Not that it will change the minds of anyone on either side, but these claims have never been demonstrated to have a foundation, probably for the reasons presented when they were first lodged:
[ol]
[li]So you start with a 1962 document intended to ensure that priests abusing penitents in the confessional are not permitted to get away with it.[/li][li]The document addresses the violations of church law, only, and are not applicable to civil law.[/li][li]The document is so limited in scope and intended to remain private that few bishops even know of it.[/li][/ol]And now it is waved about as though points 1 and 2 are completely reversed.
From the NCR article:
Some of the recent allegations regarding then Cardinal Ratzinger and the situations in Milwaukee and Vienna are very troubling, but this particular document is simply not what its champions want it to be.
And just to point out - pretending that this is about the 1962 Letter, explicitly superceded by the 2001 one from the future Pope, which does not mention - ‘go to cops or else’ is dishonest.
And to further point out - claiming Para 15 says ‘go to cops’ when it does not is also dishonest.
It’s purely about internal Magic Sky Pixie shit.
I know it’s the Pit but we still expect posters to not make false claims in the hope others won’t bother checking
So I repeat - where are these letters from the future Pope releasing the Secular Hounds on one of the hundreds of child-abusers?
I think the disconnect here is that a lot of folks see the prior actions as something that would be a deal-breaker for them, regardless what corrective actions the RCC may have taken (at least until the corrective actions had been in place and demonstrably effective for several decades). That Bricker (along with quite a few others) does not take the same view seems to strike them as evidence of a defect in his moral compass.
So he’s being attacked, not for defending the actions of the pedophile priests or the ecclesiastical cover-up, but for defending his own continued affiliation with the organization.
No, the evidence for that is his refusal to consider the possibility that the problem, of institutional support for child rapists and therefore of child rape, still exists, as ample evidence shows it does, along with his obstinate pettifogging “defense” of it as being in accordance with the institution’s own rules.
He’s being attacked, again, not for his continued affiliation as such, but for his blind loyalty to it, and for his hypocrisy in continuing that affiliation even though he has told us he would leave it if a fact were ever demonstrated to him, which it now has. That is indistinguishable in effect, btw, from defending both pedophilia and the cover-up.
The problem almost everyone here has with the RCCC is the systematized cover-up by the cardinals and bishops of the Church, and the failure of the Church to sanction the participants in that cover-up in any meaningful way. Hell, they haven’t even tried to figure out just how bad the child sexual abuse and associated cover-ups were, and genuinely come clean about the extent of the past crimes. Instead, every few years, they get surprised (and defensive) when the story breaks loose in yet another country.
No, he’s being attacked for defending the cover-up, and for his continued association with an organization that has yet to come clean about its sins or punish its high-level cover-uppers.
Every time you type that, FWIW, I picture some 34 year old college dropout typing furiously in his parents’ basement wearing an “AMERIKKKA NO BLOOD FOR OIL” t-shirt.
I don’t know about you, but for me, continued affiliation can only be plausibly attributed to blind loyalty. So I don’t think I’ve said anything substantially different from what you said.
Potato, potato.* “Continued association [despite] coverups” is close enough for me to “continued affiliation [despite] deal-breaker actions.”
Anyway, I was only trying to offer a plausible explanation to stratocaster for why Bricker is getting pinged on, even when stratocaster doesn’t see evidence of Bricker defending the RCC’s cover-up activities.
I’ll stop trying to speak for anyone else, now. I gave up on the RCC over twenty years ago, on a far more fundamental issue, so if there’s anyone who doesn’t have a dog in the “canon law” fight, it would be me.
*yes, I know it’s usually spelled “potato, poTAHto.” I just feel that this way makes it more clear that in my opinion, the distinction is inconsequential.
Maybe I should have bolded the difference in conjunctions:
“So he’s being attacked, notfor defending the actions of the pedophile priests or the ecclesiastical cover-up, but for defending his own continued affiliation with the organization.”
v.
“No, he’s being attacked for defending the cover-up, and for his continued association with an organization that has yet to come clean about its sins or punish its high-level cover-uppers.”
You’re right that it’s potato v. potato (nicely played, btw) after the conjunction; all I did was add a bit more clarity. Our real difference is about whether Bricker is being attacked for defending the ecclesiastical coverup.
Damn, now I’m envisioning a dog getting shot out of a circus-style cannon.
OK, by 1986, Mahony was the Archbishop of Los Angeles, and his episcopal career had been spent almost entirely in California.
One of the watershed events affecting Americans’ perception of child sexual abuse was the McMartin preschool trial and the allegations surrounding those legal proceedings.
The indictment in that case was handed down in March 1984. The McMartin school was in Manhattan Beach, CA, which is in Los Angeles County.
The facts of the McMartin case aren’t at issue here. The point is that, even assuming that none of the alleged abuses in that case happened, it laid down a huge marker that Americans were now taking child sexual abuse allegations extremely seriously, that they could no longer be ignored or treated as a triviality.
And this all happened in Mahony’s back yard. He was most certainly aware of it. Any claim that we’re judging 1986 through the lens of 2010 is irrelevant; the lens hasn’t changed that much since 1984. He was on notice in 1986 that the secular world now considered this sort of crime to be all but a lynching offense. If he chose to protect priests who committed such crimes, the least he should have been able to do in 1986 was to explain his rationale for believing that these crimes were less serious in God’s eyes than in the eyes of the secular law. Even if he continued to treat priestly child sexual abuse as a triviality, he had no moral right to do so mindlessly, as a simple carry-forward of the policies of the past. McMartin closed that door forever.
According to Wikipedia (and the Archdioces of Los Angeles website), Mahony is still a cardinal in the RCCC, as well as still being the current Archbishop of Los Angeles.
So: those who cover up child molesting get to keep their high positions indefinitely. Good work, Pope Joey.
