It was a close call. Wishing someone to burn in hell! And all the profanity!?! And the eye socket violation? Yeah I needed my couch.
You know, or maybe you don’t, but I try to stay out of the child rape threads. Especially when it’s systemic and ongoing. What I don’t understand is who in the world ever thinks it’s a good idea to allow an institution to investigate itself?
This is really pretty stupid. You can either allow an institution to investigate itself, or you can forbid all institutions from investigating themselves. There is no excluded middle here, so if you’re against the former, you’re for the latter.
So you believe no institution should ever investigate itself, that no institution should even have the right to do so. Wow.
And that’s just at the level of generalities.
Now take the Roman Catholic Church, which is an international organization with branches in hundreds of countries, and whose HQ is in its very own nation, Vatican City. But the crimes being investigated are (a) less the product of an international conspiracy than of a culture that condoned the crimes in question, and (b) the sorts of crimes that generally fall under the ambit of state law here in the U.S.
So if the RCC never investigates itself, who exactly is going to do the job?
We know the answer to this: a state here, a country there, but on the whole, what we get is a piecemeal, patchwork quilt of investigations that expose the RCC’s crimes in some places but not in others.
Really the RCC is the only organization that can conduct a full and complete investigation. It should have conducted such an investigation starting 15 years ago. The grand jury report from Pennsylvania reminds us once again that it has failed to do so, that it continues to fail to come to terms with its long and widespread history of sexually abusing children and protecting those who committed the abuses.
This doesn’t mean that if the RCC undertakes an investigation, everyone should implicitly trust the accuracy and thoroughness of its work. Other nations, other states, should do similar investigations to those that Pennsylvania or Chile have done, both because they and not the RCC are the sovereign authorities, and because such further investigations would demonstrate the credibility, or lack of it, of the RCC’s investigation of itself worldwide.
I think octopus’s statement is better phrased as “who would trust an organization to investigate themselves.” Sure, no one else is in a position to do an institution wide audit of the Church, but at this point, you’d have to be naive as hell to accept the Church’s word about what they’ve found and what they’ll do about it.
The church, corporations, universities, are not the police. They are not the judicial system. Hell even the police have problems. Which is why we have the FBI etc. Stop being naive and deliberately obtuse and confrontational.
The FBI isn’t in a position where it can investigate a global organization governed by a sovereign state. What do you think they’re going to do - arrest the Pope?
OTOH you ***can ***investigate the activities of a global organization that are conducted in the United States. The Dioceses are entities located and operating and holding real property within the United States. Which is where Pennsylvania is focusing.
Right. As things stand we do expect secular public and private organizations to do internal administrative investigations BUT **at the same time **there is reserved the right and means to take the issue to a police agency or court with the proper jurisdiction and those entities don’t have to privilege the internal inquiry.
e.g. if someone is harassed at work they can make a complaint with HR and if they fail to provide redress go to the Labor Relations Board or take the employer to court. It doesn’t die with the employer and we don’t have to take the employer’s as the last word for it.
In this day and age I am unwilling to allow the priesthood a de facto Benefit of Clergy whereby they are to be judged only through the church system and not through secular proceedings, on matters that are strictly criminal such as these. As far as I can figure out *there is no pastoral function in the RCC that involves buggering tweens and no doctrinal teaching that calls for it *so there is no infringement on anyone’s religioius freedom if you nail the people involved in that conduct.
The Catholic League is going off on Twitter against people who dare to criticize the Church’s dealings with pedophiles.
It is interesting to note that the most irrational, indeed hysterical, reaction to PA grand jury report is coming from conservative Catholics. They are singularly incapable of making a cogent argument, so all they do is vent like little boys. They are a pitiful lot.
The lunatics have escaped the asylum and are ranting over my statements. I don’t reply to anyone who just vents. Not one person has any evidence to contradict a single thing I have said. How revealing.
There is no on-going crisis—it’s a total myth. Over the past two years, .005 percent of the Catholic clergy have had a credible accusation made against him.
They claim the PA grand jury report is false.
You all are being silly. The US can crack down on everything happening in the US. And if things are serious enough could arrest whoever. Ask Noriega and Hussein.
So you’re proposing we invade Italy, then?
