So, Catholic Church: Evil or Pure Evil?

Politics and religion
401

Salon takes a shot at this, bringing up some good points:

However, while the author begins with a good premise (male dominance in Christianity at large) she then dovetails into what I suspect is her real goal: “reproductive rights”. I personally don’t see the pro-life movement as being a result of a toxic patriarchal society, although the author would like me to take this moment to accept it as such.

As far as the ongoing sex scandal: it’s outrageous and enormous in the truest sense of the word. My 4 year old son is going to a Catholic school, but I wouldn’t want him to become an altar server because of all this.

402

It looks like all of the diocese in PA have at this pointed admitted the failings, and pledged to do better. The guys mentioned in the grand jury investigation aren’t in the church’s leadership any more, are they? Like Erie’s bishop Trautman isn’t the bishop there any more.

Presumably the goal of your outrage is to reform the church, and it appears as though they are doing that. Both in terms of eliminating the abusive practices themselves (I think all of the cased found by the grand jury happened prior to 1990, didn’t they?) as well as reforming their handling of those cases.

403

Yes, they’ve been forced to admit that this happened in Pennsylvania due to investigations. Where’s the confession on everything that has likely happened in New York? Or Chicago? Or other major cities? The only reason this is coming out is due to investigative work. The Church has volunteered absolutely nothing, caring little for the victims but only concerned about saving itself. Unless you somehow believe that nothing like this has occurred in other cities, despite the almost non-existent chance of that being true.

I imagine the actual abuse has scaled down considerably, given how society itself has changed, how more people are aware of priest raping these days, fewer people blindly trust the clergy, etc. But how would we really know? Do you trust the Church to expose current abusers, after the decades of lies that they’re guilty of?

404

Well, to be clear, the Church actually has dealt with this stuff in recent years, like when they booted Archbishop McCarrick. I think this would suggest that they are in fact changing how they handle these types of cases.

Cardinal Dolan from NY has pointed out some of what they have done in response to some of the cases that overlapped with the PA ones.

405

It’s disappointing to see such spiritual decay in so many authority figures.

Honestly most Christian denominations are going to have to grapple with the “problem of belief” as the 21st C. continues. If belief is the sole moral compass, then when belief falters, there seems a risk of complete moral collapse. It seems like religious people are particularly susceptible to moral decay when their morality is based previously on faith, and these massive abuse scandals seem to show a deep malaise in the institution itself.

Of course, arguably, the Donatist controversy and Arian Heresy (which seems in some ways a more plausible interpretation of the Gospels, imo) kind of showed that politics and Catholicism have never been far apart, and from the outside looks like worry more about “bad PR” than the victims or their own spiritual health.

406

As to the “but the church does so much charity work for the poor” defense… well, maybe if they didn’t tell their 1.3 billion members not to use birth control, there wouldn’t be so much poverty for them to alleviate? Kind of a vicious cycle.

Has anybody mentioned that the Catholic church kept slaves until 1996?

407
408

Ok, now that’s both hilarious and incredibly sad at the same time.

409

Tin_Wisdom’s point here is really important:

Not to say these kinds of things are eradicated today. What’s really happened here is that the PA report has surfaced a lot more details on past cases and their cover-up. Remember that bishops frequently were able to keep the details of cases hidden through settlement or political pressure. I believe there is still some redacted content in the PA report that the public still can’t see!

Now, the Bishop McCarrick revelation from a few weeks ago is basically a new scandal. McCarrick is the former Cardinal who was known by many around him in the organization to have “special relationships” with young seminarians, and was more recently discovered to have straight out sexually molested minors in the past. Until this became public, he was a highly respected leader and someone who helped create many of the reforms that followed the early scandals from places like Boston.

Cover-ups require continual cover up, and remember that priests were moved around to other parishes and diocese. Or placed in retirement homes where they could still cause trouble. Often the whole point was to keep things under wraps until the statute of limitations was exceeded. Many of those responsible for cover-ups and settlements have only moved on and moved up in the hierarchy. For instance, Cardinal Wuerl is currently the archbishop of Washington, D.C. (recognized as the most important prelate in the US). He used to be archbishop of Pittsburgh. And he succeeded Bishop McCarrick in DC.

