Most people in the KGB were just ordinary, decent people doing pretty routine jobs - the KGB often included building and health inspectors and all those sorts of mundane things. If I said the KGB was a nasty organization that was responsible for many evils, does that mean I’m spewing hate against fire inspectors?
The Roman Catholic Church has been aiding and abetting child molestation for years. Apparently they still are. Most of its members aren’t child molesters but the institution has a systemic problem, it knows about it, and it continues to cover it up at the expense of innocent victims.
Are most Catholics decent people? Of course. I still would not leave my kid unattended with a priest.
The Catholic Church is without a doubt a scumbag institution. Obviously this doesn’t apply to all members, and I don’t think anyone would claim it does, but the organization is corrupt at the highest levels.
The rank and file, however, do lose points for believing in patently absurd shit like transubstantiation and virgin birth. I mean, I assume they believe in that stuff - why would you belong to an organization whose belief system you don’t agree with?
It’s probably too many years of watching Boris and Natasha in the old cartoons, but I will always think of the KGB as “those guys in the trench coats”. I can’t help it
My grandmother’s cousin started his OWN church. He’s a priest who was excommunicated after he railed AGAINST the abuse scandal, saying rightly that every good Catholic should be “pissed off” in a homily, right after the big scandal broke.
He was put on probation, and then he decided he’d go and form his own parish, and was excommunicated. (He was also condemned for speaking in favor of married and women priests).
It’s too bad more priests don’t speak out like he has. Carol, you moronic turd, I don’t personally know anyone who has been abused either. That doesn’t mean, however, that this isn’t a big problem in the church.
Exactly. No, the majority of Catholics haven’t been directly involved. But the majority do appear to be enablers for those who are. They look the other way, they shout down critics or claim that it’s nothing special. They have made it possible for the abuse to go on as long as it has.
I may not have been clear, but I am talking about different types of abuse. While I was not and don’t believe any of my cohorts were physically abused, I do feel that my faith and trust in the Catholic church and its leaders was abused (for lack of a better word).
The money I and others gave to the church thinking it would help people and do good was instead used to protect and cover up evil done in the name of the church and by the church.
And I wonder why any parent would wait for “the people in charge”–whether in the diocese or the school district–to call the police. If a crime has been committed, press charges. The Church hasn’t had dungeons for a couple of centuries now.
That doesn’t excuse inaction by the Church higher-ups, but it doesn’t make the parents look good. Of course, it means the kids might be eligible for a big payoff in later years. Are they grateful that their parents swept their complaints under the rug?
I hear ya. He said what needed to be said, and refused to back off. GOOD FOR HIM. We need more priests like this. It’s a sad thing when someone gets “the hammer” for doing what is right.
-Not all kids tell their parents (especially those who are threatened with hell, their parents going to hell, cutting off of any sort of moral or financial support to their family ‘You know, your parents can;t afford to send you to another school. If you got expelled they’d have to sell their house…’).
-Not all parents believe their children’s claims (especially not if the priest or nun is a family friend). Or they believe in corporal punishment and think the kids are exaggerating. Or, in the case of sexual abuse, they don’t know what to believe but turn a blind eye out of shame or fear for their position in the community. Or, if the abused child was female, they think she brought it on herself (you’ll often find cases where the abuser was only arrested or moved after starting in on boys).
-Not all police believe children and/or their parent’s place (especially if they count on the local religious institutions to fill in where they can’t e.g. feeding and providing jobs for the poor, keeping juvenile delinquents off the street), though one would hope this has changed over the decades.
Disclaimer: I was raised Catholic (but not really), am an athiest, but don’t hate the chuch, since my personal experiences with it were very good - I just don’t believe in God.
Sigh
The vast majority of people I know who came out of Catholic schools and institutions came out fine. Some of them got caned or smacked (the older ones) but that was commonplace at the time. The vast majority of Irish schools are controlled by the church in one way or another (over 90%), and yet somehow the vast majority of Irish people were not abused, and the vast majority of priests were not abusers.
I remember when I was in secondary school, one of the lads made a crack about pedophile priests to one of the priests. He rammed the lad up against the wall and roared at him. That priest was one of the most gentle souls that I have ever met, and was always chatting and joking with us.
Most of the priests who dedicated their life to the church are extremely upset by what has happened, and it’s not fair to generalise that all of them were involved in sexual abuse (most did take a belt to an unruly student now and again, but that was accepted in Ireland).
It should be noted that in Ireland a scheme was set up to compensate abuse victims (maximum liability for the church was set at only €128,000,000), and the standard of proof needed to claim was lower then that which would normally be required in court, meaning that some claims were exaggerated. I know two people who did so.
There was tonnes of abuse, but if Ireland seems much worse then elsewhere, you have to remember that money was made available with very little proof needed, and not everyone is as honest as the rest of us. (That said, the vast majority of stories are true - it just needs to be noted that some people did take advantage of a very generous scheme).
The vast majority of catholics I know also got through it unscathed. But here’s the thing. The vast majority of kids who were abused didn’t see justice served because the vast majority of parishoners and higher-ups within the church gave the vast majority of offenders a pass and a new parish.
Where was the outrage? Why was it allowed to go on in THIS institution when the same people would refuse to sit still for it in any other place in our society? The abuse of power (power being a mystical, psychological hold on everyone involved, in this case) allowed this to go unchallenged.
That would be the award winning actor Gabriel Byrne (his show isn’t exactly a soap opera, btw) who was quite candid in his autobiography about the physical and sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of the Christian Brothers in ireland. He wrote about calling up the priest who abused him most severely in an effort to confront him and the damage he did. The priest recognized his name as that of a famous actor, but didn’t recall having him as a student, and surely therefore didn’t remember taking gross physical liberties with him. Byrne hung up the phone and didn’t get into it, knowing it would do no good.
Actors Pierce Brosnan, Colin Farrell and Jonathan Rhys Meyers have also made reference to physical (but not sexual) abuse from their Christian Brother “educators.” Brosnan and Byrne are near to 60, Farrell and Rhys Meyers both in their early 30s. This is a multi-generational problem. All four men have spoken of the schoolhouse as being a place where students never knew from one day to the next what would set a teacher off and earn them a desperate corporal punishment and how certain brothers had to be constantly tiptoed around and there was a constant state of unease related directly to the fact that some of the children in each school were being beaten on a regular basis. Having to be on constant guard lest you be the one under the rod on any given day is abusive in itself. A schoolhouse should not be a house of terror.
It came out long ago that the church has paid money to many people to shut them up, so that the offending priest could continue victimizing children. If you have given a single penny to the church since that became known, you have enabled child molestation and participated in not only covering it up, but also in allowing it to continue. You cannot separate the members from the institution, because without the members, and their tithes, there would be no institution. If you continued to support these monsters, or the institution that protected them, with knowledge of what they were doing, you are implicated in their crimes, and I place your level of guilt just slightly below the guilt of those who did that actual molesting.
