No, because it was never the sort of thing that even all the kids knew. Girls probably had no knowledge of the ones boys thought were creepy and vice versa ( yes, priests have molested girls too, but you don’t really hear about that.) Not every parish had a creepy priest. Most probably didn’t at any given time and therefore most Catholic kids probably never heard the whispers - and those who did wouldn’t have known it wasn’t a one-off.
So walk me through this scenario.
Johnny is a Catholic kid in the 1930s. He knows that Father Chester is bad news, through the grapevine. He graduates high school, gets a job, gets married, and by the early 50s he’s having kids.
Even assuming that Father Chester was shuffled to another diocese at some point before Johnny has kids…
He never tells his wife that some priests are bad news?
He never wants his kids not to trust every priest just because they’re a “Father”?
He never finds it odd that Chester is still a priest, just somewhere else where no one knows to be careful around him?
He never wonders why Father Handsy was just moved in, or warns his wife and kids to be careful around him?
I could understand all that if Johnny himself had always been too blinded by faith to realize a Father isn’t beyond reproach. But you’re telling me that Johnny did know, as a kid; it didn’t occur to him to warn his family?
And quadruply so if Father Chester is still there when Johnny has kids. He’s not going to tell his wife to never being the kids around Father Chester? He’s not going to offer any explanation as to why she should be careful?
Maybe you weren’t raised Catholic. Or the right kind of Catholic.
It’s very complicated, both the psychology of child abuse and the psychology of faith in institutions.
It’s hard to explain but my parents generation in my family (born in the 1930s) would literally accept a little child “molestation” EVEN OF THEIR OWN CHILDREN than be “used as a tool to attack the Chiurch” by accusing priests.
Children can be convinced that nothing untoward happened. They can be cowed into silence.
This was in Pakistan. When I moved to the United States I assumed things would be quite different here. A few years later I found out I was quite wrong. As in many other aspects in the US vs Pakistan, the corruption is just wrapped up in nicer looking paper.
I don’t think this is unique to the Catholic Church. It’s just the institution I am familiar with. The level or organization and documentation of the cover-ups might be unique. Hard to know for sure.
Fair enough. No, I wasn’t raised Catholic; very, very, very far from it; and I was raised with very little faith in institutions. Especially religious institutions.
Fully understanding the mindset may well be beyond me.
I’m not saying Johnny doesn’t warn his wife or his kids. I’m saying that a victim telling his friends doesn’t mean even half the kids in the parish know. And maybe none of the kids in the four adjacent parishes know because those parishes didn’t have a molester during those years.
Why do you assume he would wonder? If he never reported any misbehavior * to the authorities , why would he think that it was odd that Chester was still a priest? Transfers don’t mean anything, because in the US, priests generally get transferred every 5-10 years and although the length of the assignment might differ, it was never the case that a priest was assigned to a parish and stayed there for life. And if he did report it, he wouldn’t necessarily know that Chester was still in a position to molest kids because families were often told that the accused priests would be given a non-parish assignment that didn’t involve kids. It wasn’t always true, but they wouldn’t know that.
ETA and the issues mentioned by @Mighty_Mouse would be a factor too. I would be very surprised if an actual victim told his friends anything more than that the priest was creepy - and even if the victim’s parents believed him, they most likely wouldn’t have told the other parents. ( and I’m using “him” for a reason, it may have been very different for female victims)
* Assuming there was any- there was a creepy teacher in high school that girls warned each other about but no one ever accused him of any actual behavior worse that putting his hand on a shoulder in public.
You might not, I certainly have.
“Gay” does not equal “Pedophile”. There were a lot of priests that had multiple adult affairs that got moved around. There were a lot of priests that had adult homosexual affairs that got moved around. There were a lot of priests that preferred little girls.
A life of celibacy attracts homosexuals in the way of “What’s wrong with me? I’ll choose this career that alegedly has no sex.” along with “I’ll choose this career that has me around a whole bunch of guys because I’m attracted to them.” And, yes, there’s a lot of predators that say “I’ll choose this career because it puts me in contact with a lot of young people”, both boys and girls. The scandal came not (necessarily) from the abuse, but because the higher-ups shielded the abusers from the law. They treated the child abusers the same way they treated the adulterers - move them out of this area to another area to quash the scandal. There were a lot of stories about “Father” not being just an honorific title. You hear more stories of young boys being abused because of the puritanical mindset in America.
That mindset shows up in subtle ways. In Alice’s Restaurant, who is on the “Group W Bench”? “Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench beside me!”
We’re still in the mindset that homosexual acts are much worse than cys acts. Thus, bigger headlines, thus more memorable.
Very true. And the important point is, like any other situation where this happened - it is actually rare. The number of predators is small, just the church is very large and international. I spent 15 years in assorted Catholic educational institutions from grade school to university, and the only hint I heard was things like the one cleric rumoured to be schtupping one of the cleaning ladies at the summer camp. And in Grade 7, the male cleric teacher warned us about an episode where one older boy a few years before had given a younger boy cigarettes and then used that to blackmail him to play “dirty games” and steal is lunch money. Telling us if anything like that ever happened, tell, don’t be ashamed.
As for why reputations don’t follow - it’s not like a lot of people would call (in the days of expensive long distance) and ask members of another parish, and some priests moved quite a distance. Priests moved regularly. If it was never reported and never in the news (the whole goal of bishops moving problem priests about) the average person who did encounter one problem priest when young would not assume it was widespread. Plus in those days, most victims said nothing, being too embarassed, ashamed, or thinking they were partly to blame. (The same mentality that keeps the reports of rapes by women so low) Even telling peers - the real victims certainly won’t tell their peers.
