As an analogy, Ford Motor makes cars. They have exclusive relationships with various dealers who sell those cars… “Brown’s Ford,” sells and services Ford cars.
Now we have John, a mechanic at Brown’s Ford, who intentionally damages cars when he works on them, and falsely claims that work needs to be done, in order to increase his own income.
John can, and should, be fined and jailed for his actions. Brown’s Ford may be fined as well, if they were negligent in hiring or training him, or if his actions were in furtherance of their business.
That’s the whole problem. You guys are acting like each diocese operates completely in isolation. In a strictly legal sense, that may be true, but in practice it’s clearly false. There’s coordination between dioceses, each belonging to a hierarchy, and a culture of abuse and cover-up within that hierarchy is evident.
If the Church wants to pretend that the legal truth is the whole truth, so be it, but that will only further sour their reputation.
You know, after ten years hanging around this place I should know better than play pedantic games with retired lawyers. I missed the part of his claim that it was specifically new priests, so that’s a fair call.
I didn’t say that the church didn’t. I said that my perception is that it cares more about that fiduciary responsibility than it does about the safety of it’s members. The way that Pell has been sheltered by the Vatican just strengthens that perception in my mind. Can you cite anything that shows the church putting victims of sexual abuse ahead of it’s priesthood? Not words from some bigwig claiming that it’s doing so, but actual actions taken by the church or priesthood?
What amazes me after seventeen years of hanging around this place is the unwillingness of so many people to acknowledge their own error. I appreciate the fact that you are not in that group.
Yes.
The new policy adopted by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops requires an immediate report to civil authorities and an immediate suspension from ministry when an accusation against a priest is made, in contrast to policies that left the reporting entirely discretionary.
Here is one example of that policy being carried out. The suspended priest has had no opportunity to defend himself, no chance to confront his accuser, none of the protections that would ordinarily be in place before a government or an employer takes such action. But the new policy places the need for safety above those protections and the priest is suspended first, while the investigation commences.
The problem is, it took real world consequences for the Church to do what is right. And that is not the way things should be in a Church. A Church is supposed to be, above all, good. And that goodness should go above the requirements of the law.
Of course the Church should choose to do what is right before the law tells them to. To get all James on you, even the heathens follow the law when they are afraid of being punished.
Look, I have no idea how the law will work. I know how it should work, but I don’t know how it does. But that has no relevance as far as I’m concerned. The law is just this thing that forces horrible people to do a semblance of what is right. Good people don’t need the law to dictate how they act. Heck, Good people will violate the law if the law is not good.
And that is the bare minimum I expect out of every single clergy person. If they can’t adhere to that, then we need to be trying to tear them down and replace them with someone who will.
The church set up “Towards Healing” in Australia. I don’t know much about it but I understand it involved money, apologies and so on. IIRC it was set up in significant part because of a recognition that legal problems such as time limitations, the inability to find a financially viable defendant and so on were hurting victims.
It’s been criticised as not working fully in practice, and the financial settlements offered being too low, but it seems to have been well intended. However, given that (a) the church probably had no legal liability and (b) the victims were unlikely ever to recognise any amount as being sufficient, I think it’s hard to objectively deny that the church was trying to take an ethical approach rather than one based on hard nosed protection of its assets.
You can read about it a bit hereand actually the article as a whole is a good read because it describes the issues discussed by **Bricker **and I in this thread and it is neither condemning of the church nor supporting.
Finally, I’m curious about the allegation that Pell is being sheltered by the Vatican. How precisely has Pell been sheltered? Again I am not a historian of the subject, but as I understand it, he’s given evidence to at least two commissions, he’s had complaints to police against him investigated fully (and he co-operated in those investigations) and so on. How exactly has he been meaningfully sheltered? Feel free to be precise.
The point you are missing is this: if someone for whom a diocese is responsible did something wrong, nobody here is saying their diocese should not be liable. If a person committed or aided and abetted abuse, then that person and (if they are person for whom a diocese has responsibility) their diocese should be liable.
The dioceses don’t act in isolation; but the extent to which they should be responsible for one another should depend on precisely what they did together not on some vague allegation they don’t act in isolation.
The problem is that (as is usually the case with bigotry) you want to gloss over the whole issue of considering whether any given person or entity actually did anything wrong. Doesn’t matter if a given diocese had no abuse problems and didn’t participate in a cover up, all them [del]Jews[/del]Catholics are the same, they’re all in on it.
But I am not going to debate requirements of morality with BigT, because he and I don’t share a common framework from which to deduce moral principles. He makes broad assertions about what is moral from his point of view, and implicitly demands that these claims be accepted as universal principles.
I don’t concede to him the power or insight to declare universally applicable moral principles, much less operating principles for the Church or what it means to “fight the good fight.”
While that is the general rule, it is by no means absolute even in US law. I am not Catholic, of course, but I suspect that the average parishioner (lacking your knowledge of canon law and the corporate structure of the church) would be surprised to learn that the church is insulated from the liability for the actions of its dioceses.
Hmm, yes. Having no tolerance for a systemic culture of abuse and cover-up in an organisation which claims the ultimate moral high-ground is exactly like anti-semitism.
And “systemic” is the keyword there. It seems to me that it’s easier for you to shout “bigotry” than to actually listen to what people are saying. This is not about targeting unrelated dioceses; it’s about recognising that the organisation itself has a toxic culture even if individual parts seem to operate well enough.