Right. So the parents who send their children to my local Catholic school in Brisbane (which has a reputation for good caring teachers and effective learning) are enabling and approving a priest in Ireland who molests boys.
The RCC is enormous. It is far from unitary. It is not all one legal entity. While there is in theory a unitary management structure, it is loose to an extent such as to make nonsense of the notion that every far flung RCC body is governed from Rome.
In other words your post shows the level of wisdom and perspective we have come to expect from you.
I’m with Beardpig and Der Trihs on this one. The problem with the slippery Catholic church is that is presents itself in two diametrically opposite ways. Sometimes being a Catholic is an individual feeling a personal connection with God; but at other times, the Church presents itself as an very clearly defined organization with strict tenets and hierarchical decisions.
Whenever an individual Catholic wants to distance his or herself from the latter, they claim to be really the former. And how would it be possible to sever ties with that personal connection because of what some individuals do?
But when that same Catholic wants to make moral decisions for his or her personal life based on that individually felt connection to God and " good" , the Church yells at him to get back in his cage and that the only way to God is their way.
The last part of your post is a laughable caricature. The RCC doesn’t and has no means by which to know or do anything about much of what Catholics do. They aren’t Big Brother, even if parts of the hierarchy would like them to be. They don’t have a camera in every home let alone in every mind.
And the rest of your post is a perfect illustration of how the organisation is so loose and disparate that to blame one person in one part of it for the acts of another person a world away is monstrously unjust.
My consistent view is that major religions are more akin to cultures than unitary bodies or distinct philosophies. Blaming a Catholic in New Zealand for being part of the RCC due to something somone in the RCC did in the US is like blaming a modern German for WWII or all Americans for My Lai.
You do realise that Catholic sexual abuse of children has also been horrifically common in Australia and New Zealand too, right? Complete with the attendant suicides of victims, moving priests to other parishes and not telling anyone and all the rest of the sickening assistance given to paedophiles every where else int he world?
Are the parents who send their children to your local Catholic school in Brisbane also not enabling and approving apriest in Brisbane who molests boys.
What about the priest in that very parish who molested boys? How about a priest in that very school?
It never ceases to amaze me the excuses that people will make for their religions. I suspect that if I could provide iron clad evidence that priests at that very school were anally raping children last weak, you still would not accept that the parents paying money to that school were in any way responsible.
A “loose, disparate” organization that managed a decades-long, systematic international cover-up of child molesting priests, complete with moving them between parishes and nations to keep them ahead of their reputations. That’s an odd definition of “loose”.
You know, I don’t think I have ever agreed with Der Trihs on anything, but in this he is dead right.
The kind of international conspiracy that the church engaged in with sexual abuse, with the literal complicity of all levels of the heirarchy from laiety to the Pope himself makes any claim that the church is a “loose, disparate” organisation absolutely laughable.
quite, The RCC, practically since its inception has been a moral blot on the face of the world. Only the nature and scale of its crimes against humanity change over time.
Yes of course. They send their kids to their local Catholic school because they approve of boys being fucked up the ass by priests. Are you actually thinking about what you are saying before you are saying it? Have you, for a single moment, attempted to think about it from the point of view of such a parent and their subjective views? If you haven’t you aren’t getting to grips with the topic, and if you have and still think parents approve of molestation you are a fool.
And you really can be a dumbshit sometimes Blake. I’m an atheist, I’ve posted to that effect in innumerable threads on these boards and said as much in an earlier posting in this thread. I wouldn’t send my children to a religious school in a blue fit. Your assumptions about what excuses I would make for “my religion” (snerk) are about as accurate as the rest of your thoughts on this subject. Unlike you I’m not so blinkered that I immediately assume someone must be of the same worldview as those they stand up for. Perhaps you are projecting.
And Der Trihs, you may think the RCC can’t be loose or disparate because of such control as it can exercise, but then of course it’s not as if any catholics use birth control, right?
Hardly; it’s that they don’t care or in denial about it. The Church is Good, it must be Good, and no facts that contradict that Goodness are permissible or thinkable. The same thing that let the Church get away with what it did for so very long. If it comes down to a choice between the welfare of their child and the reputation of the Church, any good believer will sacrifice their child. And that’s exactly what parent after parent did.
