Recently it’s come out that the RCC was running slave labor camps full of children until as recently as 1996 (!). I’ve found two reports on this. (Actually, I’ve seen more, but I only found two while writing this OP.)
First, there’s the “Magdalene Laundries” of Ireland:
2.) To what extent is this a problem with the RCC as a whole, rather than particular dioceses? If it only happened in one place, one could blame it on the local organization, as the RCC has tried to do to some extent with the pedophilia scandal. (i.e. the Pope’s declaration that it’s an “American problem.”) But when you have this kind of thing taking place in both Ireland and Australia, with similarities in both cases (such as names being taken away,) one wonders to what extent it’s a problem with the RCC, rather than being an “Irish problem” or “Australian problem.”
Suppose a multinational corporation like Nestle were involved in a scandal in which Nestle employees in several major American cities (Boston, NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, etc.) had molested children. In each case, the regional manager in charge of all operations in that area shuffled the employees around to keep them from getting caught. When the scandal breaks, the CEO of Nestle declares that while the molestations were certainly unfortunate, this really has nothing at all to do with Nestle, and is just a problem with American culture. (And this is despite the fact that there are sporadic reports of the same molest-and-shuffle crimes taking place at Nestle divisions in other countries, although they get less news coverage.)
Then, we find that Nestle chocolate was being made by children in slave labor camps in Australia as recently as 1967. A separate investigation finds that until 1996, similar slave labor camps were producing revenue for Nestle in Ireland.
Should the CEO of Nestle be arrested at this point? Should Interpol be investigating?
And at what point can you conclude that Nestle is just plain evil?
Actually, your Nestle anlalogy may be more accurate than you realized.
I’m surprised you haven’t gotten any responses to this OP yet. Personally I was kind of waiting to see what some other people said because i wasn’t really sure what to think myself. Do you have any idea what level of knowledge or involvement that the Vatican has with these situations? If they have only been recently informed of it what have they done about it?
As far as the RCC being corrupt, I would say that corruption in the Vatican is neither impossible nor new but I’m not ready to hold the Church as a whole (which encompasses hundreds of millions of good people and hundreds of thousands of ethical and sincere priests, bishops and nuns). I think the Church can survive the corruption of its leadership but the leadership probably is long overdue for an overhaul.
I think this may be a “Catholic problem” or a “Christian problem” or a “moralistic religion problem” transending national boundries. With the “Magdalene Laundries,” you have narrow-minded, gung ho busybodies imprisoning and mistreating people, often ruining their lives – to “save them” from the possiblility of committing “sins,” or to punish them for daring to have been born to an unmarried woman, or whatever. These cruel actions are done by people who are acting in accordence with the official rules, as they see them, of their religion.
Would any of these things have happened if we were all animists, Buddhists, or atheists?
This sounds an awful lot like the “Escuela al Campo” education system in Cuba. In this program children as young as 11 are sent to perform unpaid farm labor, for anywhere between 45 days of full time work, or the entire school year for half a day, everyday. This program also consists of internment, which means that for the whole time these children are performing their slave labor, they are also living away from their families.
A couple of differences, of course, are that the Cuban program applies to all children, not just orphans, and that it is not religion based, unless you consider Marxism a religion. And a major difference is that I could not find one single article in english about this problem, it goes without saying that no documentaries or exposes are out there either. Maybe Oliver Stone could do one, then again…
I’ve known of animist/Buddhists who slaughtered millions, tested their bio-weapon on captives, starved their own people for a mindless goal of conquest and power, and generaly made the world a crappier place.
It’s clearly true that religion isn’t a prerequisite for evils of this kind. However, there are certain conditions that make this kind of event more likely. It depends both on the reluctance of the catholic church to police itself, and on the wider society that doesn’t question the attitudes of its religious institutions.
The Catholic church is institutionally quite different from most other Christian churches or other religions. Many branches of Protestantism are highly democratic, with congregations choosing their own ministers or pastors, and these pastors meeting or electing representatives to decide on church policy. In contrast, the Catholic church is hierarchical, with no method for the ordinary rank and file to influence church doctrine or to gain information on the way the church is run.
