I’m a big dummy. Sorry Funk.
On a broader note, I’m pretty astounded by the direction this has gone. I was expecting some more refutation or argument about the various documented abuses, the Pope’s involvement, etc. All the stuff that is coming to light currently. Instead it’s all apologetics, which is why I’m being a bit of a dick. I didn’t know apologetics existed for this.
H.
Follow the links H.
why do people go on explaining without bothering looking at the post!!
The salient question is what makes the Roman Catholic Church’s response to child molestation different from other organized religious groups. A few years ago, when the sex scandals in the American church hit the public scene, Time Magazine ran an article on the frequency of sex offenses within the Catholic Church v. other, similar groups. The upshot is that the statistics on offenders are fairly similar across the board. The same proportion of sexual predators exists in the Catholic Church as exists in the Boy Scouts, the Baptist Church (choose type of Baptist), etc. The difference is in response.
In these other organizations, sexual predators are prosecuted. In the Catholic Church, the tendency is to shuffle these people from one setting to the next, so the result is that they can victimize more people.
Whoops! More the fool, I.
H.
Since we’re playing kick-the-dogma here…
I’m with you on the need to properly prosecute those involved in a cover-up. It’s a civil law enforcement matter, and that should be the end of it. If you want to get into “church-enforced rules of behavior” - no such thing. The church has no legal power, it can’t “enforce” anything in any way that matters in the real world.
The problem with the argument - and not yours personally, but this issue in general - is as you stated above, “abuse by the clergy” (emphasis mine). There you’re using the whole to define a very very very small portion. That’s like saying “Torture by the US military in Abu Ghraib…” - no, it wasn’t the US military, it was a group of clearly identifiable individuals.
Same situation here. Blame the individuals, and accept that you cannot - cannot - eliminate or change the overall organization. It can’t happen. Absolute impossibility. So the solution, as I would see it, is to deal with it properly as an individual issue.
It sounds like you fundamentally disbelieve in the concept of a “corrupt institution.” I disagree completely. It is entirely reasonable to look at the power structure of an existing large institution and consider whether its internal politics and decision-making processes tend to foster corruption or expose and resolve it.
In the case of the Catholic church, a unilaterally top-down organization with few if any truly democratic processes, it seems clear to me that the organization is concerned far more with self-preservation than with individual welfare. Since the organization is also focused on providing care for the young, this is extremely problematic.
I consider the current pope to be a product of his church, insofar as his dogmatic and confrontational approach to these accusations – and his lack of deliberate action to share records of abuse and to follow up on accusations of abuse – are of a piece with the church’s policy over the last twenty years. If all the major officials of an institution respond to a crisis in the same way, and if that response is harmful and/or criminal (as it is in this case), then it is no stretch to say that the institution itself is corrupt.
Mightynute, what I want to see is for the pope himself to state that there is a zero tolerance policy for child abuse in the church, that any priests accused of child abuse will be subject to civil prosecution, and that the church will ensure that any priest convicted of child prosecution will never be sheltered or transferred by the church, but instead will be immediately and permanently excommunicated. That would be a major policy change for the overall organization, and would radically reduce the incidence of individual abuse by the clergy. In other words, the organization itself has to change if it is to help reduce the abuses of individuals associated with it. The fact that this is not happening is what is so offensive, and what is – I hope – going to hurt the church significantly enough to bring in genuine reform. (Which may fall into corruption again, but at least it would do some good in the meantime.)
Well, I just have to disagree. The military is very much like the clergy, and responsibility flows from the bottom up. I think it has been amply proven that the military was aware of what was going on, and chose to ignore it. I find it just as bad that the higher-ups avoided prosecution in that case, but at least the military had the decency to transfer or discharge or jail those responsible per law, rather than just move them to a different prison.
And I don’t believe anyone ever sent Bush a letter saying, “Hey this guy has been torturing prisoners, can we put him on trial?” with GWB saying, “Nah, just put him in a recruiters office somewhere.”
H.
Hang on…
I’d be much more interested to compare priests with another profession like doctors rather than boy scout leaders which seems like an excellent job for potential child abusers.
