So, Catholic Church: Evil or Pure Evil?

Politics and religion
2024

Pretty sure the article you shared discussed this and seemed to indicate that it seems like there was little to no communication between the Bishop and Peyton before the letter that he was excommunicated. I’d think in a case like this you’d want the Bishop to maybe attempt some less formal means to return the sheep to the flock first? Again, the article seemed to be arguing something like this also.

I’ve thought it rather funny as well that this seems to be what certain people here are up in arms about. It’s like if you had a terrible boss so you quit showing up to work and in fact started working somewhere else without formally quitting your old job. Would it be that shocking and horrible if you received notice that the employer with the bad boss had terminated you for it? I mean, why didn’t they fire the bad boss instead?

2025

Okay, yeah, you’re right it did basically say that:

But canonists have also noted that there seems to have been very little communication between Deshotel and his deacon which might constitute a warning or an opportunity for due process — that while an entire penal trial is not required to declare a latae sententiae penalty, available correspondence from the Lafayette diocese gives no indication that Deshotel urged his deacon to clarify his intention in worshiping at an Anglican church, or to reconsider his decision.

The bishop could have taken his time to understand Peyton’s intentions, made sure they were of a permanent nature, etc. Thanks for the correction.

This is a good analogy! “And then they sent me an email saying I couldn’t use their copier anymore!”

2026

As the ‘certain people’ you guys are complaining about, I’ll just say that you’re both missing the point. I’m not complaining about the Catholic Church enforcing their own rules (see above) so much as I’m complaining about some other ‘certain people’, some ‘folks here’, who respond to nearly every single criticism of any kind about the Church by saying, effectively, “oh, those are just the rules, they can’t help that.”

2027

The Church certainly can help a lot of those rules onto the dustbin of history where they probably belong. The more fascinating question is why those rules are still there, and the logic that sustains them.

I find that sort of thing very intriguing. I gave up bashing the Roman Catholic Church for all the exceedingly bash-able things it has does and has done over the centuries. I’m not a fan of the institution at all. But it is a 2000 year old institution that has a wealth of history, much of it of a very high intellectual quality (even if much of that is highly intellectually odious, perhaps), and a deliciously intricate and Byzantine (hah!) bureaucracy. It’s like a reality TV show, with guys in dresses and funny hats.

2028

With regards to this topic, you picked out one sentence from @Nightgaunt in a fairly lengthy original post and have just been running with that ever since while ignoring anything else that gets posted. Including discussion about if the rule in question should have been applied in this case, or at least so quickly and in the way that it was.

As someone who has no personal skin in the Catholicism game, but has increasingly found the intricacies of the church fascinating and appreciates all of the added context and detail @Nightgaunt provides, it frustrates me when his posts are met with such vitriol. Often in ways that doesn’t even try to engage with what he’s posted. That’s not meant directly at you, Scott. I see it from a lot of people in this thread. And to some degree I get it. For a lot of people who have direct history with the Catholic Church that they don’t look fondly on, amplified by tons of awful behavior from clergy, such responses are cathartic. But coming as they do as responses to a specific poster, who isn’t exactly praising the behavior of the Church in most of these cases, it tends to come across as attacks on that poster. To the level that I don’t think I’d still be posting in this thread were I them.

For sure, but this particular rule doesn’t strike me as anywhere near the top of the list for one that makes no sense in modern times. Especially now that I’ve learned that excommunication isn’t quite the final death sentence that it’s generally understood as in popular culture.

The things living in a loudly anti-intellectual political era will make you appreciate.

2029

Heh, yes, I do appreciate folks like Aquinas, for example, or even some of the more modern Popes’ writings, for their intellectual content and acuteness of mind. Whether or not I agree with much of it is rather besides the point in this case.

And yeah, excommunication is one of those things that I think only a Catholic really can weigh in on in terms of its impact, as it is fairly meaningless otherwise. I certainly feel any organization that sanctions punishments that its members take very seriously should do so with due circumspection. I think it’s hard to argue that the Church throws about excommunication wildly, though.

None of this diminishes my general loathing for how much of this plays out in the broader community, or for some individuals as humans vice as members of a religious group.

2030

You object to me replying to you? That’s what ‘running with that’ means, right?

I mean, I think I’ve made the point I meant to make. I don’t have to make it any more. But if you’re going complain about me, I don’t think you can really object to a reply.

