Posted on 10/11/2003 5:56:40 AM PDT by RaceBannon
Vatican: U.S. Catholic Sex Scandal Was Overstated Reuters Friday, October 10, 2003; 4:16 PM VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The media has exaggerated a sex scandal that has shaken the U.S. Roman Catholic Church and unfairly tainted thousands of priests with overzealous coverage, Pope John Paul II's top aide said Friday. "The scandals in the United States received disproportionate attention from the media," Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano told Reuters in an interview. "There are thieves in every country, but it's hard to say that everyone is a thief."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Hey, Race, I'll make you a deal. You be honest with us, and we'll be honest with you. 'kay?
It's not the failure of Catholics to pick up pitchforks and torches that bothers you. It's their failure to immediately run down to Brother Jake's Full Bible Fire-Breathing Independent Baptist Church, "git saved," and sign on the dotted line that bothers you. Let's just be forthright here. You have a long history of making your position vis-a-vis Catholicism very clear. We know where you stand, so don't try to dissemble.
Now, Cardinal Sodano is admittedly highly placed, but he is not "the Vatican," any more than Colin Powell is "the Federal government". And his complaint is that it is a "minor thing," but that the media blew it out of proportion. That's true, to a point, but not helpful.
My message, as a Catholic, for the Cardinal is very simple:
Your Eminence, the problem is not with the news media. The problem is that too many of our priests are unfaithful, too many of our bishops are cowards, and too many of our seminaries are, or at least were, academies of homosexual perversion and feminist poison. That is something Rome can fix. Don't pass the buck, Eminence. Rome has failed us. They have failed us in appointing men like Mahony, Weakland, Hubbard, O'Brien, and others. Pick bishops who are prophets instead of politicians, martyrs instead of managers. Pick successors to the apostles, not golf partners for the Rotary Club. The mitered politicians, fundraisers, moneymen, and managers we have at the heads of dioceses are destroying the American church from within.
This first decade of the 21st century is truly the "queer" decade.
At a baptism of one of my neice's babies I had to ask the priest after the baptism where the tabernacle was. he said it was over on the other side of the lobby. People talked and joked before duriong and after the Mass. And I was the only one who kneeled during the consecration.
Many of the parishes have pastors who seem very casual during the Mass. It is freightening to attend Mass in some of those churches. We clearly have a crisis that is related to the popular culture of commercialism, relativism and pragmatism.
I think that Rome gets it now. They have written off this generation in the western world.
THAT is the scandal, and the Vatican still doesn't seem to get it.
One of them anyway. IMO a second is the spin that separated ephebophilia from pedophilia as if the former was any less an abomination and another is in the divinity schools that graduate these monsters.
Nice hate speech. Now hear this.
I do believe that the RCC is not Biblical Christianity. We all know that.
But for you to let these people bugger your children, and you do nothing about it...
You dont need me to point it out, the unsaved, Satan worshipping world knows this, you dont need anyone who is from some Brother Jake's Full Bible Fire-Breathing Independent Baptist Church to say it.
You as a human being need to say it yourself.
And since you wont, it must be because you endorse it.
I cannot imagine any cult putting up with this. Not one. Not for generations, not for over a century, not for over the centuries.
And you are too obsessed with opposing what I believe to see your own lack of understanding on this.
What I believe about the Bible has absolutely no bearing on this. My flesh is absolutely dumbfounded that people who call themselves RC are not picking up torches to their churches and burning them to the ground for this scandal. With the Priests inside, too. You are letting the RCC bugger your children, and now the Vatican says it is no big deal.
And I never said once, that I can remember, that it was because of my Fundamentalist beliefs that I held to that idea.
I said it because I am a man, and what was going on to hundreds, maybe thousands of young men being covered up by the entire hierarchy of your religion and NOW, Fully, Formally, being dismissed as if it was nothing more than an act of stealing a candy bar...
Only a sick pervert would defend that.
Your failure to see the difference between a Scriptural debate, and the open common sense reaction to a religion defending buggering little boys...You have got to be one sick person.
