I mean a buddy of mine’s dad managed to run an alternative boarding school for troubled youths for a couple-few decades without accidentally tripping and fucking any kids, then conspiring on a global scale to cover it up. It must be possible to do good without raping kids and then leveraging an enormous global superpower organization to protect the rapists! It must!
No, what they do during the time that they’re NOT covering up thousands of cases of the sexual rape of children is not nearly as important as the rape cover up.
What’s the trade off in your mind? Does feeding 10 people offset the rape of 1 child? 20? I seriously would like to know where your limit is.
My friend Armando, again you set the bar too high.
Is there an established exchange rate? That’s the question.
It’s kind of important dude, if you are going to pass moral judgement. You have to look at the good they do. Especially when you are talking about good on that scale. It’s helping millions of starving and homeless people.
If they are evil, why do they do those things?
Who knows, maybe they make the trains run on time.
If they’re good, why are they covering up the rape of thousands of children? Seriously, why do that? Why would anyone cover that up? Would you cover it up?
But that’s the thing.
I don’t think they are good.
I think, being an organization of millions, they transcend such a simplistic categorization.
They do bad things, and they do good things. You would be hard pressed to find any organization of that size where it wasn’t the case.
And some of these things are really bad. But some of these things are also really good.
If one can make this statement about any large organization - that it is beyond judging bad because of its scale and complexity - doesn’t that create obvious problems with counterexamples? I’m thinking of a certain organization headquartered in Berlin circa 1939 as one such example. Too complex to be judged evil? Made up of millions, many of whom do some good?
For avoidance of doubt I’m not saying the Catholic Church is like that other organization. I’m simply challenging the idea that we can’t pass judgement on large organizations. Indeed, I’ll go further: I think the right criticism would be leveled at the leaders of the church and those who acted to protect the abusers, and I’m certain there are many good people in the Catholic Church.
I suppose you can break it down like some kind of multinational organization, one that works on a timeframe of generations instead of financial quarters. You could say, it’s not the whole Church, it’s just this one church. Well, that church was covered up by its diocese, so blame the diocese. Well, the diocese was covered up by its archdiocese, so blame (and in many cases, sue into bankruptcy) the archdiocese.
I don’t exactly buy that argument though, as the problem is both vertical (with abusers mostly at the bottom but some at the top) and horizontal (spread over a very wide geographical area).
I think the Church will survive this, just like it survived all the centuries of simony and apostasy and… so on. It’s a hell of a black mark, though.
There are good people on both sides. The child rapists. And the people who support them. Good people. The best fucking people.
@Timex, I appreciate the fight you’re trying to put up on the “evil/pure evil” front, but the fact is, the name of the thread is there–and folks will continue to use the language–because of the frisson that comes from accusing the most prominent religious institution in the world–the one they perceive the other half of the time of being prude and moralizing–of being the Big E. You won’t be able to fight that impulse, I don’t think, especially when the evidence of evil acts is spewing forth from it like so many lanced boils.
@rowe33, given everything you’ve said about your school experiences, I think you are more than justified in lambasting the Church. Sounds like awful stuff to just know about; obviously a lot worse for the victims. Terrible.
Speaking as a practicing Catholic, we’ve known for quite awhile now that the Church is full of reprehensible people, some of them very powerful and well-respected. We’re learning recently that 1) one of the most prominent and respected bishops, Cardinal McCarrick, committed some awful violations, which were reported and ignored, some of which were most likely a widely known secret in the higher ranks. 2) Some of the things that happened in the Pennsylvania diocese were even more grotesque than we were aware of, including priests running child pornography rings, grooming and sharing victims, and paying for abortions for girls they got pregnant. 3) This stuff was known by very high ranking prelates, alive and dead, old and new, on both sides of the church’s political spectrum–folks associated with past conservative popes and the present liberal one–and they all just hoped they could bury it and it would go away.
What’s most galling today–and only because we’re all mostly numbed to the size and awfulness of the acts themselves–is the behavior of some of these bishops and cardinals. They’re dismissing the severity of the reports, hiring PR firms to make slick websites defending themselves (since taken down), retreating away from the public eye, they’re legalistically pointing to policies and procedures to cover their asses. They’re repeating sanctimonious apologies and statements of sadness and disappointment. In short, they’re acting like politicians.
And their fellow bishops–let’s assume there are any who are innocent of any cover-up–aren’t calling them on it, and so far the Vatican hasn’t either.
