So what? People who are being criticized are often very quick to say their critics are biased. It doesn’t make it true.
We know you grieve for the people who are falsely accused. We can tell because you keep bringing it up and saying a bunch of the accusations come from greedy liars without explaining or substantiating what you are saying. You’ve done that even though you don’t really have any concrete reason for that belief- just your confidence that the media is unfair and people hate Catholics.
What about false accusations of fraud? How vigorous are you being about those?
There was external scrutiny. It’s called the legal system. The RCC has paid billions of dollars in settlements already, and nobody gives away billions of dollars just 'cause. The church has acknowledged that hundreds of priests abused children. They were aware of this problem for decades. And they haven’t denied that a lot of priests who were accused of molesting children were simply shuttled off to other parishes to keep things quiet. Saying ‘the media is biased’ does not make that go away. You say you’re really grieved by the abuses, but your repeated claim that a lot of the charges are false makes it sound like you want to minimize the issue. There are tens of thousands of cases of reported abuse. Even if a lot of them are false, that is a tremendous number. Like his predecessor, Benedict didn’t do very much about it other than to say he was sorry about it, and he knew even more about it than John Paul II did.
You continue to say the same things. If you don’t believe the media ever writes erroneously, or actually has any bias, that’s fine and sounds like it works for you not to ever scrutinize or be discerning about anything they write. If that works for you fine. I take a different tack, one that is very fair, concern for those harmed but also concern for those falsely accused which doesn’t sound like is a concern of yours, (unless your ever falsely accused I reckon)…
And as for your claim that settling means guilt, it does not, for anyone who knows something about law. There can be very valid reasons for settling that do not equate with guilt
And, God knows the legal system always work just the way it should…we all know there have never been anyone convicted who was actually innocent…
Oh shit…:smack: wait, weren’t there some dudes who were executed on death row later found to be innocent, and that’s one reason so many people are against the death penalty…and those pesky inmates who served years and years in jail only to be let out later by a very embarrassed looking officer and some lame apology, amounting to, “oops, sorry, we thought you did it, bc your black…”
So your right, all the catholic priests found guilty, really must be, right? And the Brady bunch is a real family who lives down my street.
So do you. Are you going to back them up? I can support what I am saying.
A single settlement might not mean guilt. Thousands of settlements are another story. Like I said, nobody just gives away billions of dollars in legal settlements for the hell of it. And no matter what you think of individual settlements, the church doesn’t deny that this happened.
I can’t say for sure that they’re all guilty. I’ll say they probably are because I have no reason to think otherwise, and I’ll say again that the church is not settling because it lacks the wherewithal to defend itself in court. The church commissioned its own report on the scandal, and it identified more than 10,000 people who said they had been abused. The report said the dioceses looked into almost 5,700 abuse reports. 80% of the abuse accusations were substantiated and only 1.5% could be shown to be false. That’s on page 94. If tends of thousands of people say they were abused and 1.5% of them are lying, tens of thousands of people were still abused.
It’s obviously true that no system of justice is perfect. But at the same time, you must see the flaw in the claim, “Because we find this error, we can now disgard all conclusions.”
Undoubtedly there are isolated cases of priests being falsely accused. However, it’s equally beyond cavil that there were many cases in which priests were accused because they committed the acts in question.
The anti-Catholic bias of the media does not change this fact. These cases happened. Fr. John Geoghan, in Boston, admitted to molesting children at St. Julia’s, and was still reassigned to a new parish. That’s not something that the anti-Catholic media did. That’s something that Fr. John Geoghan did; something Auxiliary Bishop John D’Arcy wrote to Cardinal Law to complain about; something Cardinal Law knew, or should have known, was credible, since Law had already removed Geoghan from St. Brendan’s over the same issue.
I am a practicing Roman Catholic, in union with the Holy See. That doesn’t make me blind to the fact that priests and bishops are men, and as a result all will be sinners, and of those sins, some will be serious, and of those serious sins, some were pedophiliac molestation and some were placing the reputation and finances of the Church above the safety of children. IT HAPPENED. An argument denying it is both foolish and dangerous – foolish because it denies well-established truth, and dangerous because it’s impossible to place meaningful safeguards in use if you deny the problem they are guarding even exists.
I take it from your responses, Tollhouse, that you have no basis for accusing “everybody and their grandmother” of falsely accusing priests of molestation in order to get easy money.
I can tell you that there is a pattern to false accusations in this area, and it is nothing like what you imagine.
I could also tell you that the research and the investigations indicate thatabout 5% of these (and other similar claims against clergy, teachers and others in positions of trust in different denominations) prove to be false, but I’m not sure that would be of interest to someone willing to assume the claimants are liars just because you’d like it to be so.
Right. Who is supposed to care that he covered up child abuse but wasn’t malicious about it (whatever that means)? One of the reasons for this scandal, as Bricker says, is the fact that many of these clergymen put their own reputations and the status of the church ahead of anything else. As a result they not only didn’t do much to stop the abuse of children, they took steps to keep it quiet that made sure the abuse would continue. Saying that wasn’t malicious is irrelevant and it seems insensitive to me. To borrow another legal term it’s the kind of thing that might be called depraved indifference. Their priorities were so wrong it’s staggering - or at least it should be staggering. I think experience tells us that people are very prone to doing this kind of thing when it concerns an institution they are part of or which is very important to them.