Birth control isn’t nearly as important. Using birth control doesn’t risk the reputation or income of the Church, it doesn’t threaten the priesthood’s alleged moral authority. And that’s the laity anyway, not the hierarchy of the church; they aren’t “the organization” in the first place.
And most importantly we know what it did, and a “loose disparate” organization simply could not have done that.
Actually, the Pope upheld an excommunication of any Call to Action members. So those that practice (or even advocate) contraception are in danger of not being allowed to receive communion from their local parish (and if a priest is found to advocate contraception then he too will be recalled, so he has good reason to enforce that rule). Jesus may have been the first one to bring a charge of thought crime against the populace, what with their lusting in their own hearts.
Besides, observant Catholics donate money every week which goes towards the hundreds of millions the Church has had to pay out to victims of rape. I say this as someone that still infrequently attends Church and puts money in the collection, trying not to think about where the funds will go.
Fortunately for priests, but unfortunately for the rest of us, using birth control is not necessary when fucking young boys. If it were, they wouldn’t do it, because birth control is immoral.
On a more serious note, given the times and the attitudes toward homosexuality back then, I would be surprised if this, er… remedy was restricted to the Dutch Catholic church, or any church for that matter.
I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to find out that there are thousands of men all over the world who were castrated during the same period, and have never spoken out due to fear or shame.
Thomas Jefferson recommended castration for homosexuals and that was the progressive option.
Actually, that’s probably the most progressive option for sex offenders now (probably not physical castration and with post-18th century surgical techniques if necessary) given that aversion therapy has been pretty much conclusively shown to be ineffective.
Let me tweak your analogy to make it a little more accurate:
If we where to find out that:
in every state in the country Apple Geniuses were stalking and raping customers using information gathered on the job
every level of the Apple corporation, including Steve Jobs, was aware of this
the Geniuses were “forgiven” and moved to different stores multiple times to keep them ahead of police investigations but still given access to customer information
orders were given to fire, blackball, and destroy anyone who made this public at the specific direction Tim Cook (current CEO)
all this came out years ago
the company still holds itself blameless and fights any call for change
would you still hold those who continue to work for Apple and own its stock blameless?
There’s one big reason why I’m gonna cut the Roman Catholic Church a lot less slack than I’d give the U.S. government.
We’d like to believe our government acts within some sort of moral code, but OTOH we know that governments, almost by design, aren’t always moral entities, and they weren’t set up that way. Governments are always going to be doing morally dubious things in the name of protecting their citizens, for instance.
But the Church is supposedly the expression of Jesus Christ on earth. It exists only for the purpose of being a positive moral force in the world. If it is involved in great and widespread evil, then it undermines its very reason for being.
Besides, we don’t need to have a Roman Catholic Church: if it’s not being a force for good, then the world will be no worse off when it sells off everything it owns, distributes the proceeds to its victims, and goes out of business.
But regardless of the evil that various governments have done, including ours, the reality is that the world needs governments: Hobbes was right in his belief that even a very evil government can be better than no government at all, though one can argue over where one would draw the line. Certainly the people of the United States, and the world for that matter, would be much worse off if the U.S. government dissolved itself over shame for everything from Jim Crow to torturing persons captured in our recent overseas adventures.
Seriously. There were fucking assholes doing “scientific” experiments on uninformed test subjects back when Og wanted to see what would happen if he hit people on the head with a rock.
But much as I hate the Baby Boomers for many things, I have to admit that they had some pretty awesome ideas about how women and brown people and even young people (teens, lets not go crazy and include small children) are quite possibly thinking, feeling human beings just like white men and maybe we should respect that. More importantly, they had the guts and the energy and the sheer mass of numbers to make laws protecting rights for those groups.
I don’t think it’s that the 1950s were particularly ripe with assholes, I think it’s that most of history was ripe with assholes, and the 1960’s and continuing on to today has seen vast strides in eroding the paternalistic view of medicine and science and bolstering the right to informed consent and ethical standards for research.
How on earth did Operation Gladio protect US citizens? Perhaps their investments or the growing tide of… I don’t know, democratic sentiment, but certainly not actual US citizens…
Yeah, that’s the point that the apologists never seem to get. The ones who say ridiculous stuff like “If you look at the statistics, catholic priests rape young boys with the same frequency as the population as a whole! So they aren’t more evil than anyone else!”