I’ve never understood the gay equals pedo thing. Of all the body shapes, the adult male is the least like young children. (Compare Michealangelo’s and Donatello’s statues of David, then guess their inclinations)
I agree, the person who does not find themselves sharing the same urges as other adolescent males may conclude that it is a sign they are destined for the priesthood, especially in a religious community. Sometimes it takes a while to fully realize - or admit - their orientation later. I would think that the predatory types are more likely to end up in lay positions - like teaching - specifically guaranteed to encounter a lot more children. (But a predatory attitude can emerge anywhere)
In response to the scandle, many diocese had any lay people who dealt with children take Virtus training. The idea of the training is to teach you how to recognize children in distress, along with seeing grooming behavior in adults. The first round of this training was … interesting. Many of the videos we watched were interviews of (former?) preditors and their tecniques for grooming. More than just I said “Holy shit! This is a how-to video!”
They changed the videos.
My first thought before I got to your punch line is “What a way to teach the bad guys which behaviors they need to disguise.” But yeah, as your punchline said, it’s even more nearly a recruiting course for bad guy adjacent folks.
I get what they were trying for - “Here’s what they do; watch out for these behaviors.” But, predators prey on kids with problems, and parents who are likely to see the predatory behaviors are more likely to be good parents and their kids are less likely to have problems.
The next round of videos seemed aimed at "As a supervisor, look for these behaviors in your employees. " Um, a huge majority of people taking these courses are volunteers for an event here and there. We aren’t involved with every other volunteer enough to see long-term problems.
For the last dozen years, I think they got it right. The ongoing education is on kids (and vulnerable adults) and how to spot possible abuse and what to do about it.
A scout leader holding a campout with the troop is not suspect in itself. A scout leader who takes individual kids from the troop camping, or to some other activity, separately from the troop, and not, for instance, with the leader’s other kids and family, would be suspect.
“The Keepers” miniseries on Netflix a few years ago was ALL about some priests who were molesting girls, and it’s believed that some of them murdered a nun who was going to blow the whistle, back in 1969.
I’ve just been reminded that the movie Airplane has a priest reading a magazine called Altar Boy, complete with centrefold.
How one interprets the cultural meaning of a joke like that is another matter, of course.
And, is totally outside of current Scouting regulations. Don’t know when they put it in place, but EVERYTHING within BSA requires “Two Deep”. Either you have to have two (or more) adults with one child, or you have to have two (or more) children with one adult. This includes emails, texts, etc., not just individual interactions. Not that this doesn’t still happen, but it is against Scouting rules. I’m sure there are still predators involved with Scouting, but ALL leaders and ALL scouts are told about “two deep”, and it’s now harder to get away with it. 20 years ago, Mom might think nothing of Timmy getting a text from Scoutmaster Perv; today, she knows that’s wrong and keeps a closer eye on things.
Longer than 20 years ago - Two deep was a requirement when my son was a scout 25 years ago. Problem is I’m pretty sure I only know that because my husband and I were leaders - I’m not sure if there was anything communicating that requirement to all the parents .
There was a throwaway little snippet in a Family Guy episode which had Stewie (the baby) in the background running across the lobby of a building naked yelling “Help! Help! I just escaped from Kevin Spacey’s basement!” and apparently years before the scandal around him became public.
I suppose a lot of things are “known” but actual details are scarce or unprovable. The key point in a lot of the church scandals was that victims, even later - as young men - were very reluctant to come forward and admit what had happened.
There was a young man who would stand in front of the cathedral in Kansas City with a sandwich board accusing a priest of molesting him. The police beat him up very severely. This was maybe 1993/94. He’d come back a few weeks later and get beaten up again.
The priest would mock him from the altar, saying there was a mentally disturbed person in front of the church.
So yeah, people were reluctant to come forward.
Do you have a screenshot? I do remember the nun reading “Boy’s Life” (a Boy Scout magazine, no less) and the boy sitting next to her reading “Nun’s Life.”
That makes total sense. Now that I’m thinking about it, we always had the leader and another person, usually a troop member’s mom, or the assistant leader, who accompanied us on campouts or other public activities. After I got to junior high (Cadettes) the leader was a husband and wife; Girl Scout protocol said that unless an event was explicitly female-only, men could attend as long as an adult woman was present, and I do remember going on a father/daughter weekend campout. I don’t remember women being there, but I’m sure they were.
There were two girls in my troop who were being raised by single fathers; one was a widower, and the other had primary custody, which was uncommon in the late 1970s but in this case, totally justified.
That campout was memorable because we were hiking on a back road and saw a pile of what us kids all thought was junk, but the dads knew it wasn’t and called the police, and got some kind of theft ring busted. (That stuff, I learned much later.)
When I went through Virtus training, there were two parts to it. First, we had a presentation explaining how you couldn’t tell who was a predator, and that they were often people that folks trust implicitly, and thought it was obvious that they were good people. And often, abusers were a child’s own parents or other close family members.
The second part consisted of advising us to trust our guts, and to not allow anyone but parents or other close family members to have access to the children under our care.
It was a requirement when I was in, in the late 80s and early 90s, and we Scouts were informed. Though, we were informed by the adult leaders of our troop. I can certainly imagine troops where the adults didn’t tell the kids.
There was a video clip posted earlier in this thread.