" The first five or six times the father O’Malley fucked me down the throat I vomited right away afterwards.
He punched me in the stomach over and over and beat me on my back so that the bruises could not be seen by anybody who looked at me wearing a short-sleeve shirt.
He told me if I didn’t stop vomiting that he would tell my parents I was a bad student and he would throw me out of school. So I stopped throwing up and started swallowing. "
Think long and hard before you call bullshit on the quotation marks.
Trust me. Any child who is sexually abused knows full well that they are being victimized.
People see priests and somehow think that maybe they WERE chosen by this god because they are godly. They’re the closest communicators with it, right? They should automatically be respected because… because? They went to school and studied texts, swore on an oath and this makes them godly? Why don’t people do this with dentists and surgeons? We can see their work and they save lives and livelihood. Why will people still insist that those who obsess over ancient stories are above the rest of us? I don’t see professors of ancient Sumerian texts as protected as priests. They take an oath to the schools they teach in.
This line of thinking leads to politics and funding. A priest that openly backs a candidate gives that candidate a big edge. And for what? Why? It’s almost the same thing where when people put money in a collection plate, they’re convinced god sees this and maybe grants them heaven access? There’s no way that all the collections go to “poor children” or “building a new church wing”. To this day, I don’t see why palm readers aren’t shown the same dippy respect. They’re one and the same to me. And the priests are protected by ignorance and mythology.
Depends on the level and situation; my brother was 9 when he told me he didn’t want to go see the footie with Grandpa any more because “I like talking about asses and tits but… with your Grandpa? It’s YUCKY!”, almost 20 years older when he realized that dear ol’ Gramps had been committing sexual abuse. The abuse had gone on from age 4 to 9; at first all he knew was that he got candy if he dropped his pants and made his peepee hard when Gramps said (the abuse did not involve touching by other people or penetration).
Also, one of the biggest weapons of any abuser, and one in whose use they are often aided and abetted by the rest of society, is making it clear that it’s the victim who’s “being weird” or “acting unacceptably”. “How can you complain about your [relative/teacher/priest]when (s)he’s such a lovely person?!” Because bruises, that’s why, but those bruises get explained away by “(s)he’s such a clumsy child!” (might be less clumsy with glasses). Or because I was told I’m supposed to complain when someone touches me in a way that makes me uncomfortable. Or because I don’t think it’s right to scream in kids’ faces. But alas, the adults are always right!
Do not trust this man. He’s a moron who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and his comments are dangerous and damaging to the survivors of childhood sexual abuse. It’s extremely common for victims of abuse to not realize they were in abusive situations until well into adulthood. This is especially true when their victimizer is in a position of moral authority in their community.
Very badly. For every priest who is capable of saying “seal of confession or not, this needs to be acted upon NOW” there are thousands who haven’t even realized that “say the sin, not the sinner” makes it possible to call up an alert that Something Is Very Wrong Over In That Corner without breaking the seal.
And 9 is awfully young for a child to, as you said, like talking about asses and tits, and at least to me would be a loud and clear sign of, at the very least, age-inappropriate sexual knowledge. Most 9-year-old boys still think girls are gross.
And boys of 9 (specially those who are 9 but late-births, so surrounded by 10yos) will sometimes be involved in talking about asses and tits with each other as a way to imitate the grownups and to dare each other; he who says “YUCK!” first loses. Kind of like when they start threatening each other and end up on “I will nuke you!” “I will nuke you MORE!”, but with less blood.
Cant do algebra with these numbers. A 2004 study in the US said 4% of RCC priests are likely predatory (this was before the “more” disclosure given by the OP.) Their victims are mostly young boys. Moving out of the Catholic Church, you had 27.3 rapes for every 100,000 inside the US in 2010. Of these 27.3 70% of the rapists were known to the victim.
So if you’re a young boy in a parish, that authority symbol has a 4% chance of doing no good. If you’re a girl outside the parish, you have a 0.03% chance of getting raped and it’ll likely be someone you know.
If you just focus on this one report, there is a chance that the pope didn’t know what was about to become public.
But there is no chance at all that Francis isn’t aware of the perversities committed by officials of the Catholic Church that started to become public knowledge in the late 1980s and were extensively reported for the first time during the 1990s in the Western part of the world.
Any chance he isn’t aware of the systemic cover-up revealed in Ireland, Canada, the USA and Australia?
Any chance he isn’t aware of the financial hit the church took to settle case after case after case in the past two decades?
Any chance he isn’t aware that his two predecessors apologized to the victims?
We have seen little evidence that the church has changed its course under the current pope in dealing with their own officials when their depravities become known, and we have seen no change on an institutional level to reform a hierarchy that has enabled and, worse, supported those crimes for generations.
That the Catholic Church has once again become the focal point of the public interest does not mean at all that other denominations and religions are not plagued by the same problem.
What we know of abuse in Islamic countries is more than troubling, and we also begin to realize that Hinduism and Buddhism are not exempt from this.
Religion doesn’t provide any sufficient shield against human rottenness - but its organizations provide plenty of opportunity and cover to act on it. And never are the victims more alone when the perpetrators are with god.
There is no doubt that His Holiness is aware of the criminal proceedings against George Pell. Cardinal Pell is the Prefect of the Church’s Secretariat for the Economy, which has “authority over all economic activities of the Holy See”. It is hard to imagine the allegations reaching any higher in the Church.
Where do you get that number from? Every other number I’ve seen is orders of magnitude bigger than that, 5% being the low end of estimates for the amount of girls raped before the age of 18.
Damn, I guess just one major Catholic sex scandal a year isn’t enough, anymore, just spring of this year, they were dealing with the Chilean Catholic sex scandal cover-up and abuse. This NY Times article caught me up to speed on the latest big one.
From article, several bishops including Bishop David A Zubik of Pittsburgh insist, “there was no cover-up going on.”
A grand jury begged to differ, and said, " church officials followed a ‘Playbook for concealing the truth.’" They said, they minimized the abuse using words like “inappropriate contact” instead of “rape” and “tell his parishioners that he is on ‘sick leave,’ or suffering from ‘nervous exhaustion.’ Or say nothing at all.”
“Pennsylvania’s Catholic bishops called for prayer for victims and the church, promised greater openness and said that measures instituted in recent years were already making the church safer.”
Same ole horseshit, prayers won’t do, billion dollar lawsuits doesn’t seem to slow them down much either, it’s a world-wide problem, how many more chances do they deserve to clean up their act?
Spotlight on Netflix is worth seeing again, detailing the relentless investigating reporting from the Boston Globe on the Catholic sex scandal, and what they were up against.
I’m pretty sure straight up calling a poster a moron is against the board rules too.
This is going to sound strange coming from a faux-sexual like myself, but does anyone doubt that a profession that requires celibacy is going to appeal mostly to screwed up weirdos?
