That doesn’t make much sense to me. What’s the saying - “Making the perfect the enemy of the good”? Because an organization falls short of the high moral ideals it sets for itself, it should just pack it in? We’d lose not only all religions, but many charities, non-profit organizations, the UN…
There’s a rather large gap between “perfect” and “just doing the minimum required by law”. An organization or person claiming to be some kind of moral arbiter may not be perfect, but it had better be quite a bit better than the legal minimum to deserve to be taken seriously.
The church doesn’t even get within 5 light years of perfect. Year after year, decade after decade, century after century the church conspires with the rich and the powerful and actively engages in crimes against humanity in the broader ‘interest’ of itself or according to whatever flavour of mumbo-jumbo it subscribes to at the time.
I doubt there has been any ‘good’ Pope in the last 1500 years apart from the guy who dropped dead in a month or so. And now we have the current evil little incumbent - up to his eyeballs in the active cover-up of the child scandals. And on whose watch the church is still fighting tooth and nail against disclosure, against compensation, against the primacy of national legal systems all the while shedding crocodile tears about how ‘sorry’ the church is.
A truly ‘sorry’ church would not have elected this Pope, would not continue to obstruct justice, would not continue to shelter wanted abusers within the wall of the Vatican.
You might as well ask the Mafia to reform itself as ask the Church.
And as just one example of hook-wriggling. And remember they tried this in the USA also (with similar results). They claim priests are not ‘employees’ so the church isn’t liable for their actions.
No ‘penitent’ organisation would even try to run with that defence.
I never before considered the avoidance of institutionalized child buggering to be a high moral ideal. To me it is pretty basic.
For example, lets look at a short list of high moral ideals:
[ul]
[li]Encourge world peace.[/li][li]Feed the hungry.[/li][li]Stop institutionally ass fucking youngsters in its care.[/li][/ul]
Somehow that last one just doesn’t seem to fit in the high moral goals category, unless, of course, the organiztion is grossly debased in the first place. If that’s the case, then that organization ought to disband.
Quite.
Or kidnapping babies (Spain, Canada, Argentina etc etc). Or castrating orphans in its care (Holland). Or electing morally corrupt popes. Or not offering safe haven to wanted abusers within the Vatican. Or lying about contraception and Aids.
Etc etc etc etc.
Sputnik could come in under that bar. Not the RC though. IMHO the RC is ripe for prosecution under a wide range of racketeering and crimes against humanity codes.
Oh, gimme a break. What I said was, “It claims special moral standing, and in fact has no reason to exist as it is if it lacks that standing.”
Most charities and nonprofits have plenty of reason to exist if they’re doing good, even if they’re not doing as much good as one would hope for. Ditto the UN.
Religions, though, are a bit of a special case, because they do in fact claim special moral standing, and they don’t have a reason to exist if they fail to live up to it.
But we’re not talking perfection here - at least, I’m not. What’s involved in maintaining one’s moral standing is the usual stuff that any person of integrity does: setting high standards for oneself, trying to attain them, being honest about one’s failures, and making amends where appropriate.
Those last two apply to the RCC in a rather obvious way right now.
And if a religious denomination isn’t willing to apply to itself the standards that a person of integrity would apply to him/herself, that would be a pretty crappy religion and probably should have the sense to either reform or go out of business, don’t you think?
First punish the offenders. Countries have laws and sentencing for pedophilia and rape so sentence the priests who have done those deeds and covered up for them to the appropriate punishments.
Second, restitution. For the harm of covering up the untold decades of molestation going on, let the courts again decide civilly what the penalty should be.
Last, make sure this can’t happen again. I like what some people suggested already like removing the diplomatic protection of the Vatican (they are simply not a country. They’re a large religious organization. If they want to operate from a central location, choose a country and base yourself out of it), and allowing women into all levels of the priesthood including having the first Pope after this scandal be a woman. Also let priests marry, update their rules to allow condom use and pragmatic sexual teachings, remove all Cardinals and Bishops currently serving and ban them from the church for life, elect whole new ones to replace them including having proportional representation from all of its countries, make it a policy to never speak of, about, or on politics. If they want to keep thinking that god favors them, then they need not care about the laws of men. They should never be in politics or part of it in any way
As far as Canada goes, the kidnapping of babies was the residential school system, which was run by churches (RC about 60%, Anglican and United or United’s predecessors for most of the rest) which were funded by the government. The residential school system was so profoundly flawed that the government terminateed it entirely, paid compensation, and formally apologized.
Sure. I was thinking of this as well.
Cue no doubt the next version of the ‘these people? Never seen them before in our lives’ defence from the RC.
If they would open all of the Vatican secret archives to the public, that would be good enough for me. I guarantee you there’s some crazy shit in there.
Thanks for pointing that out.
yeah 2,000 years of manipulation and cover ups would be awesome
Sell all the Church has and give it to the poor. That’s what Jesus would do, anyway.