They have just as much access, in the same situations, for the same reasons, to women as to kids. If they want women, they can get them just as easily as they could kids. Plain and simple, if they get kids, it’s because it’s kids they want.
No problem. I just think that the RCC is not as different as it looks in a lot of ways. It’s just more single structure, so to speak, so it’s sometimes more visible.
I think it’s probably a very good thing for those for whom it works. Support from like-minded friends is almost always helpful. But it isn’t going to work for everyone. And I do think they need to take a better look at their priest candidates. Looking for support is one thing, trying to escape from themselves is another.
Well, right, I’m not really saying anything either way–I was just using those as examples for what people could mean in either explanation.
Nevertheless, that’s the data. Most likely the two factors that you’d see would be either inherent sociopathic tendencies or having himself been molested as a child and so have it registered as an outlet for frustration in his head. It’s very hard to say because there’s a motive for people to come up with excuses so as to get more favorable treatment, so you end up getting lots of people saying that they were raped as a child when quite possibly they’re just naturally amoral bastards.
Some people just are bad people. If they’re feeling cranky and they see someone who they think they can safely abuse, they’ll do it. That number just happens to appear to be a larger number than the number of people who desire underaged partners for sexual purposes to such a large extent as to actively live their life around it.
It’s estimated that 0.6% to 1% of the population is clinically sociopathic. Assuming a fairly even spread among occupations, 0.6-1% of teachers will be sociopathic. An even greater amount will have some sort of sociopathic tendencies (i.e. non-clinically sociopathic). Do you have any particular reason to think that a sociopath wouldn’t take advantage of his students?
Agreed 100%. The exact sentiment of my earlier post.
Edit: Also, I love your username.
If you can’t think of any particular motive I might have, isn’t that sort of evidence that I don’t have one?
Absolutely. And I think it would be interesting, and perhaps instructive, for the Church to take a look at the various orders of priests (not talking about parish priests here, but rather priests who live in community, like, for example, Jesuits or Franciscans). Many of the orders run large educational institutions (I went to Jesuit school myself) and have at least equal access to young boys and girls as do parish priests. But I think the incidence of accusations of sexual abuse is lower among the orders. Could that be because the men live in a supportive community, rather than on their own or with just one or two other men, like parish priests?
It’s also true that some of the orders are much more selective about who can join (the Jesuits particularly so).
Not being a religious person myself I’m having trouble with this ‘apology’ specifically:
What were the difficulties involved in grasping the fact that molesting children is wrong and that any person, priest or not, that does such a thing should be in jail? What am I missing here?
At least he is offering some concrete solutions.
Yea - more Sky Fairy Mumbo-Jumbo. That’ll do the trick.
What he needs to do is step down because he is responsible for covering up and moving child rapists around so they could destroy as many lives as possible. After that he needs to turn himself into the police and thrown in prison where hopefully karma will deal with that vile piece of garbage.
Quite. He and the RC have been aiding and abetting child abuse for decades. The RC is guilty of institutionalised child abuse.
His ‘apology’ even manages to blame Vatican II as if that in some way made the whole ‘Abusing kiddies - right or wrong?’ question obscure.
And still no word on co-operating with the Irish Inquiry.
But couldn’t, “I’m really stressed out” be just as much an excuse? Pedophiles and predators do tend to be very self justifying. It seems to me that that could be a justification. Like, “I"m not really attracted to kids, I was just having a bad day at work…”
There’s this:
ie. The Catholic hierarchy in Ireland is at fault for letting this thing go on, and they should cooperate with civil authorities.
Just speculating here, obviously, but I’m wondering if that also could come from greater accountability, in the group setting, and less of the feeling of being set apart and special that seems to go along with being a parish priest sometimes. It’s harder to think you deserve what you want when all your compatriots are just like you and you’re not the one everybody looks to.
Might it help, do you think, if priests were re-assigned more frequently? Or if they had somewhat regular assignments to a group setting? Say, four years or so in a parish and then six months with the Order, or some such as that. It seems to me that serving a parish could be pretty isolating.
I don’t know. It might help, I guess, but I don’t see how the Church could rotate people in and out of religious orders – it just doesn’t work that way.
Yes, serving a parish can be isolating, especially today, when so many parishes have only one priest. I think of all the Jesuits I knew who lived in a group in the city where they worked, and they were going home at the end of the day (typically teaching), to what was essentially a dorm, with people around, and perhaps a communal dinner, certainly a bit of free time to talk and just hang out, and then I think of the parish priest, who’s often just rattling around in a big old empty rectory. That kind of isolation can’t be good.
A great deal. For a start did he say that molesting children wasn’t wrong? I doubt it. For every complex problem there is someone who thinks strawmanning and simplistic ranting is a solution.
I can’t speak for every diocese or seminary, but the only way the Church could have scrutinized me more to have interviewed all my relations. I had a psychological evaluation, multiple interviews by both the diocese and the seminary, two background checks, and then there would have been further six years of observation and reviews during my seminary formation. I only stayed for a year and a half (I liked seminary, but it just wasn’t my calling), but I was evaluated at least half a dozen times. In fact the knowledge that we were under constant scrutiny was a little stressful.
“You’ll come for the communion wafers, you’ll stay for the altar boys” was a popular priest recruitment slogan for a while. Sounded much better in Latin though.
Or, just as likely, ‘I was seduced by a wicked child!’
Of course, this doesn’t work quite as well when the child is a boy. Which may explain why, as in several cases including those in the aforementioned documentary Deliver Us From Evil, molesting girls was often overlooked, but molesting boys got, well, got them moved to another town. So almost overlooked.