You are making two separate claims, but conflating them in your own head. The first is that there is bias in the media. Leaving aside the issue of whether there is anti-Catholic bias (doubtful; Catholics read papers too), we can all agree that there is indeed some bias in the media.
The second is that because of this bias, the media is ignoring child abuse scandals in other faiths and denominations. Several of us have asked you for evidence of this, and you can’t or won’t put forward any. As a result, people are entitled to conclude that you are making it up.
This includes Bricker, who is a devout Catholic and who spends a great deal of time in GD defending the Catholic Church. Considering his heavy pro-Catholic bias- he is, after all, a congregant- it can safely be said that criticism of the Catholic Church he agrees with is fair criticism.
So, back to the OP, according to this NY Times article (‘Constant Drumbeat’ Sped the Pope’s Exit - The New York Times), the abuse scandal, as well as other scandals, probably led to his exit. The thinking is that it may take someone with more energy and a cleaner slate to tackle all of this stuff going on and clean house.
Seems reasonable to me. I hadn’t heard about the butler thing until this article.
It is plausible IMHO that his health was also a factor in the scandals, as in the butler’s case of stolen mail.
IIUC it was like stealing candy to a baby, I think the staff of the Pope must had realized something like “now, we can not have control of scandals if we have a Pope that is not careful, can we?”
For those of you who feel the legal system is such a sterling institution, you must not have heard of how some Poor black folk find themselves pulled over more often by police, or people of color being pulled over, and also you all must be (thankfully for your sakes) blissfully unaware that a black or Hispanic person is more likely to wind up with a guilty conviction, and also to end up on death row. I think marley wrote its ‘possible’ there were an isolated case or two that was falsely accused but he even doubts that. Sometimes I wish I could think like this, it wold help me not feel down about injustice in the world. In your world (some of you , those who can’t believe a number of these were falsel accusations and convictions) all people are treated fairly first by the media, and then by the justice system. It seems like such a nice place to live without all that nasty injustice stuff. Its laughable and offensive how some of you honestly seem to believe that there is no anti catholic. Bent in the way the media treated it, and also how so insist that any guilty conviction means just that. I am notsurehow to find “proof” for unreported molestation in other religions. If you honestly feel all the outran, Methodists baptist, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist kids don’t have any reason to worry, only them poor Catholic kids, well…thems some lucky kids them (all the non catholic kids)
And just because Catholics read the paper doesn’t mean there isn’t anti catholic bias in it. Black people used to ride buses, but the buses were ‘biased’ in making them ride on the back. Handicapped people watch tv, but tv ads are biased against them, they usually don’t portray people in wheelchairs. So the fact Catholics Al’s read papers doesn’t mean there isn’t any bias towards them.
This is a very interesting take on the resignation and it’s the first time I’ve seen these kinds of specifics. And it’s also interesting that they say the Vatican acknowledges Benedict has a pacemaker. They said years ago that he had a heart condition and there were rumors he had surgery or was going to have surgery, but they were never confirmed.
You’re comparing groups of people who are discriminated against and who tend to be poor to people who are part of the wealthy and powerful Catholic church. Enough said.
I said I think the ones in jail are guilty and that I’ll continue to think that unless I see an actual reason to think otherwise.
Tollhouse, how about posting a ballpark figure for how many cases of abuse actually happened or a general proportion for how many you think are true and how many are false? Like I said, the church looked into something like 5,700 cases of alleged abuse and found that 80% of them were substantiated and 1.5% of the allegations were found to be false. Intentionally or not, I think you are using the ‘some of the allegations are false!’ claim to avoid looking at the truth of the entire scandal, which is that thousands of people were abused and the church enabled it by doing little in response except moving the priests out of their churches and into new ones where people would be less likely to know what they had done.
While I share your skepticism about the legal system, it’s infinitely better than the RCC’s self-investigation, which as Marley23 has pointed out, failed to look any further than the molesting priests themselves. The Church has ignored the likely culpability of many higher-ups in covering the tracks of the molesters.
How do more frequent arrests of minorities make it more likely that victims of abuse by priests are liars?
You really aren’t making sense and apparently have no compunction about accusing child victims of fraud of an appalling magnitude when you have no evidence or cogent reason to believe it is so. It makes my heart hurt that a person of faith would do this; I sincerely hope you keep your thoughts to yourself and on the internet rather than sharing them with people who have been injured by the priests and the Church they loved and trusted.
And I’m plenty skeptical of the legal system in many cases. But there’s a difference between being skeptical for a reason and making vague and unsupported accusations of bias to deflect attention from the facts. I’m skeptical of the idea that poor people and minorities get a fair shake in our legal system in a lot of cases. That doesn’t apply to the RCC, which is very rich and powerful even though there are some people out there who hate Catholics. And to repeat this again, the church looked into thousands of cases of reported abuse in the U.S. and found the vast majority could be substantiated. That being the case, what is there to argue about?