I dunno. Marcotte has her agenda, and that’s fine, but I think it makes her blind to most of the real dynamics at play here.

There are a lot more safety rules around churches and schools, which have undoubtedly helped. There’s just a lot more (but not enough) sunlight on everything that’s happened. But I think the sentiment with a lot of Catholics of all stripes–especially after the McCarrick revelations–is that the bishops’ reactions are still more about PR damage control, financial settlement, and political ass-coverage than true disciplining of bad actors. A lot of that is probably because nearly all the high-ranking bishops in the country are complicit at least somewhat in not speaking out or worse. They’re protecting each other to protect themselves.

What happened in those facilities was incredibly awful, but I don’t think that “keeping slaves” is really a very precise description. And whatever you accuse the church of there can also be leveled at the Irish government and the Church of Ireland, too.

410

I understand but here is the thing,. The movie Spotlight is about the 2003 investigation into Boston, it also had stories going back 30 years. I remember heaing reports in New York and Chicago in the late 1980s (and quick check of Wiki shows that while I may be mis remembering the locations, my time is right). So for past 30+ year, there has been a steady stream of news media accounts of decade long abuses by priest of children in the Catholic church. We don’t see the same frequency for Mormons, or Baptists, or Presbyterians, or Methodist, or Jews or Muslims and never on a mass scale just individuals. Now there several times more Catholics than the other denominations but still, it is worth raising the quest is there a systemic problem with the Catholic church and is the institution capable of fixing it by themselves?

411

I would say Yes and Yes, possibly.

Female priests, married priests, and allowing priests to have consensual sex with other adults (of either sex.)

412

Oh, 100% there is a systemic problem. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say a culture or subculture that emerged and promoted and propagated itself (remember, a lot of problems can be traced to seminaries). It flourished because no one wanted to think or talk about it, and because the perpetrators were people in positions of authority and trust.

I think simply because of the new awareness of the problem since Boston, things are improving, there’s less tolerance, better avenues for reporting, etc. I think that’s new today is that it wasn’t just a few bishops or some unknown bishops of minor diocese who were playing games with the truth and trying to hide criminal priests. It was some of the big dogs–bishops who have continued to climb the ladder, even when other bishops and seemingly their superiors know that they were looking the other way.

In short, to fix the problem, we might have thought ten years ago we just needed new policies and procedures. Now it appears we need a housecleaning. That’s a thing that the Church hierarchy isn’t real used to doing.

We also (speaking now as one of the faithful) need a spiritual reckoning. All the policies and review boards and lay councils are good and proper, but they’re all practical and political moves. We need penitential moves. Bishops should be stepping down, admitting their failures, and begging forgiveness from their spiritual family, before God. That doesn’t appear to be in the constitution of any of these high-profile bishops. It’s another way the Church culture has been corrupted. We got politicians for shepherds.

413

Sorry, I think this is a total red herring solution. I mean, what’s the implication? That it’s because of sexual repression that priests turn to children and teenagers? Would letting potential rapists have wives and kids be better? Or worse? Isn’t that the “violent incels should be assigned girlfriends” argument in another form?

It’s typically people outside the church that think celibacy is the problem here. Celibacy seems freaky to modern culture, but it’s not that weird and it’s not so burdensome that it’s the cause of rape and pedophilia.

I think the celibate priesthood arguably gave cover to predators. But that’s not the same as saying it made them that way. If your argument is something different, I’d be interested to hear it.

414

They still have issues.


Also:

415

There are tons of pedophiles who aren’t priests and aren’t prevented from having normal sexual relations with people.

416

I was raised Catholic. Baptized. Communion. Confirmation.

I was bused to the local Catholic church, St. Rose of Lima, every Wednesday at 2PM. Taken out of class in elementary school. They bused us there but we had to walk home. It was a long walk while me and my friend Joe were harassed and assaulted by big Irish Catholic jerks.

But the worst part was the climate of fear that they kept us in. There was a, I guess head nun there. When we were first introduced to her she had a speech she gave. It was a story about how tough and unforgiving she was. She said that she had a heart, but it was a rock. Then she literally took a heart shaped rock out of her habit and slammed it on the floor. She scared the shit out of us.

