I doubt there are any parishes where there are no children. If you acted to keep it quiet, you should be prosecuted.
I’d let prosecutors figure it out. I don’t know what the laws say and how much responsibility each person can be said to have. I’m not opposed to sentences and jail for anyone who deliberately looked the other way or acted to cover for a child abuser.
You don’t get to decide all by your lonesome if you’ve adequately dealt with a crime. Dealing with a crime means getting the police and prosecutors involved. You especially cannot be trusted to make that decision if your actions are also part of a coverup because you have a conflict of interest: what if making sure it can’t happen anymore involves something that might result in exposure? At some point you’re going to choose keeping it quiet over preventing future crimes.
Maybe a worldwide ban on the Catholic Church running schools, orphanages and youth clubs, or any enterprises involving children.
And perhaps they could tell starving people in the Third World that its not a deadly sin using contraception, but having children that you can’t feed and then them starving to death probably is.
I am very bemused by non-Catholics who become upset at the Catholic doctrine concerning the exclusively male nature of the priesthood.
Catholics do not ordain women because they do not believe women are capable of transforming bread and wine into flesh and blood. The only way to criticize this policy is to say “No, women ARE capable of transforming bread and wine into flesh and blood”. And that is a highly religious argument.
It’s pointless to bring modern secular ideas about sexual equality into this debate, because modern secular ideas do not recognize the supernatural. According to modern secular ideas there shouldn’t be such a thing as a Catholic priesthood at all.
I’m sure there are laws applicable to every instance but personally i would put almost the entire hierarchy of the church in jail for the same amount of time as the molesters.
This is probably why a lot of people are suggesting that the Catholic Church would need to disband. I didn’t know not being sexist and being Catholic were mutually exclusive. There are many churches out there that ordain female priests. So if not ordaining female priests is a fundamental belief that would tear down the entire Catholic doctrine, then I suppose I too would agree it needs to disband to make amends.
The Pope, the College of Cardinals, and every bishop and archbishop would have to kneel in columns in St. Peter’s Square and shoot themselves, thus castrating their church forever.
Then the Catholics need to keep clear of the contraception debate, as they seem determined to force women who are not Catholic to follow their beliefs. Let them forbid women who are brainwashed, self-hating and/or dumb enough to be Catholics to use contraception, but they have to STFU about what women who are not Catholics do or don’t do.
Marrying preists or not may be more problematical, since women who are not Catholics probably do not often find themselves wanting to marry preists.
Engage in one of the ceremonies of the faith: confess.
Simply admit, out right and up front, that they did wrong, and in detail. When prosecutors make use of that, continue: admit what was done in formal legal deposition, and again before a judge. Confess, and do so willingly.
Without reading any replies yet and speaking as a former Catholic.
Purge the leadership from the Pope on down and turn them over to civil authorities if they were in any way part of the coverup of the sex abuse scandal
Open up the Vatican archives. The treasures they have (ie stolen) belongs to the world, not to a bunch of old sex perverts.
Get out of politics and only concern themselves with matters of faith
End the Vatican city-state status
Actually help people without trying to get them to convert or join the church
Just as Penn State now has to reform the institutional culture that permitted protection and encouragement of child rape, so does the RCC has to reform its own. I don’t see how to do that short of eliminating the encrusted institutional practices that have created a leadership culture that includes perversion and abuse - the medieval doctrines of celibacy and men-only priesthood. It all stems from that. But it won’t change as long as its leadership must be submissive to a leader who is selected only from its ranks, one who epitomizes that diseased culture.
IOW, its adherents who are disgusted by all that, but sill want to feel part of all the good stuff, can check out the Episcopalians. That’s probably the only option in this generation.
The Catholic Church does NOT have an exclusively celibate priesthood, however. There are currently thousands of married priests in the Eastern Rite, and hundreds of married priests (mostly former Protestant ministers) in the Western Rite, all with the full blessing of the Vatican.
While you’re fantasizing about bloody, painful retribution, please keep in mind that pedophiles exist in all religions and professions, including yours, in surprisingly comparable numbers as they do in the Catholic priesthood. And they’re good at gaming the system there, too.
