Of course, it’s a joke. Handing over people to be burned was wrong even when the church did do it. However, the larger point is that you are simply in error regarding how the church uses excommunication. It is not intended as a punishment.
Your statement that molestors will not admit that they intend to molest again, but will (probably) do so is pertinent to the discussion. (Actually, I doubt that many molestors (particularly after being caught) actually intend to molest again. Monsters like Geoghan aside, many molestors actually have some record of attempting to find ways to avoid doing it again (hence the hoopla over whether a molestor can ever be “cured”).) However, since they are not declaring their intention to stand outside the church, excommunication is not the proper response to their actions. Removal from the priesthood is often appropriate, some sort of bar to any contact with children is necessary. Certainly, reporting them to law enforcement agencies should be a requirement.
Excommunication is simply not the most appropriate response from an ecclesastical perspective. It does not do what you think it does, either in theory or in practice.
Staying quite away from everything else going on in this thread, I have to say that this is pretty damn funny, and I intend to steal it at the next opportunity.
I think Tomndebb is right that “excommunication” is being misunderstood here. Basically, my understanding of it is that it is an official confirmation by the Church that the person in question has himself (or herself) made the decision to live outside the Church. In effect, the person has excommunicated himself, and the Church is acknowledging that, not imposing it as a punishment.
To deliberately and publicly choose a way of life that is contrary to the Church’s teaching is one way to excommunicate oneself. To commit a sin, as grave as it may be, is not, because we are all sinners. All Catholics are bidden to repent for sins and to intend not to commit the same sin again. Since we cannot see inside someone’s heart or conscience, one cannot know the sincerity of the intention not to sin again. UNLESS, one has made a PUBLIC VOW AND STATEMENT that their intention is to continue (such as in the case of making a simultaneous vow to a marriage partner and to the priesthood).
It has nothing to do with the Church not having a “rule” against molesting children.
Be that as it may, I still pit the church. They reacted more harshly to an archbishop ordaining married priests as bishops than they did to priests molesting little boys. And that is despicable. Now, you may be able to nitpick little points and find some errors in my post, but my making a mistake does not magically absolve the church of their responsibility. In the end, you’re just throwing up a smokescreen, trying to focus the attention on my little error so that the church’s glaring, horrible behavior will be forgotten. Congratulations. You caught me in a mistake, scored a point for the church, and succeeded in forestalling some conversation about how evil it is. Another “jewel in your heavenly crown,” as my Sunday School teacher used to say.
They responded differently to one situation than they did to another situation. It is not “nitpicking little points” to note that your basic premise was doubly flawed.
I am as irate as anyone that Cardinal Law and several of his fellow bishops tolerated, and worse, hid abuse by priests. I would even accept your “Molest a little boy; get promoted” snipe if we modified it to “Hide a molestor; get rescued if you have friends in high places” regarding Law, who was allowed to resign and then given a desk in the Vatican.
People who see the RCC as a monolithic structure (as anyone silly enough to think that the pope “is” the church would do) are, from their perspective, entitled to rant on about the whole church for the actions of some part of it.
However, since this is the Straight Dope[sup]®[/sup], it is perfectly legitimate to point out the errors in your basic premises.
If you want to rant that the church has not done enough to stop abuse–certainly prior to the Law scandal, but probably even now, I will actually join you as long as we don’t invent facts or make up false claims. However, misunderstanding the rules of the church does not make your rant very compelling.
Please, have a conversation about how evil child molesting is, and anyone involved in the Church hierarchy who turned a blind eye or covered it up. I’m way on your side with that one.
The point is not to nitpick and find errors, it is to clarify the diffference in the two situations. The fact that excommunication is called for in one situation, and not the other, does not indicate in any way the latter is any less grave of a sin.
I guess the ultimate “punishment” is given by God, not by the Church, anyway.
But to me, it does indicate that. How else can you view it? I just can’t get my head around what you are trying to say. If there is a “punishment” (or “correction,” for tomndeb) for one behavior and not for another, how can you say that the latter is viewed as worse than the former in the eyes of the people who wrote the rules? It makes no sense.
But I will accept your assertion as the final word on the subject, since I am obviously uninformed about church practice, and because I appreciate the fact that you conducted yourself much better in this thread than I did.