"Sodano...is second only to the Pope in the Vatican hierarchy"
"It is fair to condemn evil, but one must keep it in proportion," said Sodano
Asked if there might have been a plot to discredit the Church, he said: "We don't have evidence of this but I know that many people have thought this."
It seems to me that there might be evidence to discredit the Pope. [Of course, I meant that there might be evidence that his underlings are trying to discredit the Pope - NOT that there is evidence which discredits the Pope.]
Every time the "Vatican" speaks, it is not necessarily the Pope, but more likely his underlings, who, by their own short-sightedness [I'm being generous here], end up smearing the Pope. This is VERY unfortunate.
They have to know that, as representatives of the Vatican, what THEY say can be misinterpreted as having been said by the Pope.
[Again, the Vatican is not necessarily the Pope - it's unfortunate that most people assume that it is.]
It's "hate speech" to tell the truth about you? Pathetic.
But for you to let these people bugger your children, and you do nothing about it...
That's just plain stupid. I didn't "let" anyone "bugger my children," and if anyone had, I would have done something about it, with a 12 gauge (3-inch magnum, ought buckshot) if necessary.
Now, if you want to address the parents who didn't go to the cops, immediately, fine. But that ain't me, and it's not 99.9995% of the Catholics here, or anywhere. We're disgusted by it, more than you are.
My flesh is absolutely dumbfounded that people who call themselves RC are not picking up torches to their churches and burning them to the ground for this scandal. With the Priests inside, too.
And what would that accomplish, exactly? Wow, so you think the response to one desecration of the Temple of the Almighty is to desecrate it again? What kind of warped world do you live in, where two wrongs make a right?
Don't project your sick fantasies about killing priests and destroying churches on the rest of us. We don't share them.
You're way over the line, Race, but you've been way over the line for a long time. "Hate speech"? To blame the innocent Catholic people scandalized by this evil for the evil is hate speech of the first magnitude.
And by the way, this is a flat, out-right lie.
Who's "they"? Cardinal Sodano? Well, maybe. As I pointed out, Rome has a major problem at the root of this that they can't MINIMIZE, or even minimize.
If by "they," you mean ordinary Catholics, I take extreme offense at that statement. We don't minimize it, but the claim that we are somehow responsible for it because we didn't riot, burn down churches, and kill priests is craziness.
The Catholic Church does not "run" itself outside of the realm of theology, liturgy, education, helping the poor and dispensing the Sacraments. As this horrible problem of pederasty arose among a tiny percentage of Catholic priests, the fact that nobody really knew how to handle it effectively should not surprise anyone. Nobody else in our society knew how to deal with this phenomenon either. The generally accepted plan in the 1960's thru the early 1990's was to send the perpetrators to intensive psychotherapy for six months or more for rehabilitation, and follow up with counseling. Sometimes this plan worked, sometimes it did not.
My point was that nobody knew how to handle this stuff effectively; not the schools, not the medical profession, and not even law enforcement, who themselves were giving pedophiles the "swinging door" treatment, as they let them out of jail to offend over and over again. And society still doesn't know how to handle these people beyond sending them to prison and throwing away the key.
In other words, society has thrown its hands up in frustration and has given up trying to "cure" them. This may be a safer and more effective plan than was practiced previously, but the Catholic Church is not in the business of law enforcement, and it was not their function to develop some cutting edge solution to this huge societal problem.
Taking the "forgiveness" and "medical help" route, while granting large monetary settlements to the victims, cannot fairly be viewed as some massive "mafia-like" coverup tactic as some allege. Forgiveness is the Christian way, medical help through psychotherapy and rehabilitation was an act of Christian mercy, and granting huge sums of money to the victims was Christian charity. I'm still waiting for the Catholic bashers out there to explain to me why over 600 teachers in the state of Texas alone were convicted or punished for child sexual abuse from 1996 to 2002, and the national media have not even mentioned it. This scandal is much larger and broader than the Catholic Church's scandal, so what is the fixation on the Catholic Church's problems? Surely the secular media and non-Catholics out there are not suffering from heart break because Catholic children have been abused. There is another agenda.
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