The first two paragraphs of the front page story from today’s Los Angeles Times (with link to the full story above):
[I]Fifteen years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and a top advisor plotted to conceal child molestation by priests from law enforcement, including keeping them out of California to avoid prosecution, according to internal Catholic church records released Monday.
The archdiocese’s failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement has previously been known. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese’s chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation’s largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders’ own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being molested.[/I]
I’m hoping that charges get filed against Mahoney - never liked that right-wing bastard.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell: you felt the need to get in a right-wing jab on a FUCKING CHILD MOLESTER PROTECTOR. Why are priests different? Why is it somehow accepted that yeah, most of them are child molesters, but I really hate the right-wing ones!
Mahoney was an ass long before any of this came out - search this thread and you’ll probably find me referring to him as “Roger (or Cardinal) fucking Mahoney” any number of times. If you object to me identifying him as someone who essentially moved from the evil to pure evil category, you aren’t paying attention to the title of this thread. So, to be clear, I hated him before (evil) but now really hate him for being to my judgment a criminal rather than simply despicable (pure evil). If you have a problem with that, I think your message is more about you getting in a jab at me than me getting in a jab at Roger fucking Mahoney because I’ve been relentless in castigating him pretty much within the first year of him succeeding Archbishop Timothy Manning.
Yeah but you can’t and shouldn’t castigate him more because hes right wing, and it does read like that, do it because of what he did not which way his political preference is.
On the topic there was no need for the right wing comment and if you can’t see that you need to get some focus on in the right way.
I wasn’t really going after you, though it reads that way, rather than the idea that the child molestation thing is such a given we need to find other ways to denigrate these people. How the congregations don’t take care of this blanket-party style is beyond me.
For the same reason most communities don’t, because they find it so horrifying and outlandish a thought that they don’t want to believe it really happened.
It’s not the actual rate of child molestation that makes the church horrible in these cases, because the rate of priests doing this sort of thing is no higher than the general population, but rather their historical willingness to close ranks and protect their own. Putting their own image above prosecuting and stopping a child molester, even if they have trouble believing it happened, is vile.
Read the article and it’s clear what my main objection is - it speaks for itself. I can’t already dislike Mahoney about something I didn’t know about the time preceeding, just the things I knew.
On the topic there was no need for the right wing comment and if you can’t see that you need to get some focus on in the right way.
Of course there is - Mahoney has always been an asshole. If you weren’t raised Catholic and not from Los Angeles, you have no idea what you are trying to deny. The guy was already evil in my opinion, and now he is pure evil. One time he tried to get a California legislator to change her stance on abortion by threatening to excommunicate her. She immediately made her ad campaign that she would stand up to the Catholic Church whatever the consequences and was, of course, elected. Mahoney never tried that again, but it shows what kind of asshole he is. Evil, and now pure evil - which is the title of the thread. I don’t believe for a second that I must only restrict my contempt for Roger fucking Mahoney to his biggest evil, though this latest is my biggest contempt (which should be kind of obvious because I’m the one that brought it up).
Lawyers for Pell, Pope Francis’ finance minister, have been fighting the allegations since before he was charged last June with allegations of sexual abuse against multiples people in Victoria from the time he was a priest in his hometown of Ballarat in the 1970s until the 1990s, when he was archbishop of Melbourne.
Since Pell returned to Australia from the Vatican in July, he has lived in Sydney and flown to Melbourne for his court hearings. His circumstances are far removed from the years he spent as the high-profile and polarizing archbishop of Melbourne and later Sydney before his promotion to Rome in 2014.
The case places both the cardinal and the pope in potentially perilous territory. For Pell, the charges are a threat to his freedom, his reputation and his career. For Francis, they are a threat to his credibility, given that he famously promised a “zero tolerance” policy for sex abuse in the church.
Again, it’s an organization of like a million people. Half a million priests alone. It’s ok to condemn the actions of the groups that were involved with these things, but you are painting with a very broad brush.
Are you seriously suggesting that it’s just the priests that have been exposed that have been raping kids for years? What percentage of priests can rape kids before the organization itself should be condemned? 10%? 20%? This was/is happening everywhere. Not just Boston and this diocese in Pennsylvania. We had sexual abuse from clergy at my HS in Texas that didn’t come out until later. Is it really just those three places?
The Church itself is absolute shit for doing this. I’m 100% condemning the group involved, that being the Church.,the group that covered this all up for decades. I imagine the millions of Catholics are no better or worse than anyone else but the Church itself is evil for covering its sins up.
I don’t think you have any support for the assertion that 10% of priests engaged in anything related to those types of acts.
Again, there are like half a million priests in the world. Then another 3.5 million non-ordained ministers, then around another 750k folks working in other non minsterial capacity.
So you’re talking about an organization of nearly 5 million people, not including the parishioners.
So no man, this stuff was not happening “everywhere”. You can’t support that statement.
I’m seriously at a loss if you think that it only happened in the places it’s been exposed. The Church actively covered this up for decades so that it wouldn’t come out. Was there something special about Pennsylvania that led the priests there to rape children? Something in the water? Something about Boston that similarly led a good number of priests there to fuck kids? And then the Church systematically and thoroughly covered it up EVERY SINGLE TIME.
Sorry, but I’m not gonna condemn an organization of 5 million people on the basis of the actions of a few hundred. That’s not 10%. That’s 0.01%. That’s not everywhere.
I mean, just step back and consider the fact that… most people aren’t pedophiles and rapists. That kind of person is not “normal”. They aren’t a significant portion of the people working for the church.
Again, you can criticize the church for its handling of this, but the church itself is not evil. The vast, vast majority of the people who work for the church are good people who are just trying to serve their communities and God.
It would require an immense level of “head in the sand” willful ignorance to believe that it’s simply a few hundred individuals. 300 in Pennsylvania alone. And those are the ones that were discovered. This is worldwide and it went on for decades. You’re saying that you believe that no one other than the specific priests involved in child raping was aware of what was happening, despite evidence to the contrary. Their crimes were covered up, they were shuffled around between dioceses, they were promoted, etc. That is a level of cover up and concealment only obtained by cooperation by the organization as a whole. Bishops, cardinals, the Pope, etc.
