Worth? Worth to whom? And who would buy it? Most of the artwork held by religious institutions isn’t “worth millions”; it’s “priceless”. There isn’t a market for it. On the rare occasions that a private individual acquires a priceless piece of religious art, they usually just turn around and put it on permanent loan to a church, right where it was before except now with a little plaque under it that says “On generous loan from the personal collection of J. Arthur Moneybags”. The “sale” of religious artwork is just a fancy way of soliciting donations from wealthy church-members.
What actual wealth the Church really does have is mostly in real estate. And that real estate is being used, as a place to put church buildings.
An idea seems to pop up in threads like this that if a man isn’t getting sex regularly, of course they will start raping and molesting kids or adults. That always feels very wrong to me, like it’s shifting the burden in an Incel-y way. Almost as if society (usually women) is to blame if men harm people because they don’t get sex.
I could see people falling into that trap, though I don’t know if not enough distinction is made. I don’t know what actually goes on behind the scenes in seminaries, etc.
I think this is quite wrong. There may not be a market for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but there’s a market for things like Michaelangelo’s Pietà. Museums and private collectors would line up around the block for a chance to buy the portable-ish art. Frescoes and the like are trickier.
I think a lot of people don’t realize the significance of sending someone away from a job without references. Back in the day, when not only was there no internet, and credit bureaus were nascent, long distance calls were expensive and sometimes difficult to place, written references were extremely important. When you left a job, you got a written reference from you employer talking about the great job that you’d done, and you could show it to the next person to whom you applied for a job. This was a really big deal. If you didn’t have a reference, it was suspicious to say the least, and the assumption was that you not only got fired, but left under really bad circumstances; even people who got fired for cause usually got some kind of reference-- it might not be glowing, but it might say that you always showed up on time, and just omit the fact that you provoked a fistfight with a coworker, which led to some equipment being damaged. The fact that it didn’t say they were sorry to lose you, but couldn’t offer you the advancement you deserved, etc., etc., would usually communicate volumes.
Getting NO letter of reference pretty much meant that you weren’t getting another job in the field, unless you could manage to find some really crap version of the job-- if you got fired from a rich church in a big city for getting caught abusing a child (or embezzling, or some other serious crime), and they didn’t contact the police, but decided to send you away without references, you were probably going to be starting over as a manual laborer, or maybe working as a bartender, or a cab driver; otherwise you might, because you did presumably have some kind of degree from a divinity school, and were ordained, find a church in the middle of nowhere, that paid a subsistence salary, and hadn’t had anyone apply in over a year. They might put suspicions aside out of desperation.
There was actually a black market at one time for false references. If you were either just starting in a field, and couldn’t get a foot in the door, or had been sent away from some place without references, you could buy forged ones from some places (some of which were otherwise legitimate employment agencies). They did a hopping business during the Depression, and also around the turn of the century, when new immigrants often bought false references.
I remember when I was a kid in the 70s, my parents used to get asked to write letters for their students all the time; they were applying for first jobs, but they could at least get letters from professors saying things like they had perfect attendance, never showed up to class “altered” (a big deal in the 70s), had good communication skills, and tackled problems pre-emptively. When my mother would be composing a letter, she’d lecture me on the importance of job performance, so I could get a good reference if I left the job. Little did she know what kind of world I’d be living in as an adult.
Yes, selling off cultural inheritance is always a great idea. Why is it only the Catholic Church that gets this kind of argument? No one says, “Egypt is in economic trouble, they should just start selling off their museum collections.” or “Japan did something bad, we should strip it of its artwork and architecture. That’s what they get.” Most of us would be horrified at the idea of divying up cultural patrimony over temporary troubles. It’s quite frankly disgraceful how much has already been looted from various places and peoples and saying that we should encourage this is offensive. I can’t believe that you would even begin to suggest that the Pieta which is housed and on display for public consumption of Catholics and non-Catholics alike be shipped off to Elon Musk’s house for use as a selfie backdrop. Removing it from Rome would be a travesty to humanity and selling it to say the Galleria Borghese would accomplish what exactly? I’m not Catholic and I disagree with them on a lot of things, but stripping Catholics of their sacred objects and art sounds to me a lot more like Romans sacking Jerusalem or Napoleon ‘acquiring’ Italian artwork than it does justice.
Q1: Why is it “deeply and horribly wrong” to do with a child the kind of behavior that would be considered “a little bit wrong” if done with a consenting adult?
A1: Give me other answers if you can think of them, but the main reason I can think of has to do with the psychological damage it inflicts on the child.
Q2: Is it at all possible that the priests who were doing these things, and/or those who were covering them up, didn’t know about this psychological damage? Is there any defense at all for the idea that they didn’t know that what was happening was “deeply and horribly wrong” as opposed to just moral failings, bad habits, lapses in judgment?
Part of A2 - always a part of it, regardless of how the rest of that answer may vary - is that humans are adept at finding and/or inventing a seemingly endless string of rationalizations to support our continuing to do what makes us feel good.
I didn’t take her to be saying they didn’t know it was wrong. I took her to be saying that it could be possible to think that it’s a horrible thing to commit any sexual sin and the punishment is the same, so the degrees between the various sexual sins gets conflated. I don’t know that this is actually happening in the RCC. I’ve seen similar thinking in other contexts, but as I think you’re getting at, it’s not like these guys are not from the same culture as everyone else. If they are using such thinking, it’s because they are convincing themselves of something they want to do anyway.
Read somewhere some of these priests were shipped off to small towns in Alaska, I guess they figured that was far away from the rest of the US to hide out. Also these places were glad to get a priest , some never had one before , they would have to share a priest over a big area.
Yeah, it’s really not difficult at all to have never touched someone else in a sexually inappropriate way. I mean you really have to go out of your way to even do so in the first place. That you think otherwise says a whole lot about you.
First, a general hint: people, please just type “etc.” - trying to type “et cetera” is tempting AutoCorrect. Or do a King & I and substitute “and so forth”.
Then back to the other issue: If all parties involved were capable of valid consent and agreeable to it, then it was not so “inappropriate”, was it? I mean unless you did it at a time and place and in a manner that caused a public disturbance.
Besides all inappropriate conduct is not created equal.
I just was wondering whether they—or any other molesters, minimizers, or coverer-uppers from the same era—have any possible valid defense that they honestly didn’t know/believe it was “that big a deal.”
Good point, but I think there are large differences between what has been socially allowed a man in this society, and what is permitted intent in a priest within the Catholic Church.
I have some rather sordid Catholic priest stories of my own although none related to pedophilia. Mainly a lot of secretive gay sex (a significantly larger percentage of Catholic priests are gay than in the population at large, as it was long seen as a refuge from the requirement of marriage, in American Catholic cultures anyway), mistresses etc.
Sorry, I misunderstood your question as rhetorical.
I just don’t see how. These guys grew up in the same culture (yeah, slight differences from Protestant culture, but still) as the larger US culture that said it was a big deal.
Because “some people make a big fuss about it”. They themselves don’t see why, but it bothers someone who is in a position to really fuck their lives, so they hide it. It’s similar to those people who say “sorry” meaning “sorry you caught me”. Others see why that would bother a person, but don’t perceive the target as a person.
I had to put down the autobiography of García Márquez (a guy I’ve never been able to stand anyway, and reading that book I understood why) because his tales of being taken to a brothel by his brother sound way too much like my Gramps talking about being “taught” by an adult neighbor; both boys were of similar age. Like Gramps, GM didn’t see why everybody makes such a big fuss about that and thinks every boy should be deflowered as soon as possible.