As some Catholic commentators have pointed out, in the context of the church, they’re not supposed to be political leaders, they’re supposed to be fathers. They’re supposed to be shepherds. How does a father react when they find out one of their children has been abused? I don’t think it’s to institute a review board or to hire a PR firm. And if their negligence or outright duplicity is responsible for that kind of suffering coming down on their family, how does a truly contrite father ask forgiveness? However it is, we’re not seeing it. Not yet.
I think the Catholic church is less evil than Donald Trump but more evil than any other US presidency in my lifetime. I might be more forgiving if this was the 2nd or even 3rd huge scandal in my lifetime but it is not is closer to closer to the 10, and the pace doesn’t seem to be decreasing. The only good thing is they seem to be slightly less efficient at covering them up.
A couple of points here… and I guess I’ll preface this by saying that I was raised Catholic, never abused, but left the church for what I consider moral reasons. My parents are deeply involved in their local parish, and I still assist them with some charitable activities associated with the Church.
The Pennsylvania accusations mostly (not all, but mostly) date to before the “Spotlight” expose in Boston sent shockwaves through the Church. After that, it looks like the Pennsylvania leadership cleaned up their act along with most of the dioceses across the country and planet. That’s important to note because the headlines make it sound like this is a new round of abuses that happened recently, but they are (mostly) from over 30 years ago.
Of course, what that ALSO means is that after Boston, the Pennsylvania Church leadership looked at the outrage, looked at their own actions, and… decided that it was in their own best interests that no one ever know what they had done. And of course it heavily implies that if you take a magnifying glass to any archdiocese in the US, you’ll find a similar level of cover-up for perhaps similar levels of abuse. [There are 32 archdioceses in the US, of varying size; the Ecclesiastical Province of Philadelphia is more populous than many]
Timex is of course correct that most Catholics are not OK with child abuse. And that most Catholic ministers are probably not abusing anyone.
But this new revelation does mightily imply that the leadership of the Catholic church (US archbishops and above) certainly were aware of the scope of the problem back in the 1960s, and chose to cover the problem up rather than taking action to stop it. Then, when they were forced to take action, they made reforms but knowingly continued to cover up past crimes and protect abusers rather than coming forward and helping the victims that they KNEW existed and were counting on them.
So yeah, the Consolidated Catholic Charities are (in aggregate) the largest single force for helping the poor on the planet. But if we heard that the Gates Foundation was covering up the rape of children, we’d be demanding that the organization scupper its entire management cadre… even though the Gates Foundation is almost eleven times larger than the biggest single US Catholic charity.
Sure, but a lot of the guys involved in that stuff in the Catholic church are dead now, aren’t they?
I’m not sure why it matters if some of the perpetrators of the abuse are dead now or not, other than the fact they can no longer harm even more kids.
I think that’s a tough one to answer. Catholic clergy tends to stay in leadership positions longer than a corporate CEO might (i.e., they don’t “retire” at 65), and some of the bishops back in the 80s are archbishops now. Some of the current cardinals and archbishops were archbishops in the 80s.
There’s also the victims to consider and the current leadership’s inaction. If you’re a bishop coming into a diocese in the 2000s and you find evidence of massive sexual abuse in the parishes you oversee from the 1930s, you’re probably going to sigh and move on. But if you come to your position in the 2000s and there’s evidence of abuse back in 1980… well, those kids are now in their 40s and they’re probably still in your local flock. Don’t you have some responsibility to help those folks?
Yeah, but by the same token, a lot of the high up leadership in the church tends to be pretty old… so guys who were running things decades ago may just be dead at this point.
By the way, it’s important to note that the report just released does NOT include Philadelphia. Why? Because there was a grand jury investigation in 2005 on the city’s diocese. So all of that was known about Pennsylvania priests 13 years ago but the Church said nothing about the rest of the state. Curious.
In Philly itself, there were at least 63 priests that abused hundreds of children. And it should be assumed that there are an unknown number of priests & children that were unreported, or weren’t discovered for some reason or another.
Here’s a fun quote from the grand jury report:
We should begin by making one thing clear. When we say abuse, we don’t just
mean “inappropriate touching” (as the Archdiocese often chose to refer to it). We mean
rape. Boys who were raped orally, boys who were raped anally, girls who were raped
vaginally
Why would kids remain silent about it? Hmmm.
A boy who told his father about the abuse his younger brother was suffering was
beaten to the point of unconsciousness. “Priests don’t do that,” said the father
as he punished his son for what he thought was a vicious lie against the clergy.
This site covers the Philly abuse & cover up:
http://www.bishop-accountability.org/pa_philadelphia/Philly_GJ_report.htm
Again, why does this matter? The leadership TODAY is covering this up still. The current leaders of the Church are covering it up. They are alive, right now, covering it up while I type this.