Anyway, I’d say whether the incidence of child abuse in the Catholic Church is higher or lower than the general population is not the salient point. By making someone a priest you are giving that individual a heck of a lot of power over believers, you are giving him a gigantic amount of trust leverage that comes from the role. If you can’t trust your priest or your doctor then who can you trust? The incidence of child sex abuse and every other serious crime should be much, much lower in the clergy or else what is the role worth anymore?
Secondly the church should be excoriating and vigorously persuing these criminals and further than that continually investigating all of their priests for these kinds of crimes, to an extent much greater than the general public, precisely to preserve the trust people had in the role of priests. Instead they appear to have done the exact opposite, covering up anything they could and tolerating these crimes to either avoid short term bad PR or because of some kind of old boys network.
If you want to be a serious moral authority you need to be serious about maintaining your moral authority.
Some easy reasons the Catholic church has such a hard time dealing with this:
100% top-down organization
Takes little or no feedback from followers or subordinates
Run by a guy who claims to be literally infallible
Often claims it is not subject to the laws of any country
Fighting a rear-guard action against the 20th century
Obsessed with sexual purity
…yeah, I can see how they’d handle scandals badly.
That would satisfy me. Can anyone really argue that there should be any changes at all to what RepoMan has written? That’s just a perfect statement of something that should be a given, but has not been.
H.
It also describes the military, who at least prosecute when they get caught.
H.
I agree, and that would be a huge leap forward. It wouldn’t be a change so much as a policy establishment. But having B16 come on out and actually SAY it? Yeah, that’d be a major force of change.
In general, with the tweak of s/excommunicated/defrocked/ and s/civil/criminal/ and I’d likely go along with that. There’d still be issues to deal with in countries that don’t have reliable court systems. Lots of third world countries, for example, and the Catholic Church is very strong in many of those countries.
That is, I agree with the idea, just think that in practical terms, there are significant details to work out for it to be effective.
Very interesting. That speaks directly against the idea that priestly celibacy directly contributes to the problem, as most of those groups don’t have that policy/doctrine. Do you have a link handy, by any chance? I’d like to read a bit more of the background of that.
Is Bill Donohue to be taken seriously? I really don’t know, I’m asking:
He’s saying the problem is homosexuality because the boys are post-pubescent. I’m not even going to bother pointing out how many ways that is an utterly insane thing to say, I’m just curious if he’s a Catholic Glenn Beck or a Catholic David Frum.
H.
Sort of true, but extremely confused. If the offenders aren’t molesting pre-pubescent children, they aren’t pedophiles, and it’s not useful to call them that. Pedophiles are sick people with a known mental disorder: they are sexually aroused by humans who have not reached puberty. In a sense, part of the problem could be the fact that being a priest is as good a way for a gay Catholic who believes that he is fundamentally evil for being gay to deal with his sexuality, and some of those individuals who are placed in positions of power over post-pubescent boys who will arouse them sexually and don’t have extremely well-developed self-awareness and control (which I would suggest that the fact that they have elected to become a priest rather than dealing frankly and directly with their sexuality argues against) will end up committing acts that would be legally classified as molestation of an underaged child but are not motivated in any way by a pedophillic impulse, but by a deeply repressed homosexual desire, a lack of moral fiber, and an air of absolute authority over a trusting and ignorant subject.
A shallow reading of that situation would identify the problem as homosexuality. A more astute assessment, however, would probably point out the broad problem of repression of non-traditional sexual orientations in the Catholic orthodoxy as a contributing factor. Homosexuals, pedophiles, zoophiles, and any other individual whose basic sexual nature would make public celibacy in a primarily orthodox Catholic environment a foregone conclusion would probably find the celibatic restrictions of the frock less of an obstacle to overcome, and so I would expect the occupation of priest to be slightly more attractive to those individuals than to your garden variety heterosexual in an orthodox Catholic society.
He’s the Catholic Glenn Beck. He’s an idiot.
Yeah, I’m curious about this too.
Interesting points on clinical definitions, although I think that boinking 12-year-olds goes well beyond standard homosexuality. This isn’t Kentucky, for god’s sake.
H.