I don’t think the church should have rules like that, rules that allow them to hold up their hands and disclaim responsibility for. So the question of whether the rule should have been applied isn’t even a meaningful question to me.

Sure, this is a small example of what’s wrong with the church. There are bigger ones. But reflexive, knee-jerk defenses are still reflexive, knee-jerk defenses.

2031

No, I objected to you taking one line from one post and asserting that this is their response to every criticism of the church and pretending like they didn’t post a whole lot of other detail to go with the one sentence you picked out. Alternatively, I don’t actually understand the point you’re trying to make and am just arguing past you. Regardless, I’ll bow out now.

2032

The issue isn’t really does the church have the right to excommunicate, or if excommunication is the correct response. It’s not really even the optics of it, though i think that’s the main driver. It’s that cloying sense that the people ultimately responsible for bad things happening punish the victims rather than the perpetrators. Fundamentally the excommunication happened because the victim didn’t feel their diocese was responsive enough to their concerns, and was in fact actively working to limit the consequences that victims like him could expect.

Still, “we continued trying to go to the Catholic Church, but I took a leave of about 18 months from active ministry,” he added.

“All of this had been a battle back and forth,” he said, “to deal with the hypocrisy of the diocese and the Church, and knowing as a deacon so much of how things worked. Especially seeing the Church’s lobbyists being so active at the legislature to go against bills that would extend the statute of limitations for victims.”

“It came to a point where I should have left the Church a long time ago. … The institution and the men that are clergy were kind of standing between me and my faith. In addition to losing faith in the institution of the Church, [those men] were beginning to erode our family’s faith in Christ,” Peyton told The Pillar.

Eventually, though, Peyton thought a new assignment would help. He got involved in diocesan Cursillo ministry as a deacon.

But in early December 2023, four years after his son’s abuser had been sent to prison, Peyton told Bishop Douglas Deshotel that the trauma had become too much.

“Over the past few years, the Catholic Church has been confronted with a series of distressing revelations regarding sexual abuse scandals involving members of the clergy. The magnitude of these revelations has deeply shaken my faith and trust in the institution to which I have dedicated a significant portion of my life,” he wrote in a Dec. 4 email to the bishop and obtained by The Pillar.

Debating whether the Church had the right to excommunicate him is kind of missing the larger issue of an institution using the power of that institution to censure victims rather than the perpetrator. It’s one of those letter of the law vs the spirit of the law things. His diocese was clearly correct, by the letter of the law, and clearly wrong by the spirit of justice. This is one of those things that should have been written on a piece of paper and shoved into a file cabinet at best.

He was naive though, imo, because he had sued and successfully won and having them issue a public apology. Just by human nature, you don’t win a lawsuit and then sit down and break bread with the people you just successfully sued. Even if, you know, this is “Church” and you should be able to. The moment he sued the Church he severed any chance to conviviality with both his diocese and, probably, the Church at large.

And that human fact, that’s its basically impossible to hold the Church responsible and remain inside it, is at the heart of the excommunication.

2033

This is all very well said, and helps me to clarify for myself my own visceral reaction to the whole episode. Thanks for posting it!

2034

I think basically everyone in this thread agrees with this, but we can’t seem to come to agreement. ;)

I would say that the moment was when his son was molested, or at least when the Church continued its practice of hushing things up instead of working for restoration. Somewhere upthread @Nightgaunt said something to the effect that the harm suffered in these cases and the subsequent refusal to face it is so great that the Church should be devoting all of its effort (and money) to justice for the victims, were it following Jesus’ teachings. That seems transparently true, but here we are.

2035

Don’t bring that Jew into it, you heretic!

2036

I think it’s just a matter of two conversations going on side by side. Some folks really are interested in discussing the minutiae of canon law and that’s cool. I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum. But sometimes digging right into that sounds an awful lot like apologia for many and profound wrongs of the modern Catholic church. Those are the posts I feel compelled to mock.

2037

I can understand this, but I think this is more on you than anyone else, if I may be so bold. There is a huge if nuanced difference between the positions you lay out. One can be utterly appalled at most of what the Catholic Church does, and still be intellectually fascinated by how it does it. And the mechanics are not just, well, mechanical, as they are tied up with the Church’s own moral framework. One which, admittedly, is easily and justifiable in my view critiqued in many ways. But it isn’t like we’re talking about some inherently evil cabal, unless you feel that all organized religion is inherently evil.