I’m not the one saying the US judicial system can’t handle crimes in the US or is otherwise powerless. Why people are suggesting that an institution that is covering up widespread child rape has any business in investigating the issue to the exclusion of the real judicial system is bizarre.
Donohue has always been a raging ass but he is of the sort that keeps getting worse. With any luck he will finish ranting the Catholic League into well deserved useless nothingness, and good riddance.
That doesn’t matter, excommunication only means no Jesus cookies. What they need to do is publish their names in every parish newsletter under the heading Rapist Priests, and publish same in the secular newspapers as well.
No need. Arresting all the American archbishops/cardinals/etc would be sufficient.
I think they should, and let’s do away with confidentiality agreements especially when it is crimes against a child and there is enough corroborating evidence to know such a thing occurred. Still protect the child and keep his identity private, but expose the predator. Looks like Massachusetts has made some good corrective measures that muldoonthief mentions in post #95.
That needs to be on a bumper sticker. Everyone in PA needs that sticker right now.
Richard Sipe was the ex-priest that the Boston Globe relied on throughout their investigation for its Spotlight team, and with his expertise of over 25 years of looking into priest sexual abuse of children, courts have relied on his expert testimony hundreds of times. Learned he just passed away last week.
By his estimate 6-9% of all priests are sexually involved with a minor. A figure I seen given in the Baltimore Sun. In the film Spotlight, Sipe gave them the 6% figure. Spotlight realized there were 1,500 priests in the Boston area, and with some quick mental math, came up with a number of 90. What made the film so interesting, is when they finally got ahold of some court papers that the CC already had made disappear, eventually got some tips on how to make the records reappear, and immediately show up at the court house before the church makes them disappear again. They get the records, eventually figured out the code, i.e., excuses the CC used when priests came up missing, things such as sick leave, mental exhaustion, emergency response, if I’m remember all of them right, might have been a few others. When they knew what terms that were used on the missing priests, after they went through the whole list, they got 87 names. They knew then, Sipe knew what he was talking about.
With the Newsweek clip, it cites the John Jay College study. Other places seem to use it too. I’m not really finding any criticism from it, on what little time I’ve spent on it. So maybe I’ve been premature to treat it on the same level as the tobacco financed studies just because it was financed by Catholics. Not necessariy something that should be dismissed outright, but it deserves further scrutiny. I’ve noticed that even Richard Sipe in the Baltimore Sun link I give up above even said that that study confirmed his 6% figure with the years that he lists. From that article:
When Newsweek cited 4% from the link I gave earlier, they got that percentage from the same study, but it was going with the years 1950-1992. So that’s going back another decade earlier, when maybe there was even more secrecy and others not as likely to come forward then, although it also had data that was almost a decade later too. And much more has went on since that time as well.
Regardless, of how the CC sexual abuse with minors compares to the general population, the real story is about the cover-up of higher ups protecting and tolerating the pedophiles and how the apologists can spin the fuck out of it. However, if you have a fetus…
Also, not to worry, Pope Francis says only 2% of priests are pedophiles, so rest assured he is on top of his game!
Anyway, doubt I’m going to spend too much more time on this. Whole damn thing creeps me out and gets me upset.
The Christian God is:
[ul]
[li]Omniscient[/li][li]Omnipotent[/li][li]Omnibenevolent[/li][/ul]Pick two.
Why are all you people ragging on the Catholic Church, and not celebrating the fact that the Pope can make tumors vanish with a kiss?
It’s events like this that make me question why anyone believes in God. Did he know about it and do nothing? Did he condone it? Why didn’t the prayers of the victims change anything? Was he listening and ignored them? And when the bishops and church leaders prayed for guidance on how to handle the situation, did God tell them to move the priest to a new church and cover everything up? Even if the molesting priests were unreachable by God, certainly God could speak to the church leaders in their prayers to tell them what the right thing do to would be.
And really, who needs God to tell someone what to do in this situation? Are the church leaders really that morally vacant that they need someone to tell them to go to the police and get the molesters away from kids?
Well, no, I don’t think you’re right about that. I could point you to this old thread in which the “three omnis” are discussed, and in particular Alan Smithee’s excellent Post #6 from that thread.
Or I could point out that it’s an absolutely central tenet to Christianity that the Christian God does and has allowed people to do evil things.
I’m not trying to be glib. Questions like those that filmore asked above are good questions and deserve to be wrestled with.