Posted on 04/23/2010 1:25:04 PM PDT by NYer
The Church has LOST in terms of global public opinion, and while we should expect the Kool Aid drinking ultramontanists (who are, btw, a small minority of Catholics, but have a LOUD presence here on FR) to defend the hierarchy to the death, they have as much of a chance of changing public opinion as the Swiss Guards have of defeating the 82nd Airborne.
The high-hats brought this on themselves, and it angers me to see what this has done to a Church that still includes close family as active members.
Gee, you would think they would have fixed this problem by now...
Would you stop defaming Catholics with this line!!!???
The Anti-Semitism of the Presbyterian Church, USA
http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/03/the_antisemitism_of_the_presby.html
I was surprised by this too.
Statistics show that homosexuals molest children at far higher rates than do heterosexuals. The RC church’s requirement that priests not marry has created the perfect sanctuary for homosexuals. What percentage of priests, bishops, cardinals and popes over the centuries have been homosexual? This is the $69 question. “All” those involved in or shielding this heinous behavior need to be prosecuted by both criminal and civil courts. Would executing those who’ve molested children be an appropriate punishment?
What other organization has systemically hidden homo pedophiles...over decades, if not centuries?
If you can name one, we should go after them too.
I’m sorry, but I can’t. You can only hide the dirty laundry so long until the stink is noticeable by the neighbors.
So you admit it’s defamatory? Thank you.
Want to know what is happening now? Study Hitler and Stalin and you will see it unfold according to plan.
Good people in a free society are so easily deceived and the Left are the masters of deception. They are responsible for the term Brain Washing, which is what is happening with the Muslim now, and don’t think the two are not connected.
Look to Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Jimmy Carter, Slick Willie (and he would have been as bad as Obama if it weren’t for the Republican House) and now Obama. Slowly and incrementally they have stolen our country,
An uprising like the Tea Party Movement is our best chance. And don’t let them distract us from the fiasco of the health care bill with all this other stuff.
From what I read today..it is very difficult to do in the Protestant Churches...
http://stopbaptistpredators.org/article07/child_sex_abuse_by_protestant_clergy.html
Child sex abuse by Protestant clergy difficult to document Large number of denominations, nature of hierarchy make task elusive
"...But tracking allegations and confirmed cases of misconduct by Protestant clergy is an elusive task because Christianity’s other ecclesiastical division is wildly diverse, congregational and sometimes staunchly independent compared to Catholicism’s centralized hierarchy..."
After the wedding he pulled out the sauterne and started getting us drunk.
to make a long story short, I got scared, jumped on my bike and left. Hank stayed.
Next day my dad and Hanks dad had a talk on the phone, then went to the priests' residence.
Father George was beaten...cops were never called...Hank never forgave his dad for not calling the cops and ended up drinking himself to death at the age of 42.
Father George was reassigned within a week.
I'm wondering how many times such a thing was repeated over the decades and centuries.
It was a systemic, criminal conspiracy reaching to at least national levels of the Church.
Didn’t you just post an article by one of the Bishops that explained WHY the priests weren’t moved?
>>However, I do wonder why the church handles these situations so slowly and so terribly!?!?!?<<
1. The Church handles cases now, much differently than they do now.
2. Because the Psych communtiy told Bishops that these guys were “cured” or “curable” and there was nothing to worry about.
This is just as much a Psych problem as a Church problem. I worked Psych in the 90’s.
The term "mortal panic" is instructive, and it is driven by the 24/7 news cycle. Back in the 1890s, a young New York reporter, Jacob Reis was assigned to cover the NY police department. The man he had replaced simply passed on the information provided about crimes for the papers. Reis, however, was a good-getter, a very personable guy who got along well with patrolmen on the beat. He made a point of pumping them on information about crimes, and thereby uncovered many stories that had gone by the wayside before. His editor lied histories and encouraged him to get more. Pretty soon the paper was full of such stories with headlines such as" Crimewave sweeps East side, " and such. Finally the police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, called him in and asked him to lay off and showed him that the number of crimes was actually no more than in past years. But now the public was frightened and demanded action.
Now all these stories about bad priests covered a period of forty years, and complaints and convictions are all treated the same. Obviously for a period of time, there was a rash of new incidents. Such things had always happened: priests who were drunks, thieves, phlanderers. But they had always been relatively few. Now they were relatively many: 500 whereas there had been fifty. There was a rash of child-abusers, and obviously, many bishops did not want to hear the news. Furthermore, in the age of psychology, they wanted to think tolerantly. and not to throw malefactors into a "pententiary" -- an actual one, but to bring in the mental help folks rehabilitate them. In other words, they were looking evil in the eye and they blinked.
And all of this was happening when there was a crisis of vocations in the priesthood. After Vatican II, seminaries emptied out; thousands of priests asked to be relived of their vows. Ditto, nuns. Many, many priests lost their sense of mission, even their faith. To fill the void, unqualified men were ordained, and bad priests were left undisciplined. No longer was the Gospel the driving force. For many years political power had been a major factor in the Church as it grew rapidly in numbers. There was even hope that the nation could be converted to Catholicism. But after Vatican Ii, the very thought of converting the nation was treated as an unworthy goal. Ecumenism is the order ofthe day, and all distinctions between Cstholics and others must be minimized. Among these was a priesthood consisting of a corps of the ablest men in the Church. In the '70s we have a kind of "hollowing out" of the priesthhood, and this scandal is the bitter fruits of this loss of faith.