Then we went to class. Where we were taught to bow our heads any time anyone said the name Jesus. Any fucking time. You didn’t bow your head and the sister saw you? Raps on the knuckles with a ruler. Some times, if they didn’t like you particularly, blood was drawn.

Sometimes a priest came into the class to tell us about the new plastic Jesus statue we could buy, the next time we came in. It was guaranteed to be blessed with Holy Water. We had to get money from our parents to buy the things or we would be like outcasts in the classroom.

I still haven’t gotten to the part where we had to be really good at kneeling, standing and sitting in the church during rehearsals. A few kids surrounded by hard core Catholics. We had NO fucking idea of when to kneel or stand. When we fucked up, the older kids near us would smack us and make fun of us.

More to come if I can get through it.

417

I’m not saying it’s a total solution but forcing humans to live under such conditions simply isn’t healthy. And then having these individuals around trusting children day in and day out was just asking for abuse. Maybe people prone to this sort of behavior were also attracted to the priesthood, given the easy prey it would provide. I don’t know - probably a lot of factors come into play here.

But I 100% believe that my reforms would enable a lot of progress towards a healthier, less rapey priesthood overall

418

You’re acting like pedophiles occur when people are sexually repressed. That isn’t remotely true.

The problem the Church has is that pedophiles are often attracted to the clergy because they don’t want to have relationships with adults and priests often have access to kids. How do you detect pedophiles that want to join up? It’s not easy if they don’t slip up and let you know about it.

419

Rich’s story reminds me of the elementary school I went to in Hampton, VA when I was seven or eight. I was raised Catholic, but in deeply Baptist Southern Virginia there were few Catholic churches and no Catholic schools. The public schools were terrible at the time (late 70s). So my folks signed me up for the local Baptist private school (my mother was doing her student-teaching there and we got a discount).

Since I was so young, I didn’t quite grasp why the older kids said I “wasn’t a Christian” and made fun of me, but it wasn’t that big a deal because the kids my own age mostly didn’t understand either, so I had the typical number of friends. But I did vaguely understand that I was different, an outsider, and the teachers and preachers kind of treated me a little differently.

The Baptists also had fund-raisers similar to what Rich describes: small crosses (no plastic Jesus! That’s idolatry!) to buy, little New Testament pocket-bibles, stickers, bookmarks, etc., all hawked to 1st and 2nd graders with the unspoken assurance that we would absolutely be going straight to Hell if we didn’t convince our parents to send us back with money on the morrow.

But the thing that always stuck with me and that I remember vividly forty years later, is the “Saving” sessions.

Every few months, the pastor of the church attached to the school would visit the class and he’d have all the little seven-year-olds put their heads down and no peeking! You’d make Jesus cry if you peeked!

Then, with no pressure and no one needed to know one way or the other, you were supposed to raise your hand if you wanted to be Saved and Accept Jesus Into Your Heart. Yup. Noooo pressure. Take as long as you need. Give it some thought. All you have to do is raise your hand…

These things fucking terrified me. I was an obedient, good little boy and didn’t peek. But I could hear the other kids stirring around me. And as the session stretched on into what felt like goddamned hours with my head down, the preacher would inevitably be standing right next to my desk asking repeatedly if there was anyone else who wanted to be saved? Anyone? All you have to do is raise your hand and let Jesus Into Your Heart. Anyone?

But I knew I was different. I went to Mass every Sunday and sometimes on Wednesdays too. CCD for several hours after Mass Sunday mornings. These preachers were not of my tribe, and even as a seven-year-old I knew I wasn’t supposed to raise my hand, even if I wasn’t clear why.

So I never did. And afterwards, though they tried to hide it, the classroom teacher and the pastor would be kinda pissed off at me. I was not a behavior problem - far from it. It annoyed them that they couldn’t get an eager-to-please little boy to take that first little step away from his papist allegiance and into their system.

tl;dr: Catholics aren’t the only faith that exploits and traumatizes kids.

420

@RichVR @Tin_Wisdom

It’s a shame you were subjected to this kind of child abuse and I’m sorry for it. I can’t count how many times I’ve been grateful for the fact that my parents lost interest in religion when I was still very young, and I never had to go through anything like this. I never even went to church, except for a few times out of curiosity.