But once the church authorities are made aware of child raping priests it is their duty to deal with them appropriately. They have processes set up to punish priests for what is deemed bad bahavior. In this case, the church felt and feels that it is appropriate to hush it up, accuse and blame victims and quietly, prevent civil authorities from taking dealing with them and move the child rapists to another parish so they can start again destroying lives. There is no defense for this.
Also, I’d like to see where you get that children are safer with priests, because frankly I seriously doubt that.
I don’t have a cite, but if we’re accepting the 1.5% figure for abusive priests, that’s way below the figure for abusive parents or family members. Yes, the church should, like any organisation, not let those guilty of child abuse near children. But that’s not what’s happening here - what’s happening is a witch hunt based on peoples memories of things that happened decades ago. Where there are clear cases of individuals in the church facilitating abuse, those individuals should be dealt with by the law, but the claim that the church as a whole is set up to foster abuse is, frankly, stupid.
Still: the clergy (whatever denomination) claim to follow a higher standard and it should surprise none that they be held to that in those cases; in the case of an offense involving a child there is even a specific and downright hardcore Gospel dictate attributed to Jesus himself – see Matthew 18:6 ; Luke 17:2. And the least that we should have expected from a church was that in the presence of any strong evidence that a member of clergy indeed had molested a child, that evidence and that person would be delivered onto the police and the courts. They are the few: the church could afford to cleanse itself from them. Moving them around and seeking to have the victims and families keep quiet was obstructing justice and the hierarchy should take it and show true intention of amends. At the same time, the institution can be called out on that without that having to imply that the whole of the church or religion (whichever it is) and all its adherents must be brought down.
The church by their actions did foster abuse by covering it up and shuffling child rapists around. How anyone can say they didn’t is what is stupid. You have to look at their actions because that says it all.
I wrote a long response which I managed to delete, and it’s late here so i’m not redoing it. In short, though, this conspiracy theory about the church should be shot down, like this board does to all other such theories. Deal with what’s actually happening - a small group of people in an extremely large organisation commiting or facilitating serious crimes - and drop the argument that it’s the whole church.
Then, preferably, attack the church for the things it’s actually done.
They ARE attacking the Church for what it’s actually done. It’s not a “conspiracy theory.” It’s very well documented fact. The Church has admitted to it.
My wife is a practicing Catholic. My kids are baptized in the Catholic Church and go to a Catholic school. I don’t hate Catholics. I don’t hate the Church. I don’t hate priest. I hate child molesters and I hate people who cover up for child molesters. The Church has engaged (probably for centuries) in institutional concealment and protection of the very worst sort of criminals possible. Sniveling and whinging about “Catholic haters” is just chickenshit deflection.
There has been systematic cover-ups of abuse world wide. The story in the OP deals with a Cardinal. Do you know what a Cardinal is in the RCC. He’s top level management. He is the head of the religion in that country. He could be potentially the pope and at the very least votes for the new pope. In many countries including the US it’s been shown and in some cases ADMITTED by the church that these cover-ups have happened.
You deal with what actually happened you fuckwit. Educate yourself and stop making a complete tit of yourself by making such stupid and uninformed statements. People at the highest level including the fucking pope have been involved in this shite. Cop on to yourself.
Chessie Sense, can you point out to me where Carol Shakeshaft even suggests that the sexual abuse in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests?
The article you are linking is to Breitbart (I not longer consider Brietbart to be credible). It links the Shakeshaft report to Congress in a .pdf. I searched the .pdf and I couldn’t find anything like that claim. In fact it hardly mentioned priests at all.
Even worse, the only link within the Breitbart article that suggests 100X more abuse at schools is to Newsmax which I find even less credible than Breitbart.
Could you find me a better source or at least find a relevant quote in the Shakeshaft report? Otherwise, I question this claim. It appears to be outrageous considering priest are human beings and abuse should at least be in the same ballpark as other scenarios.
Again, the point of this discussion is widespread, I repeat, WIDESPREAD, cover-up and moving around abusers to other places where they will abuse again. Otherwise these would be non-stories. Please respond appropriately if you understand this point or ask a question if you’re still confused.