The Catholic church is also unique because of its size. It is far larger than the largest Protestant church (the Anglicans/Episcopalians). Eastern Orthodox Christian churches tend to be administered at a national level without a super-national authority. None of the branches of Islam are terribly centralised beyond a national level. Other religions - Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism - are also divided and none of their groups have anything like the membership or wealth of Catholicism.
What this means is that the Catholic church is not accountable either to individual nations or to its congregation. It has a huge body of paid officials (which is different to some religions, although most Christian churches seem to have paid priests or ministers) who have the conflicting interests of serving their congregations and preserving their livelihoods. Inevitably any institution in such a position is going to act in the way that benefits the members of its hierarchy, particularly those members who are in a position to advance up the hierarchy.
The main counterpoints to the Catholic church are (a) the media and (b) organisations of individual catholics who try to hold the church to account. Particular problems arise when neither of these are able or willing to question the Church. It seems that there is an increasing willingness in both Ireland and Australia to investigate and criticise the church. However, reform of any institution is largely meaningless if the desire for reform is not present inside. Most people in the Catholic church are not in it for selfish reasons, but it still requires a commitment by them to consider whether they are acting in the interests of the people they are supposed to be tending to.
So you claim. However, is there ANY tenet of their religion which commands them to commit this atrocity? Is there any tenet which can be reasonably construed as commanding such actions? Any tenet whatsoever?
Would you mind explaining, to a non-Catholic, how an “overhaul” of the Church’s leadership is possible? My understanding is that the laity never get to elect their priests or bishops, never even get a voice in the decision; the clergy is a self-perpetuating hierarchy, like the leadership of the old Soviet Union. The present pope has packed the College of Cardinals with men who share his conservative vision for Catholicism, by way of ensuring that the next pope sees things the same way. This is all perfectly legitimate by canon law, isn’t it? The only way around this, the only body superior to the Cardinals, is a General Council – which, as I understand it, only a pope can convene, and the participants are still pretty much limited to priests and bishops.
Unfortunately, all this is correct. I guess what I meant by an “overhaul” was just a hope that the next Pope would make some changes. The Vatican is going to have to adapt in some areas to salvage its own credibility. the pedophile scandal has really hurt the Church. In a worst case scenario the “overhau” may have to happen more organically, IOW, we might have to wait for some of those old Cardinals to die and clear the way for some new blood.
The Orthodox also have another advantage (should one wish to call it such). We have in our history an event that amounts to the laity rising up and overturning a decision consented to by a vast majority of the Church Hierarchy. I am, of course, referring to the betrayal of Orthodoxy at the false “council” of Florence. Only St. Mark of Ephesus stood up against the tide. When the bishops, archbishops, metropolitans, and patriarchs came home, they found themselves point blank informed of their error by the faithful laity. It was the hierarchs that backed down, not the ordinary people. Other events over the years have shown that this seems to be a sort of philosophical precedent. The provocation has to be fairly significant, but the Church is not considered to be a laity absolutely “led” by a hierarchy.
Who’s to say? Only seven years ago, a person in a modern city in a first-world country could have jimmied the lock on a Catholic orphanage and found something out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom going on inside. And that’s not the only country in which the RCC was running slave labor camps. How do we know they aren’t still doing it? (In your own town, for that matter?)
The story of the Magdalene Laundries is a fairly well known story. 60 Minutes covered it a few years back…Joni Mitchell and the Chieftains even composed a song of the same name. A film (Magdalene Sisters) also covers the story.
Yes, sure, you will find jerks everywhere and everywhen. But. Would Buddhists being cruel to children justify their actions by saying “the Buddha told me to do it!” or by claiming this was what Buddhist tradition called on them to do?
As for animists, I don’t think they would even call their beliefs a religion. They cirtainly wouldn’t have any scriptures to cite as a basis for their actions. They might say, “this is the proper thing to do” – but I don’t think they would claim any kind of religous basis for their claims as to what was proper.
I think I see a difference. The similarity is that kids are basically being enslaved, but, a question: Is this thing in Cuba something all kids have to do? The Magdeline Laundries deal was not an across-the-board, everyone-has-to-do-it kind of thing. Only girls and women were sent to these, I guess you could call them, prisons. Or labor camps. And, mind you: not all or even most girls and women – only girls and women who were seen as “sinful” or “at risk of becoming sinful”.