Thanks for the info. Very informative.
Pyro7480: Would you stop defaming Catholics with this line!!!???
....Sin, confession, and church displine of the same is (or should be) an area inside of [the American bishops'] competence. What's telling isn't that the bishops received bad advice on how to act. What's telling is what authority the bishops recognized and sought out, when looking for advice...Moreso, I would accuse that the bishops have rejected scriptural authority in favor of (to modify your term) modern pshrinkology. They didn't define the issue (and it's treatment) as a sin problem to be repented of. They treated it as behavior modification....
-- Alex Murphy, April 2, 2008
I would have expected a religious order to recognize that raping a child is fundamentally a sinful behavior, before they would believe it to be aberrational behavior. It should be a warning sign to everyone that if a religious order looks to "the Psychs" for expert advice on dealing with known sinful behavior, instead of looking in their Bibles for solutions, they prove themselves to be scripturally deficient if not illiterate. "Religious" order, indeed!
We should not expect "psychological treatment" will end sinful behavior. That's what many bishops have believed, however, and look at what fruit it has yielded - $3,000,000,000 awarded in damages and settlements by Catholic dioceses within the United States alone.
The only thing that ends sinful behavior is repentance. Check your Bible if you don't believe me.
-- Alex Murphy, May 20, 2009[Faithful Departed author Philip] Lawler points out that while less than five percent of American priests have been accused of sexual abuse, some two-thirds of our bishops were apparently complicit in cover-ups. The real scandal isn't the sick excesses of a few dozen pedophiles, or even the hundreds of priests who had affairs with teenage boys -- the bulk of abuse cases. No, according to Lawler, it is the malfeasance of wealthy, powerful, and evidently worldly men who fill the thrones -- but not the shoes -- of the apostles. In case after case, we read in their correspondence, in the records of their soulless, bureaucratic responses to victims of psychic torture and spiritual betrayal, these bishops' prime concern was to save the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar and mortgages. Ironically, their lack of a supernatural concern for souls is precisely what cost them so much money in the end.
-- excerpted from the "Inside Catholic" blog article and 'Catholic Caucus' thread Kneeling Before the World....“The thesis of this book,” writes Lawler, “is that the sex abuse scandal in American Catholicism was not only aggravated but actually caused by the willingness of church leaders to sacrifice the essential for the inessential; to build up the human institution even to the detriment of the divine mandate.” Bishops again and again responded to the crisis as institutional managers, employing public relations stratagems to evade, deceive, and distract attention from their own responsibility. Lawler several times invokes the terse observation of St. Augustine, “God does not need my lie.” The bishops lied, says Lawler, and many of them are still lying. This is offered not as an accusation but as a conclusion that he believes is compelled by the evidence.
“The first aspect of the scandal, the sexual abuse of children, has been acknowledged and addressed,” Lawler writes. “The second aspect, the rampant homosexuality among Catholic priests, has been acknowledged but not addressed, and later even denied....The third aspect of the scandal has never even been acknowledged by American church leaders.” The third aspect, the malfeasance of bishops, “is today the most serious of all.”
-- excerpted from "Paved with the Skulls of Bishops" by Richard John Neuhaus"...the scandal was never really about the 4% abusers in their ranks. The real scandal was that 66% of bishops covered for the 4%, negatively affecting 95% of the dioceses in the United States - actions which cost the Catholic Church over three billion dollars paid in settlements and awards to the victims."
-- Alex Murphy, September 29, 2009
The Nazis were masters of public relations and during the 1920s and ‘30s expertly used the media to condition the public to their ideas. The Nazis flag—which is a propoganda masterpiece is the work of Hitler himself, not a bad artist, at all. There rallies were masterpieces of theatrical production, techniques learned from Hollywood. The Fascists in Italy were employing these tactics at the same time. The Nazis papers were well done, and employed techniques developed by Pulitzer and Hearst, to sensationalize the news. In other words, they were slick and convincing, which is why one main source of membership was the university. War veterans, or at least combat veterans . tended to avoid the party. But the Nazi Party was a youth movement. The main reason it went after the Catholic Church was to destroy the Church’s hold on considerable segments of the young. The sex charges were more successful than the article lets on. Many bishops waffled, as did many priests. Von Galen, unfortunately, was a giant among midgets.
>>1. The Church handles cases now, much differently than they do now<<
Well there’s a sentance that makes no sense.
They handled things differently then. Cases today are turned over to the police.
66% of the bishops did not cover for the 4%. But they did let their staff-priests and laity—cover. One thing the public seems unaware of is the extent to which the bishops have “professionalized” their diocese. This especially since Vatican II. Since then they have turned matters over to “experts.” Their management style has always been princely. Now the prince operates his diocese like a corporation. Of course, even before—and this was a major reason why men left the priesthood. They were treated as functionaries. Now with fewer priests the functionaries are lay persons, as often as not.
That’s awful......
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