I can’t speak for the OP, nor for other Dopers, but I for one am not ashamed in the slightest to proclaim–LOUDLY–that I FUCKING HATE THE CATHOLIC CHURCH! I do not hate Catholics, mind you. (A distinction that some people appear not to grasp.)
Chessic Sense and others seem to be suggesting that because someone hates an organization, that his criticisms of it, even though otherwise rationally based, are somehow specious and petty. Or that his hatred is evil or “racist” or “bigoted” or whatever (I’m ignoring for the moment Chessic Sense’s utterly ASININE suggestion that hating a religious institution is a form of racism…apparently his grasp of the idea of race is as well-developed as his rhetoric). This position is just stupid political correctitude extremism. Where is written down that we as humans are not ever supposed to hate an organization? Who the fuck made up that rule?? And who ever said that that hatred undermines any argument we make? That’s just bullshit, in the strongest possible terms that I can call it out as bullshit.
Og, I expected a few pro-Catholic numb-nuts to crawl out of the woodwork and make some feeble defenses of the RCC, but I didn’t expect the sort of brainless, antagonistic, namby-pamby PC, hopelessly irrational counterattack that CS has tried to mount in this discussion.
That’s not Chessic Sense’s argument at all. What he has argued, basically, is that a double-standard is applied to the failings of the Catholic Church and its administrators—likely because of its size, visibility, and importance as a signifier for organized religion—which results in more calumny being heaped upon it than would for a secular organization. An incidental point is raised that this disfavor of religious institutions is particularly evident when the institution in question is of a Christian variety (this is what he was getting at with the remarks about Islam).
Nowhere does CS say merely forming a group should insulate the group or its members from criticism. No wonder you find his remarks to be bullshit—when fundamentally misapprehended in that way, of course it’s bullshit.
Again, I don’t have figures either, but I highly doubt that. I can easily accept that more than 1.5% of parents abuse their kids with excessive physical and emotional punishment, but we’re talking about sexual abuse here, and no fucking way do I believe that more than 1.5% of ANY group besides priests and childfuckers do that.
Any perceived “disfavor” of Christian organizatuon by the general public, by the media or by “liberals” (the majority of whom are Chistians) is completely imaginary. No such disfavor exists or ever has. Quite the opposite, actually. Christian institutions are treated with ridiculous deference in the US. Deference which is offered to no oher religion.
I wouldn’t say “completely” imaginary—doing so would commit me to the proposition that there has never been an instance of a commentator with particular hostility reserved for the Christian religion, and this is a stance I’m not prepared to take.
As to your more important point, unfortunately prefaced by some rash rhetoric, you are quite right that it is difficult to argue that, at the aggregate level, Christian organizations are particularly victimized. Nevertheless, I don’t think any particular church is immune from unfair sniping, and the Roman Catholic Church is a visible (and for some, a tempting) target. This isn’t to say there’s not ample and compelling evidence against some of the leaders of the RCC; only that the truth of some various serious charges preferred against the RCC doesn’t mean that there cannot also be other, less justified hostility directed at it. It is precisely when there’s some truth to the accusations that it’s easiest to paint with a broad brush.
This is a valid point. The Catholic Church is the biggest worldwide wholesaler of child molestation. But the retail uncles, teachers, doctors and pizza delivery guys are a bigger collective threat and story.
In 1972 (or whatever) the RCC was busy hiding child molesters. That is evil, made more evil by their claim of moral superiority. But, your own family, your local school board, your police department and your medical association were doing the same thing.
Think about it. It is 1968, some school teacher is caught having sex with the fifth graders. What do you think happened? I suspect that they gave him a letter of recommendation and sent him out of the state with a warning never ever to come back.
The RCC story was broken open ten years ago (I give the Boston Globe credit). But nobody has yet done the hard work to bust open the story of how widespread covering up child molestation was everywhere not so long ago.
If it was one small group of people who were in one parish, or even one country, that would be one thing. You could argue that it’s a localized problem. However, the whole damn top layer of the Catholic church has been shown to be involved in this. Not only do they know that there’s a problem with pedophilia, they refuse to demote the pedophiles and remove them from positions where they’ll have contact with children. They KEEP those pedophiles in positions of authority, and when a community starts to get upset about Father Fingers’ wandering fingers, then they transfer Father Fingers. They don’t turn him over to the authorities, they don’t get him any help that’s actually HELP, they transfer FF to a new area, where he’s not known to be a danger to kids…and they let him loose on the new community. And that community’s kids. They don’t warn the community. They don’t punish Father Fingers. They aid and abet his pedophilia.