I can understand that to someone who doesn’t have familiarity with the structure of the Church, it’s really a foreign concept and completely confusing (as evidenced in my floundering in this thread, I’m pretty hazy on some of it, myself). Suffice it to say that if committing any sin…even a very grave one…automatically led to excommunication, the Church would have no members. As I said, the difference lies in overt and ongoing rebellion against Church authority, something that applies only to very specific circumstances. And again, excommunication is something that can happen even without the knowledge of the Vatican. I would say that any Catholic, priest or otherwise who is an ongoing pedophile, without the proper remorse (which would include taking steps to be sure the sin is not repeated), they are just as surely excommunicated as anyone on the Church’s official “list.”
I’ve got to agree with Don’t Call Me Shirley. Recently, some women in my city were ordained as Catholic priests. Their ordination was ruled invalid and they have been excommunicated, as is the Catholic Church’s privilege. However, in my non-Catholic eyes, to tell people they are no longer welcome in a church they love and want to serve seems far worse than merely changing what parish priests who molest boys and girls serve.
To me, obviously, ordaining women and married men does no harm, although I can see the argument about how these people brazenly defied authority. On the other hand, men who harmed children are as welcome in the church as anyone, and, indeed, more so than this rogue Anglican.
I think the people in this thread know I’ve nothing against Catholicism, even though it’s not something I can embrace myself. The difference between the way priests who molested children and the way women who wanted to become priests are treated is simply one illustration of where the Catholic Church’s priorities differ from mine.
Accepting as correct that the statement is properly read as: “Despite molesting little boys, the Church promotes you,” the problem I identified still exists. You have to show that the bishop doing the promoting knew that the priest being promoted was a molester; otherwise it’s simply a statement of two events, one which followed the other but which have no logical connection.
There is no need to repeat in Church Canon Law the prohibitions against all the sins that are already forbidden by the Commandments and regular Church teaching. Canon Law is an addition, to provide details and deal with specific, complicated situations. It certainly IS NOT setting priorities or ranking various sins.
The Canon Law rules against married priests are there because this is a change; it used to be allowed. In fact, for most Church history, married priests were the norm. It’s only for the last 1/3rd of the time that the church required celibacy of priests.
That said, I do agree with the basic point of the OP. The Church does seem to put a higher priority on stopping priests from marrying than on stopping them from molesting altarboys.
That is similar to what I see as the main flaw of John Paul II (and becoming worse under Benedict): the Church seems far more worried about private sins (a married couple using condoms, for example) vs. public sins (a country starting a war, for example). But fighting private sins just means taking on people individually; fighting public sins would mean taking on powerful leaders. So perhaps it’s just a lack of courage among Church leaders.
IIRC, not exactly; there are sins so grave that you in effect excommunicate yourself (e.g., procuring or aiding in procuring an abortion). “latae sententiae” excommuncation.
As mentioned, many abusers have authority over their victims, as parents or relatives, teachers, etc. I don’t believe a priest’s sin is worse than any other believer’s.
To me the point is that the church knew about molesters and did nothing about it. We all know this to be true. If we know the differerence between right and wrong,and I assume the church does. They were motivated by something else. Greed.There is no way they can jusify the coverups.They moved them from parish to parish to avoid prosecution. They only stopped when it became to expensive.
So you have a priest with a completely logical solution. He must be corrected.
We do know it to be true. We also know that child molesters are not unique to the Catholic church. Non-parochial school boards, Boy Scouts, even Little League baseball protected child molesters ( ot to mention incestuous fathers) back in the 60’s and 70’s because we lived in a culture of silence.
Society began to change in the late 70’s and 80’s. “Problematic” teachers were not just shuffled around, but dealt with. Children were given a voice, which was a huge cultural shift. The church was slow to deal with priests, no doubt, but most of the cardinals, bishops, and the pope himself were born in the 30’s and 40’s.
Weellll, not exactly. According to the Catholic theory of holy orders, the ability to confer orders is an innate quality of a bishop; thus, even a defrocked bishop has the power to (illicitly) ordain clergy.*
The reason why the women were not ordained as Catholic priests is because according to Catholic theology, orders can only be received by men, not as a matter of discipline, but because of the nature of holy orders themselves. Trying to ordain a woman has no more effect than trying to ordain a cat – “woman in holy orders” is simply a logical impossibility.
Yes, this does seem to make Catholic holy orders a sort of “magic” – if you’ve had the right ritual performed on you by the right person, you can perform the right ritual on someone else and make them a cleric. This “Augustinian” view of holy orders is one big problem the Eastern Christians, who follow Cyprian’s view on the matter, have with the Latins.
