’t released to the public, or even to another government agency, in a way that would allow someone to work back from what was made public to identify an individual respondent.

I expect organizations where adults work with children to be similarly proactive, whether it’s the RCC or my county schools. But that goes double for an organization like the RCC that has a history of flagrantly failing to protect the children in its care from abuse.

d) Correct me if I’m wrong, tom~, but of the bishops, archbishops, and cardinals who didn’t sexually abuse children themselves, but covered the trails of the priests who were sexually abusing children, and enabled them to keep doing so, has the Roman Catholic Church turned what it knows about those formerly revered gentlemen’s actions over to the civil authorities in the appropriate jurisdictions so that they might be prosecuted if appropriate?

I’d been waiting for this particular shoe to drop for many years, and if it happened, I confess I missed it. As best as I know, it hasn’t happened. But I’d be relieved to find I was wrong.

And finally:

e) We’re well past the point where the internal workings of the RCC should be relevant in a discussion with non-Catholics. After this many years have elapsed, the RCC simply should have responded as it ought to have to this matter, fully and completely. The time for “we’re dealing with this as fast as we can, and here’s our internal obstacles to dealing with it any faster, and here’s what we’re doing about those obstacles” was 2005, not 2015.

32

In my opinion, this response arises in your head because you you believe that, at heart, each and every working principle used by the Church is ultimately imaginary – that is, they are not immutable laws of nature but creations of charlatans in funny clothes. The Church cannot be heard to complain about changing anything, because they could, if they wished, change anything.

33

How is that not the case, other than in your *own *head? :dubious:

No, because, as a pedophilia-enabling and corrupt organization, they have no *right *to complain.

Anything about their own conduct? Of course they can. Who is telling them to protect child rapists?

Your absolute submissive institutional loyalty is not as admirable as you think it ought to be.

34

I’ll cop to believing that about the Churches theology, but it’s not the theology that led to the mishandling of the abuse scandals: it’s the bureaucracy. Unless you’re claiming that all of the rules of the Catholic Church were explicitly laid down by God?

35

There have been efforts throughout this period to rectify the situation. Each effort has produced good results and each effort has also failed to the extent that existing rules were abused by individuals or were created within the scope of the institution in which, for 1,950 years, or so, the diocesan bishop has had no supervising authority.

The current commission was formed by Pope Francis in recognition of the failures of previous efforts and is, (I hope), looking to take a more radical approach to ending abuse, worldwide. I agree that this comprehensive approach should have been the outcome of the 2002 Dallas meeting, (or, even better, should have been formed to consider world wide issues in 1985), extended to the whole world. Unfortunately, under the pressure of the publicity surrounding the Boston Globe articles concerning Cardinal Law, the Dallas conference was held in haste and without sufficient preparation, so it resulted, (IMO), in both good and bad rules thrown together by bishops who felt compelled to respond immediately but who often did not understand the actions they needed to take.

Accusations that the church has made a hash of the situation are valid. Accusations that no effort has been made to resolve it are simply not true.

36

False dilemma.

The Church takes the position that it was, as an institution, created by Christ, and that its leaders were given the authority to promulgate its teachings and build its structure. That’s not quite the same as saying that each and every rule was explicitly laid down by God, but it does suggest that that Church’s authority does not derive from a man-made assumption.

Specifically at issue here is the near-absolute authority that a bishop has in his own diocese. You don’t regard that rule as anything except bureaucracy. The Church regards a bishop’s executive, legislative, and judicial authority as tied to the bishop’s role as a successor of the apostles. Indeed, every single Roman Catholic bishop in the world can trace his ordination lineage back to one of the apostles. My bishop, Paul Loverde of Arlington, was consecrated as a bishop by Archbishop John Francis Whealon in 1988. Whealon was consecrated a bishop by Cardinal Egidio Vagnozzi in 1961. Vagnozzi was consecrated in 1949 by Cardinal Adeodato Giovanni Piazza… and so forth, back through the centuries, so that the hands that consecrated Bishop Loverde are linked by touch to St. Peter himself.

Changes to the church bureaucracy that undermine the authority of a bishop are not simple matters of reving SOP 173-A-6, in other words.

Of course, you may certainly take the position that the entire exercise of consecration and episcopal authority are meaningless. But that’s not a view that the Church – or I – share.

37

Of course it does. The fact that they believe it was God-made instead of human-made does not make it any less of a human-made assumption - or pretext.

No, that is not the fucking issue at all. Raping children is the issue.

And just why should that self-delusion be respected by anyone else?

You are using that view as a pretext for defending the abusers of children. Perhaps your view is due for reconsideration.

38

I don’t see anything in the dogma, the stuff that can’t be changed, that would prevent any of the recommendations being made. There doesn’t seem to be much procedural stuff at all.

One of the thing that has always annoyed me about Catholic theology is treating stuff that is not dogma as if it can’t be changed. I assume that Dogma is in addition to Scripture, but even that leaves you with a lot that can be changed.

Far from mere procedural and bureaucratic stuff, things like being anti-abortion or birth control or even being against homosexuality and gay marriage are not dogma. Yes, I know the Pope said abortion cannot be made moral–but that was not said ex cathedra, and thus can still be fallible.

I’m not saying they have to change, but I hate the way what is expressly not infallible is treated as such. The Church very well could change a whole lot without violating that which is supposed to be inviolate.

39

From that link, item 229: “By virtue of Divine Right the bishops possess an ordinary power of government over their dioceses.”

40

Your claim regarding the issue is false.

Everyone other than actual pedophiles agrees that raping children is wrong. There is no disagreement on that point, so that is not an issue.

The issue is what changes of procedure need to be implemented to ensure that if an agent of the church, (priest, brother, sister, lay person acting on the behalf of the church), attacks a child, that person is disciplined and removed from any possibility of being in contact with a child. As noted in the Wikipedia article to which I linked, several attempts have been made to bring that about. The church has had a certain amount of success, but has still suffered failures–and every failure is tragic and no failure should be acceptable. That said, the link in the OP appears to indicate another failure and the church does need to discover what happened and take corrective action. The issue Bricker has addressed is the specific one that has permitted various failures since 2002 (in the U.S.).

Your sentence that I have I quoted fails to address the issue, at all.