Posted on 04/04/2010 3:57:33 AM PDT by Scanian
Sure, it was explained to me when I converted that the gate would be narrow, but I had no idea. Born “nothing,” I completed my adult catechism and chose to become a Catholic in 2000, to the thinly veiled displeasure of people close to me. Archbishop Fulton Sheen put it right when he said, “There are not over a hundred people in the US that hate the Catholic Church, there are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church, which is, of course, quite a different thing.”
Now the horrific replay of the 2002 clerical sexual-abuse scandals has again stirred up sadness, anger and the inevitable stream of negative postings on my social-networking feeds.
But there is zero tolerance for pedophiles in the Church today. And the test of moral credibility the Holy See is charged with really applies to the whole church — not just clergy but the whole mystical body of Christ.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
You’re from Indiana, right? Probably that was one of the more conservative areas. I lived in California, the Pacific Northwest and New York State during these horrible decades. And believe me, sentencing was scandalous. You may be too young to remember this - but I’m in my 60s and lived through it. I had young children at the time and I could not believe how lax the justice system was in dealing with pedophiles.
If you are making these charges, it’s up to you to prove them. The Church was doing exactly what the secular justice system was doing at that time.
As I have said, I think that was wrong and the Church should have relied on its old system (monastic jails, removal from the priesthood, etc.). But after Vatican II, the Church ceased to behave as the Church, something very much praised by the New York Times at that moment.
And this is the result.
You seem to be caught up in defending or rationalizing child molesting in your Church when that wasn't the issue I was responding to at all. I lived through it too and was part of the system so my response is based on personal experience of prosecuting and defending these cases. I'm not relying on a 60 year old memory of what I read in the newspapers.
“Please show me one shred of objective evidence that shows ‘most’ people caught child molesting...”
One difficulty here is with the word “caught.” I'm not sure that “caught” is an on/off switch type of word in this matter. There are degrees of “caught,” or rather, knowledge by third parties, and I suspect that by playing on the shading of meaning, on the ambiguous nature of things, etc., many abusers avoided being prosecuted.
If, by “caught,” you mean “someone has made a formal complaint to law enforcement authorities, and law enforcement authorities found the accusation credible,” then I suspect that my original statement is defeated almost tautologically.
But, if by “caught,” you mean that some party other than the offender and the victim are aware of the accusation of crime, then I think that my assertion is completely true, but is still impossible to prove in the way that you request.
In the past, there were folks strongly suspected of abuse, but because circumstances were ambiguous, or victims reluctant to come forward, or where organizations intentionally covered up, or organizations handled the matters privately, or private settlements were arranged, or accusers weren't believed because there was no physical evidence, abusers weren't prosecuted. Yet, in some way, shape or form, they were caught. And many of the perpetrators were forced to move on. By their nature, these cases would be difficult to quantify. Yet, as naive as I was in my youth, even I knew of a few cases like this.
The now-revealed documents of many Catholic dioceses show that there were several thousand abusers over the course of 50 years whose cases fell into one or more categories. Even among those where there was clear evidence of abuse, most of these cases were not prosecuted, even though many of the abusers received treatment.
Do you think that these same sorts of cases didn't play out through other American institutions? I've seen research that suggests that 12% of public school children are sexually abused by public school personnel. Do you think that nearly all these cases are completely unreported and that some signifcant number of them were not traditionally dealt with as mentioned above? I certainly don't see hundreds of thousands of public school teachers in prison.
I've seen studies that suggest that 8% of adult males engage in sexual abuse of underage minors. That's literally nearly 10 million people. Are you saying that nearly all of these cases are completely and totally unreported and nearly none dealt with as laid out above?
How many hundreds of public school teachers did you prosecute? Oh, you didn't prosecute hundreds of public school teachers? Then you likely missed the bulk of abusers in the public schools.
I know that St. Luke's in suburban Maryland openly treated hundreds of Catholic priests for child sex abuse from the early 1980s into the mid-2000s, and that in the early years, these men were not usually prosecuted. They were treated and often re-assigned to limited ministry (I remember that Cardinal Hickey, then-Archbishop of Washington, assigned one of these priests to be the chaplain at a maximum security prison in southern Virginia, but that's as far as that man got to being sent to jail), as laicization was not yet the norm for abusers in the mid-1980s.
This institute openly practiced therapy for child sex abusers, and actually worked with authorities to treat those who actually had been prosecuted. Thus, the authorities knew that St. Luke's was a place that treated abuser priests because they actually worked with St. Luke's on cases where there was criminal prosecution. Folks released on probation or parole often had to have on-going treatment at St. Luke's, and the civil authorities actually assigned much of the supervision and monitoring of these folks to St. Luke's. Nonetheless, when Ive reviewed the sex abuse records of the Archdiocese of Washington, prior to recent years, archdiocesan priests sent to such facilities often were not prosecuted.
Law enforcement in Maryland knew that there were abuser priests there because THEY'D SENT SOME OF THEM THERE THEMSELVES. Are you telling me that the Prince George's County, Maryland State's Attorney was unaware that there were other abuser priests there who were going unprosecuted?
Also, not being in the field, I guess you'd be surprised how many folks used to confess to these acts before the laws changed. That's why my professors were against mandatory reporting - because they saw a fair number of these folks, and by treating their confessions in confidence, they believed that they could do something to dissuade some of the perpetrators from further crimes, and if the laws were changed, the number of folks who would confess to these acts to their shrinks would decline.
Here's another piece of evidence. By definition, every girl under the age of consent who has become pregnant by someone more than a few years older than herself is technically a victim of child sex molestation. This population comprises literally in six figures.
Here's a clip from a wiki article on teen pregnancy:
“A review of California's 1990 vital statistics found that men older than high school age fathered 77 percent of all births to high school-aged girls (ages 16-18), and 51 percent of births to junior high school-aged girls (15 and younger). Men over age 25 fathered twice as many children of teenage mothers than boys under age 18, and men over age 20 fathered five times as many children of junior high school-aged girls as did junior high school-aged boys.”
A little back-of-the-envelope extrapolation suggests that just among the population of underaged females who become pregnant, there are many tens of thousands of adult men who have fathered these children. And yet, are not in jail for this crime. The hospital birth to a 15 year-old girl of her baby is significant evidence of child sex abuse. Are the district attorneys lining up to make these tens of thousands of cases?
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Sorry, in the US justice system, the accuser has got to prove his accusation. And you can’t.
I'm not accusing anyone of anything and I didn't make the initial assertion. Now you're just rambling and making no sense at all. Give it up.
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