There may be plenty of reason for that to occur (although it would not play well with the large majority of Catholics who believe the bishops should be held accountable for their actions). What your thesis lacks is any evidence.
You have the personal remarks of two guys. You have no pronouncements from any official Catholic Congregation. You have no arguments following that line from lawyers representing the church in lawsuits. You have little more than a desire to assert that various individuals speaking their own beliefs represent an official position that indicates the “will” of the entire church.
Based on the eighty-one percent of documented cases in which the perp priests were bothering boys, and based on the fact that the little boys were, in the majority of cases, of post-teen vintage:
One could conclude that a huge part of what was going on was predatory chickenhawks deciding that the priesthood was a great way to gain access to sub-legal Hot Twink teens. And, they did.
They bought into a lot of 1950s vintage Freudiam crap which paralyzed them.
Everyone idiotically believed that “sinners could be redeemed.” Coupled with the stupid Freudian Moment (“we can cure you if you admit your Oedipal impulse”)< this idiotic idea did great harm.
There once was a choirboy of Devon
Who was banged in a haystack by seven
High Anglican priests
The lascivious beasts!
For of such is the Kingdom of Heaven
There one was a parson named Bings
Whose mind was on heavenly things
But his loins were afire
For a boy in the choir
With a bottom like jelly on springs!
From deep 'neath the crypt at St. Giles
Came a shriek that re-echoed for miles
The vicar said, "Gracious!
"It’s Brother Ignatius!
“He’s forgotten the Bishop has piles!”
I think the idea that “sinners can be redeemed” is much older than, and in no way attributable to, Freud.*
“When I come to visit you, we shall see who is the stronger – a little schoolgirl who does not get enough to eat, or a big, wild man who has cocaine in his body!”
I’ll de-compress it – everyone believed that the uber-dense doctrines of how “married priests,” or “homosexual priests,” or whatever, could be easily explained as in accordance with Catholic teaching and would turn out, very consistent with Scripture and doctrine, to be the be all end all. But, in reality, as it turns out, mainstream Catholic doctrine and scripture treatment did not support such notions.
Most of the “clean up the seminaries” talk (and the recent decision that gays shouldn’t be admitted to seminaries) doesn’t really have as much to do with the pedophilia scandal as it does with the scandal that emerged in an Austrian seminary a little while ago. There was a seminary near Vienna where investigators found a lot of gay pornography and a bunch of gay relationships, both between students and between teachers and students.
Not the best decompression, I’ll admit. I’ll take a little more time:
The RCC, along with much of society and the psychological establishment, has believed a lot of things about the sources of and treatment for deviant impulses and actions within the past 50-100 years that turned out not to be very true, or turned out to be actively stupid. I mentioned Freudianism as an obvious example of something that used to be accepted doctrine but now seems somewhere between silly and pernicious – I don’t think anyone (other than maybe Woody Allen – and there’s a success story for psychoanalysis!) really believes today that we can usefully address people’s mental problems by years of delving into whether they had a crush on their mommy thirty years ago. But people, including some people who should have known better, believed in Freudian based therapies, or electroshock, or lobotomies, or any number of other things that clearly have either minimal utility or are affirmative disasters as far as figuring out why someone’s thinking and behavior are messed up and what can be done about this.
When you combine flawed “medical” or “psychological” models with an institution that has a vested interest in believing in redemption, you get a recipe for believing that second (and third, and fourth, and fifth) chances can work, if only the offender prays hard enough, or avoids temptation, or “seeks treatment.” “Everyone knows” today that hardcore sex offenders are just about impossible to rehabilitate by any means, and everyone knows that sex abuse has been pretty widespread – but this is somewhat newfound knowledge, and would not necessarily have been recognized as given by anyone (including but not limited to the RCC) in decades past.
Having said that – and granted that characters like Shanley were master manipulators not only of their victims but of their superiors – I don’t know that the most spirited defender of Cardinal Law (if such defender exists) would have much of a case to work with to justify his neglectful supervision, willful blindness, and just plain stupidity in reacting to what should have been a pretty glaring problem at some point.
Wow. This thread is such a wreck that’s it’s of become a work of art. Kinda like starting at a trainwreck. And it’s awful, yet incredibly awesome at the same time, y’know?
I’ll try to find it. It was reported in Newsweek back when the scandal was still breaking. J.Rat (the currnet Pope’s rapper name) was quoted calling it “A problem with some homosexual priests in America.”
(Yes, I know the current Pope isn’t as charismatic or photogenic as the last one. But he & his predecessor were quite compatible in doctrinal matters.)
First of all, I would not expect official pronouncements to be issued. I hardly think the RCC is going to put out a declaration that “we have decided that none of this is the fault of our priests, and all of it is the fault of that “intrinsic evil” homosexuality.”
Come on, I think they are a bit more clever than that.
Lawyers representing the Church in lawsuits do not use that line because the judge and jury would tell them to knock it off. Can you imagine the lawyer for a rapist saying “It wasn’t my client’s fault, it was the fault of lust.”?
It is a much more subtle and long-term strategy that implies: “See, the Church always told you homosexuality was evil, and now it reaches even into our Church to corrupt our priests and foul it with child sexual abuse”.