Which, honestly, I tend to feel sometimes too.

2038

I’m going to disagree that it’s on me. Diving into certain technical niches with no acknowledgement of the wider context is either apologia or profoundly tone deaf.

Keep in mind that the story that re-started this little strand of discussion in this thread is about a guy who had his child molested. So in a thread about the evils or the church, specifically in response to a story about child molestation, not acknowledging that context and just diving into “well actually church law says” sounds . . . really bad.

2039

Yeah, wait. Are we not supposed to discuss whether the Catholic church is evil or not in this thread? Seems like the right thread for it to me.

2040

Ok, we can disagree I suppose. I personally have not trouble separating the moral turpitude of many in the Church from the broader theological issues, but YMMV. We have to remember–whether we agree or not with it–that the Church tends to view what it sees as spiritual salvation as superior to whatever happens in the real world. Personally I think that’s utterly insane, but to each their own I suppose.

So in how we look at these things morally, I agree with you. I just think I can both despise the way the Catholic Church operates and its (to me) skewed values, AND parse its actions through a dispassionate analytical lens. It’s what I was trained to do, so it comes much easier I think.

2041

I gather you and others find it annoying, so I apologize for that, but I guess I kind of figured that those “technical niches” are the wider context? Specifically of the sort that most readers of the thread have no reason to be aware of?

So are you saying that in my initial response to the story I should have said something like, I dunno… this?

I deserve the jabs implied by those scare quotes, for egregiously doing whatever the forum equivalent of subtweeting is. I don’t even think I was thinking of you, Scott, with those comments–in fact, I’m embarrassed to say I might have just been lazily launching broadsides at a non-existent “they.”

Your argument seemed different to me, and is valid as far as it goes. Canon law is certainly written by people; it can be and is modified regularly. It’s as imperfect in that regard as any other body of law.

But I still think there are some ways in which your “don’t cite the rules, fix them” objection is less germane to this kind of excommunication situation. I wonder if you really digested what I said earlier, that communion with a church is a relationship; that either side can break a relationship; and that that essential state isn’t really the purview of the canons–it’s just the way relationships work. Peyton became an Anglican. That’s (if I may bastardize the title of that Bing Crosby film) excommunication!

2042

I’m sure you don’t mean it this way, but what I get from this paragraph is a kind of creeping equivocation. On the one hand, the Church committed crimes against Peyton’s family. On the other, Peyton left the Church, not the other way around. It’s regrettable that he did, but he did. It’s sad!

I think I do. I think the part you haven’t digested is that the relationship is an abusive one. In a relationship, both sides ought to be bound by some reasonable and mutually beneficial rules of behavior. But one side in this relationship has all the power; it makes arbitrary, sometimes insane rules that the other must follow, then breaks those rules whenever it wants, then engages in abusive forms of punishment if you don’t or can’t in good conscience follow those rules, or swallow the abuse, because, well, that’s on you. No communion for you, baby-killing Joe Biden!

And when someone points to the constant stream of examples and says that the Church’s behavior seems suboptimal, you step in and say well, those are the rules, what can they do?

As I have said many times, the Church can make whatever rules they like, as long as they’re consistent with secular law. It’s true that if people don’t want to follow those rules, they shouldn’t be Catholics, and they don’t have to be. But this fact doesn’t mean that the rules are good rules, and explaining how those rules work isn’t the defense you think it is. And if you think you’re not offering a defense, that others are misreading what you write as a defense when it isn’t intended, then maybe that’s on them, but also, maybe it’s on you?

2043

This is the only part of your excellent post that gives me pause. I still believe that nuance is damned hard to do on a discussion board, and not much easier in person. And perhaps it is a bit like Jesuitical causistry, as they used to say, but I do think that it is not only possible, but desirable, to separate the moral and the analytical when looking at these sorts of problems. A desire to thoroughly understand the rules in no way implies approval or acceptance of those rules from any sort of moral or ethical perspective.

I have not read @Nightgaunt’s posts as a defense of what the Church did, though of course others may have a different interpretation. The entire framework of Catholic law and practice in my opinion is only sensible if one is not only a devout Catholic but one who values the institution over all, or to put it another way, one who sees the core of the Church in what the Church itself has done and said rather than anything else more transcendent. But that’s just me.