The attraction of prohibition plays a part, I suspect.
Isn’t a lot of incest porn involving step relationships?
What rather remarkable thing to say. Do you have a cite?
I don’t think that’s remarkable, as quoted there the words happen to be right, Catholics do not hold that as a matter of course “priests can do no wrong”. The Catholic Church did take a position that priests were/should not be subject to secular authorities if they did wrong, but that the Church itself should be the one take care of it. And very many congregants obediently abided by that until the last few decades.
(In some places in the US and other non-Catholic-majority countries there was also a bit of circle-the-wagons effect, that would want to keep things quiet lest it feed preexisting anti-Catholic sentiment.)
Institutions, businesses and governments would not survive unless they had a set of defensive processes to protect themselves from existential threats.
They also need good internal governance to ensure that they meet their stated purpose and aims, from which they derive a lot of their legitimacy.
Those who live on the inside, certainly know the failings if they have any seniority. If the organisation. is well led, leaders will try to get the organisation back on track when it becomes clear it has been compromised.
On the other hand, there are individuals and groups that target vulnerable organisations and try to use them for their own purposes.
What seems to have happened is that the internal crisis management processes no longer work effectively as they once did. We have gone from a time when media was highly centralised to a highly connected world which has made publishers of all of us. It is hard to keep a secret anymore. The stories of the victims come out more easily and uncover many years of wrong doings.
Sure people knew of the predators, but they also knew of the many good people working hard to fulfil the purpose of the organisation. They had to weigh up what is the greater good. Blow the whistle about some abuse and seriously damage the organisation, or keep quiet in the interests preserving both their own position and allow the organisation to continue doings it’s good work, encouraging any internal processes to weed out predators to work.
This is a moral and ethical dilemma.
Catholics have been appalled by the revelations of abuse and yes, even at the grass roots, they knew about troublesome priests. It was often reflected in popular culture. One example is the very funny ‘Father Ted’ set on a remote part of Ireland, Craggy Island, where priests who been found guilty of some personal failing are sent until they are judged by the Catholic authorities to have been reformed. Such places did exist and it was part of governance of the. church. But clearly it was inadequate, predators managed to rise to high positions in the Church and protect themselves and their fellow travellers.
In Ireland, were the Catholic church was very established politically and culturally, it led to a lot of desperate agonising. At the level of the congregation they felt very let down because the central religious purpose of the Church served them very well, ministering over the important events in life with ceremonies and rituals. The betray was made more galling because the activities of these predators contradicted the important ‘pastoral’ mission of the Church.
I guess though some priests were known to be bevuo to no good behind closed doors, these were thought to be individuals who needed guidance. What was not common knowledge was how high up in the organisation the predators got.
That took until the exposure of the complicity of senior clerics in covering up scandals. Just as in famous political scandals, the efforts to cover up crimes were often more damaging.
The crisis of confidence in the Catholic church is just one a number of institutions that have become vulnerable because of its failures of governance.
I am curious to know the reasons for this cascade of revelations that seem to cover a very wide range of institutions.
It has no doubt bern accelerated by the fact that everyone has the capacity to publish anything through social media these days. But it that is a fairly recent development, the tide against institutional corruption goes back much further. A baby boomer thing, perhaps? Some of the other abuse scandals, such as excessive corporal punishment in UK schools, seems to date from the demographic changes that led to the young becoming politically active in the 70’s and 80’s.
It depends on how far you want to go back. I can certainly see the trend for the elimination of the implicit trust in the current hierarchies going back as far as the end of World War II. This would not then be the Baby Boomer generation that did this (since they didn’t do it as children) but the one or two or even three previous generations (the Lost Generation or the Greatest Generation or the Silent Generation). See this list of the generations:
For that matter, you could even trace back this increasing distrust in the implicit morality of hierarchies for a century or so before then. It’s somewhat tricky to list all the people, institutions, publications, organizations, etc. that are responsible for this breaking down of trust. For example, reading Mad magazine was an important part.
The opening up of discussion of institutional abuse (in multiple institutions not just churches), and the pushback against “in house” dealing with it, antecedes the social media boom as we know it. It does have a factor of the Boomer-era rise of general questioning of authority but there are other factors involved — the evolution of a more mobile diverse way of living where you were in touch with others not tied to your same institutions, and where those institutions were no longer as much of an existential need for yourself; the rise of movements affirming the equality or rights and dignity of groups whose voices used to be dismissed; the press assuming more of a line to NOT be guardians of the established order, at the same time as some subjects stopped being literally unspeakable/unprintable; a more mobile and connected society even by earlier standards so those paying attention to news from elsewhere started noticing that this was not just a freak occurrence in your town but was more widespread. TL/DR a growth in people noticing, hey, it does not have to be this way.
All those plus sheer building up of numbers affected over time suggest it would “boil over” inevitably.
This is getting into IMHO/Pit territory, but if a person finds a “moral and ethical dilemma” in whether or not to turn in a child rapist, then their morals and ethics are non-existent.
If only things were that simple.
Whistleblowers have to be very careful. They face being isolated, ostracised and themselves condemned. Their career and livelihood ended and render themselves unable to meet the responsibilities of all those who depend on them. Removing the good people from an organisation can leave more scope for the bad to continue their misdeeds.
The crime a whistleblower is trying to expose has to have solid reliable evidence if it is not to be dismissed as malicious lie by a perpetrator who may be able to leverage their own powerful support network that reaches high into whatever authority is responsible for governance.