So yeah, it’s the whole church, or at least that part of the church that makes the decisions to cover up the problems.
Maybe you should try reading the thread and read the stats that people have linked to. Seriously. It’s the least you could do.
But the statistics don’t bear that out. As I posted before, for at least 50% of priests that had been accused (not convicted), the problem solved itself. The priest has resigned, was defrocked, retired, or even died by the time the accuser came forward. We’re talking decades here, from incident to accusation. What’s the church supposed to do about that?
There isn’t a cover-up epidemic. There was such an epidemic 30-something years ago but that’s changed. And that epidemic was the same one that happened in the Boy Scouts and in many, many school districts across the U.S.
By the general public? No.
By the media? No.
By “liberals”? No.
By the SDMB’s Pit posters? Hell fuckin’ yeah they do.
This board has a hard-on for pitting the RCC. That’s where I was going with the bigot remarks. This board will post anything and everything it can that denigrates the Church, even if they have to dig up 10-year old abuse cases from Belgium to do it. There’s a double-standard that goes on on the SDMB where if a school board does it, it’s all “meh, it’s just another bad thing out there in the world.” But when it’s the RCC, it’s all “Goddamnit, Catholic Church, when will you ever learn to stop being so evil?” You’ve even got people like Cyningablod that just come out and say it.
“I don’t care if it’s no worse than anywhere else! The facts be damned! I hate the Church!”
I would expect the church to act in a much more timely manner. The church claims to be above and beyond secular authority and laws, that it can and will take care of any abuses that are done in the church, by church officials. And so far as I’ve seen, the church has been “taking care” of the problem priests by simply shuffling them around for at least a century. Probably for longer. This isn’t solving a problem, it’s enabling the abusers! And an abuser (or other problem person) who dies or resigns has NOT met justice, nor have his victims received justice. It’s not enough that the priest resigns. His crimes must be made public, and he must atone publicly. His victims don’t have to have their names known, but they will get some satisfaction from knowing that the priest was publicly accused, and found guilty. Allowing a priest to quietly resign is NOT good enough. And if the priest dies of old age, that is precious little comfort to his victims.
School boards are, by their very nature, local. The RCC is global. The very NAME Catholic means “all encompassing” or “comprehensive”, and the RCC wants every human on the planet to convert to Catholicism, or at least abide by the teachings of the Catholic church…that is, they put restrictions on even the MENTION of birth control (other than natural family planning) and abortion in foreign aid, both from the US and the UN. There is no one worldwide group that oversees all school boards, but there IS one worldwide authority which oversees the RCC. And it is this very authority which is doing all the covering up and shuffling around which enables the criminals to get away with abuse.
Well, I viewed the wikipedia articles you linked and I challenge your ‘statistics’. Why did you use only credible allegations but disregard substantiated allegations? I assume those are two different groups of priests which would bring up you’re kiddie-diddler rate to nearly4% as the link to the John Jay Report states. Anyway, why should we unquestionably take numbers from a report by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops when the whole topic of this pitting concerns the secrecy of the Catholic Church? And why are you comparing rates of children reporting sexual impropriety in public schools to rate of diddling priests? You should be comparing rates of diddling teachers to diddling priests. Furthermore, most priests don’t have extensive contact with children so a 4% rate of abusers is pretty damn high in my book. What you’d need to do is compare priests who have access to children to secular teachers. Then we can compare true rates of abusers. I’m also waiting for your response to my earlier post regarding the 100X higher abuse rate in schools(elsewhere). You appear to have misquoted Carol Shakeshaft.
How does dying ‘fix’ the problem? It simply muddies the waters of guilt. That argument neither supports nor negates your position. Also, can you please stop using the Boy Scout excuse here? That’s an excuse used by the Catholic Church itself. Why are you using the Catholic Church’s excuses to support your position? Are you a bishop? :dubious: