That makes as much sense as people who say that Catholic priests would be less inclined to molest children if they could get married. Human sexuality just doesn’t work that way (in most cases).
The Amish got clergy? I had no idea. In a lot of the Anabaptist sects everyone is sort of their own clergy. Shows you what I know.
Each small congregation elects a man to lead them. They’re not professional clergy, it’s sort of a part-time side gig although very important to the community as a whole. And quite the honor, since it has to be earned, although it can also be seen as a burden.
And that’s about all I know on that particular subject.
Based on the the article they deal with ‘annoying’ problems like abuse by simply shunning the accused for 6 weeks, the accused repents and then everything is back to the way it was, abuse and all.
So maybe don’t peddle the BS about them ‘internally dealing’ with the issue. Actual law enforcement and prison sentences would have to be involved for any semblance of justice. Anything else is pretty laughable.
Depends how appropriate you think it is to laugh at other cultures.
Weird Al did.
Weird Al did, with Michelle Pfeiffer as an accomplice.
Oops, double post!
[quote=“nearwildheaven, post:27, topic:846468”]
Weird Al did, with Michelle Pfeiffer as an accomplice.
[/QUOTE]I think that’s Florence Henderson. Fun video though. I grew up and again live in a very Amish town.
That is my favorite Weird Al video.
If Catholic priests were allowed to get married the Catholic church have a much larger pool of candidates to choose from and they could afford to cull some of the pedophiles who currently slip through the system. That’s the benefit of allowing priests to marry. Nobody thinks that priests are fucking alter boys because they can’t get married.
I had Tivo’d some true-crime TV shows, and watched a show about this man just last night. I knew about him killing his son, and quite likely his wife, but not other people as well.
ETA: This is also the first I saw that his wife was pregnant at the time of her death.
This argument is invalid because according to the available data, Catholic priests are not more likely to commit child sexual abuse than men in general are. The Catholic Church’s problem is not that it ordains disproportionate numbers of pedophiles, but that it’s perpetuated an ineffective and corrupt institutional accountability system for dealing with abuse.
Really, that’s your position? That there are no more pedophiles among the priesthood than among the general population?
Let me come up with an analogy. Suppose you’ve got a baseball team, and you hire only unmarried players. Your team has a terrible record, and someone says that if you didn’t care about marital status you’d have a wider pool of candidates to choose from, but you say, no, they don’t strike out any more than the average guy on the street.
I submit that they should be striking out less than the average guy on the street.
When you hire a priest, you’re putting someone in immense moral authority in close proximity to impressionable youngsters. That person should not be just as likely as anyone to ass rape children. That person should be much less likely to ass rape children. Being just as good as the average person shouldn’t be good enough, not by half, but because the pool of men willing to give up a normal life to become priests is so limited the church can’t sort out those possible pedophiles. Hell, they can’t even dismiss those proven pedophiles, moving them from diocese to diocese hoping it’ll somehow work out next time.
Except that according to that article, insurance companies that offer sexual abuse coverage to churches don’t charge Catholic churches a higher rate than other denominations, which means they don’t see Catholic churches as a higher risk than denominations that do not restrict their clergy to unmarried men. Using your analogy, they don’t strike out any more often than the teams that don’t care about marital status.
Your analogy is absurd. Baseball teams select from a very limited pool of people who are talented and trained at playing baseball; whether they’re married or unmarried has nothing to do with it. A team with a terrible record would be far better off raising the standards for its recruits’ baseball skills than tinkering with its policy on players’ marital status.
And the point is, as doreen noted, that the Catholic Church does not in fact have a terrible record for percentage of pedophilic abusers among its personnel, compared to other institutions closely involved with young people which don’t impose a celibacy requirement on their staff. In fact, its institutional record for incidence of pedophilic abusers is about average. There is absolutely no evidence-based reason to believe that this incidence would be lower if the Church had been admitting married men to the priesthood all along.
What the Catholic Church does have a terrible record on, as you note, is its institutional policies of accountability for dealing with pedophilic abusers. But then again, some other institutions with no celibacy requirement also have terrible records on this score. Again, there’s no evidence-based reason to believe that the Church would have had different policies on shielding abusive priests if it had allowed priests to marry.
It varies from community to community and your local Ordnung/rules but you have your local Parson who is chosen by God (his name is pulled out of a hat) and Bishops who oversee x-number of Parsons in their region. Parson is usually an unpaid office and you serve for life while Bishops usually receive some compensation and are the closest to professional clergy. But you are right in a sense as like with Lutherans most OOD believe in the “priesthood of all Believers”. In some settlements teachers are considered as a part of “the clergy” as religious training and prayer are a part of Amish schools but the whole Amish school system thing is newer among the families/places I am familiar with.
Now personally ------- I am amazed at how good the average Parson is; and the dedication of the Bishops. I love the ELCA, don’t get me wrong ------- but if our people, with all their education and vetting procedures, were half as good we would have a lot more butts in the pews on an average Sunday.