The attitudes towards hebephilia and pedophilia were different back forty years ago, and that made it easier for priests to get away with shit (as was the case for others as well - the rate of attacks on minors is no higher AFAIK for religious than for any other profession with contact with minors). It has taken years to “process” all the cases that have come to light.
There are over a billion Roman Catholics in the world - there are always going to be perverts among them. The current Pope is benefitting to some extent by the fact that the creeps are dying off or being kicked out.
I believe he can be defrocked, but I don’t know if that would make him demoted. (And I’m sure there were popes who definitely did away with their enemies, although they were probably a lot more subtle about it)
I don’t think you can. I mean, you can’t stop him from being a priest or a bishop, at least. Those are for life. And all being a cardinal does is let you vote for pope. I don’t think anybody thinks of a cardinals as “role models”.
Like what was said above, the Catholic church has done a pretty good job of cleaning up its mess and paying restitution to victims. I’m not Catholic but I do support my Catholic brothers and sisters.
What I’m getting tired of is people that keep bringing it up to slam the Catholic church when it does something unpopular.
I agree the media needs to start going after the pedophiles who work in the public schools.
And the Archbishop in question was “stationed” in the Dominican Republic as the Ambassador, as opposed to being the Ordinary of a diocese. In other words, this is different. It’s a diplomat with diplomatic immunity, as opposed to a citizen of a country.
Were there ever any proof that there were considerable more pedophiles among Catholic Priests than of Jewish rabbis, Muslim Imams, liberal male school teachers, homosexual gym teachers, or whatever group? If not, is any particular reason Catholic Priests should be singled out for especial examination and blame?
The scandal wasn’t so much the existence of priest pedophiles (as you suggest, there weren’t wildly more then in other professions that work with children) but that the Church as an institution took steps to protect offending priests from exposure, in some cases moving them to places where they continued to have the opportunity to re-offend.
It’s an organization that thought protecting the organization from embarrassment was more important than protecting the people being hurt by the organization. There’s nothing unique in this, but so what?
The way I understand it is that you can’t de-ordain someone, but you can effectively remove their job and affiliation with the Church, which is called “laicization”.
So if you were to laicize a Cardinal, he wouldn’t be a Cardinal any longer, since that’s an elected, essentially administrative position, but he’d still be a Bishop, and any sort of sacraments performed by him would be valid, if illicit in the eyes of the Church.
If you’ve got evidence that there was a systemic and massive cover-up in our public school system involving hush money being paid out and teachers being shuffled all over the country to avoid prosecution and publicity, by all means blow the lid off this great conspiracy!
My understanding is that the immunity actually belongs to the country the diplomat serves, who has the discretion to strip him or her of it. So a request for extradition (if and when made) would include a request to waive diplomatic immunity.
It is of course a different authority in each case - the request for extradition goes to the judiciary, and the request to waive immunity goes to the government.
The Catholic Church has done an incredibly poor job of dealing with their child rape problem. As for bringing up the child rape crimes, it needs to be brought up more until the powers that be in the church that participated are thrown out and put behind bars or in the ground.
They can play all the lodge-brother silly-hat incantation rituals they like, all day long, but no one else is obliged to take any of it seriously. The part about protecting their own instead of the kids they’ve hurt, now *that *we need to be serious about.
And as long as the church was run by mean ol’ “conservative” Benedict and John Paul II, liberals were eager to make hay of the scandals (and who can blame them?).
Have the scandals ceased? No- but media outrage HAS pretty much ceased.
Why? I can’t say for certain, but my besty guess is that Francis is (wrongly) perceived as a liberal on sexual matters, so he gets a pass for crimes that go on under his rule.
Meanwhile, the sex scandals HAVE died way down - or rather, we seem to have mostly mined the supply of scandals that had accumulated over decades thanks to the Church’s constant cover-ups. At the height of the scandal, there were new revelations of horrific abuse on almost a weekly basis. New stories of abuse are not nearly as frequent these days, and the Church is no longer able (if not willing) to prevent them from being prosecuted.
The Church abuses were an important story, but they were also a very lurid story, and that sells a lot of ad space. Absent an ongoing bounty of really juicy stories in that vein, the media has found that stories about the Pope acting like your adorable grandpa sell almost as well, so that’s what they’re going with for now, despite the small drawback of it not actually being news.
(my bolding)
Do you believe that the Catholic Church has “protected their own instead of the kids” more tan public schools, gyms, protestant churches, etc.?
The RCC is an easy target. Small individual churches, a no-name school district, Joe’s Gym simply don’t get headlines nor do they sell as much. The unified nature of the RCC makes it easy to lump numbers.
