Of the recent controversy concerning The Catholic Church and little boys ETC, I have one question. Why does the fact that they were Catholic or not? Does religion really have to do with any of this?
The press is 100% right to mention the religion. It’s the only thing that will pressure these people not to cover things up, and surely the public has a definite right to know as much as possible about where child molestors might be lurking.
Unlike most religions, the Catholic Church requires priests to be celibate. But this sort of abuse happens with other religious authority figures, plus boy scout troop leaders, etc, and again the press has a duty to tell us.
There are two parts to the scandal, and the what the priests did doesn’t have anything to do with Catholicism.Others molest children ,too. What the Bishops apparently did (reasssigning priests who were accused of or even admitted to this behavior,while making no effort to keep them away from children) is another story. And I don’t know that the second part is likely to happen in too many other religions.Not because other religions are any better, but simply because, as far as I can tell, most don’t have the sort of system that the Catholic church does, where the priests are assigned by the diocese and are employees of the diocese. It’s one thing if a minister is fired by a congregation for sexually abusing a child and gets hired by another congregation that doesn’t know the history. It’s different if officials know a priest has been accused of sexual abuse in parish A, and simply send him on to parish B ,where he may be put in charge of the altar servers because even the pastor isn’t told of his history.
Doreen
“Under pressure from consumer watchdog groups, a Big Corporation has apologized for producing merchandise which resulted in the deaths of several cute babies”
Wouldn’t you want to know who the Corporation is?