In terms of evidence, if you are waiting for me to produce a document from the Vatican entitled “Dastardly Plan for Shifting our Child-Molesting Guilt onto Homosexuals” I fear you will wait a long time.
You say I have only the “personal remarks of two guys” as evidence? I assume you mean Bishop Alvarez and the priest I debated with?
First of all, Bishop Alvarez may be one Catholic, but I think you will agree he is not just any Catholic. If a Catholic cab-driver in the Bronx had made a comment such as: “Why is the abuser of minors sick and not the homosexual?” I could shrug it off as the comments of an ignorant man. But if there is one thing I know about the RCC is that the men they promote tend to be be educated and intelligent.
Given his age, it is likely the Bishop was appointed by John-Paul II or by the present Pope, both arch-conservatives. Surely they would have carefully reviewed Alvarez’ opinions, sermons, declarations and general reputation before making him a Bishop.
Besides, it is more than one Bishop and one priest. I have debated or discussed with several priests who have made this sly reference to “protecting children” when it comes to gay people. Each time I have come up with the crude but effective answer that it is not really gay men who seem to have trouble keeping it in their pants around kids.
Canadian Bishops campaigning against gay marriage have pulled out the “child protection” card on more than one occasion.
The campaign run by Anita Bryant in Dade County Miami in the 1970s, which sucessfully overturned an anti-discrimination ordonnance to protect gays, was warmly supported by the Bishop of Miami who sent a letter read in his churches before the vote. Bryant’s campaign was entitled “Save our Children”.
A number of years ago (about 10 or 15, sorry, I have no cite easily available but I might be able to find it) the RCC Bishop of British Columbia got in a dispute with the teachers’ union because he insisted that teachers in Catholic Schools had to sign a “lifestyle and morals” agreement regarding their private lives. The issue concerned more than gays, I admit, but the comments about protecting children from gay teachers were a major component of the debate.
A document put out around 1999 under the approval of John-Paul II (and likely written by Ratzinger, since it quotes extensively from a document by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) is entitled “Some Considerations Concerning the Catholic Response to Legislative Proposals on the Non-Discrimination of Homosexual Persons” fundamentally attacks the idea that gay people should be legally protected from discrimination, and essentially endorses the idea that having homosexuals near children presents a danger.
An interesting quote:
"Such initiatives (to make public housing available to gay and unmarried ciouples) even where they seem more directed toward support of basic civil rights than condonment of homosexual activity or a homosexual lifestyle, may in fact have a negative impact on the family and society.
and further:
“There are areas in which it is not unjust to take sexual orientation into account, for example, in the consignment of children to adoption or foster care, in employment of teachers or coaches, and in military recruitment.”
This document, published at the same time as charges of child sexual abuse by priests were exploding all over the world, clearly delivers the message that gays are dangerous to have around children.
Finally, Tomndebb, I would submit the evidence that gay people throughout the world have noted this subtle but very real tendency of the RCC to shift the blame to homosexuality itself. The quote I gave from the gay Magazine “Fab” in which it is suggested that the working title of the colouring book should have been “Keep it in your Pants, Monsignor!” is harsh, but it is based on a deep resentment in the gay community where this trend has been noticed.
May I submit to you, Tom (unless you are Jewish or Black yourself), that if a Jew were to say he has detected increased anti-semitism or a black were to say he has noted more racism, you would at least admit that their impression deserves some credence, since you have not lived their experience?
Again, you provide no evidence that such “strategic” motives or gamesmanship are in play when/if a Catholic official says “we’ve concluded homosexual priests are a risk factor for abuse.” You seem certain that no one could ever sincerely hold this belief, so that only a “subtle strategy” could be underway.
I don’t agree. I think that they really believe in the causal linkage they posit, even if you do not.
For instance, Richard John Neuhaus, who’s been a priest for years, believes it, and has long argued that what he has seen in the seminaries is linked to the abuse scandals, paceCaptain Amazing.
N.B. that Neuhaus is not a part of the Church hierarchy; he’s a mere diocesan priest (albeit an opinionated one). Are he, and everyone at the far-from-reactionary or Establishment-friendly Commonweal – also in on the “subtle strategy?”
In the first place, I never said that they all got together to set out a formal strategy in secret. I am not alleging some kind of “Protocol of the Elders of Zion”.
However, both of the quotes you give clearly show a desire, which is all too natural and all too human, to shift the blame. The second quote essentially says that the “evil” of homosexuality permeated seminaries and may have led to the abuse. So the Church is the victim and homosexuality is the villain. See how it works?
As to your oft-repeated statistic that 80% of the victims of priestly abuse are boys, making it a “homosexual” thing, may I also conclude that a whopping 20% of the sex abuse problem is due to the infiltration of heterosexuality in Catholic seminaries?
And I would like you to answer my question? How commonly are schools for girls run by priests, compared to schools for boys. How many altar girls compared to altar boys? Do you think availability could have som,ething to do with yopur 80% statistic?
If a girl is molested in her home by her father or brothers, are families very likely to have this problem aired and recorded in statistics, btw.