A lot of people may be aware of crimes and decide to do nothing, not simply because they lack the courage, but because they do not think they have to power to change anything. They have no confidence that whatever authority governs will not simply decide to silence the messenger.
It takes a critical mass of evidence to force change in an organisation that has been compromised and it requires support from outside.
A lot of scandals are bubbling up in the UK right now in several public institutions. Notably the London Metropolitan Police service. There are a lot of honest and dedicated police officers, committed to public service, who have had to suffer the behaviour of some very bad colleagues. The good ones felt powerless to change anything because they could not rely on any support from higher up. It took a shocking incident of a policeman raping a murdering a woman walking home at night, to expose patterns of bad behaviour and poor management and governance that led up to this man using his police powers to commit this awful crime. Institutions like the police in the UK carry a huge weight of public expectation that they will perform their duties with integrity. Public service generally, is highly regarded. And the public get very angry when their faith in respected institutions are let down like this.
Reports are being written and the long process of institutional reform has started.
A lot of the evidence has arisen as a result of the use of social media. As much by its use by the perpetrator conferring with fellow offices, as its use by victims to connect with other victims to gather support.
Institutions sometimes fail, their performance degrades because of poor leadership or they or become captured by ‘bad actors’ - the corrupt, the predators, but most often, the simply incompetent. Putting them right, repairing them so that they function once again, as they were intended, is an important process. Not so newsworthy as a juicy scandal of things going horribly wrong, but the nonetheless essential. Part of that will involve being more open about failings.
The Catholic church is going through that stage and the remorse and contrition for the damage done seems heartfelt, at least at the very top. But steering a large organisation in another direction is a slow process. It takes years to pension off those with old attitudes who refuse to accept that the a culture has to change. Moreover, there is always to tendency to over-react. It is always to easier to destroy things than repair and build them up better.
Wikipedia seems very comprehensive in its coverage.
That’s not how it works. Ask the poster who made the claim that “priests are viewed as someone who can do no wrong” for a cite.
You and filmstar-en have different ideas about morality and ethics. Suppose you’re in a hierarchy where there are many violations of generally accepted morality and ethics. Suppose you discover an obvious such violation. Suppose that you know very well that if you reported such a thing, you would not only be ignored and not even just thrown out of your job. Suppose you know that these violators are so powerful that they would have you thrown in prison, tortured there, killed, and phony evidence created that would make it look like you were the one violating the rules. Wouldn’t you hesitate to report this violation?
That makes it incredibly difficult, but it doesn’t change the morality of the situation. Sometimes the moral thing to do is hard.
Ethics is different from morality, but it’s usually also the ethical thing to do.
…aand we’re off the factual question rails, are we not?
Looking back on that, guess the closest to a factual answer we can have IS “there were always (a) abusive institutional situations (see: native residential schools, Magdalene laundries); and (b) community-involving cases where people would know ‘Father So-and-So is troublesome’ but in both cases people would assume it was an isolated thing because it was kept quiet or moved away from them or it affected ‘others’ who were not given a voice”.
Now, the OP does point to something else: namely, media that uses the “trope” of the child-abusing priest as part of a mainstream narrative. I believe that may have seen a spike since the 1990s as the scandals and suits gained more prominence IRL.
As a classic example, google Jeffrey Masson - worked in the Freud archives, came to the conclusion: Freud recognized very early on that the patients he was treating were mostly suffering the trauma of childhood sexual abuse. Yet he realized that accusing the cream of Viennese society of child molestation was a “career limiting move”. Instead, he concocted a mess of garbage theories to explain that when people talk about childhood and sex, they are simply having subconscious dreams about having incestual sex.
So yes, absent stunning photographic evidence and a dozen accusers, it was dangerous to the whistleblower to make accusations to a hierarchy that did not want to hear or deal with dirty laundry. Heck, even in the last few decades we have examples like Penn State where the powers that be did not want to believe and deal with a real problem.
Plus, for priests, often there was maybe one or two accusations or rumor, so they pleaded that it was a momentary weakness and they were repentant. they were then transferred far away where the local authority again had no idea of the problem, and each time it was severe repentance and a promise to behave.
There’s also the Church’s position that the moral failings of a priest don’t invalidate the ceremonies he administered in his capacity as such; a baptism or wedding or Mass performed by a pedophile priest is still a valid sacrament, as the Perfect Master himself explained. The magic works, even if the magician is a criminal. That’s a purely theological issue, but could be misunderstood as “priests can do no wrong” by an outlander.
Also note that in medieval times, the Catholic church did have jurisdiction over the crimes of church officials, and was in fact a law unto itself in many countries with their own court system. There was even the concept of sanctuary, the area around the church that was under ecclesaistical authority and the king’s men had no right to be.
Reading this article, those courts in some times and places had far reaching powers. It was certainly one of the issues that led to the protestant reformation. I doubt anyone in the church hierarchy in the last centuries takes that stand any more, but it does suggest an attitude that the church feels it could take care of its own business.
Plenty of laymen could, and did claim the right to trial in the ecclesiastical courts, because the penalties were generally lower and there was no capital punishment.
So if a Catholic was part of the judicial apparatus – police officer, prosecutor, judge, etc. – and they were involved in putting a priest behind bars, would they face excommunication?
Why should they?
Because as mentioned above, it seems like the Catholic Church did (still does?) expect matters of criminal behavior within its ranks to be handled within.