Posted on 06/06/2002 8:51:14 PM PDT by topher
"At the root of the present scandal is not pedophilia, but homosexuality."
The very biased media should wake up and leave their same sex partners long enough to know the sham they are committing on the American people and how they are abusing the American people just as they accuse Catholic priests of abusing the American people.
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Christ forgives; Christ changes. They act in His Name.
The same can be said of teachers or parents who do the same thing. I remember hearing the story of a step-father who raped his 13 year old daughter with several other men many, many times.
To say it just happens in the Catholic Church, is a lie. Many much smaller churches have many more incidents than the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church in America is the single largest denomination. The next largest denomination is "fallen away Catholics".
Plan B is to Defrock the priests. Some of the priests involved have done as Jesus has said -- "it is better to be thrown into sea with a weight around your neck than to cause scandal among the innocents".
Than have been a number of suicides by these priests.
One of the problems is that Christians base their lives on "forgiveness". I guess Christians need to remember that Jesus said to the woman caught in the act of adultery "go and sin no more".
Clearly, the Catholic Church made severe errors of judgement to allow the priests to continue as priests (or even the bishops), and even worse, to allow them access to children.
Peter denied Jesus three times, yet he walked on water and was the foundation of the church. Another apostle, Judas, betrayed Jesus.
Clearly Jesus forgave Peter. And Jesus would have forgiven Judas if Judas would have asked for forgiveness (instead he made matters worse by killing himself).
Jesus himself said to Peter, in particular, and his followers that you should forgive your brother "seventy times seven", which is meant to signify a large number at that time.
But that does not mean the church should allow people who are known offenders to have access to innocent children.
Father Thomas Nelson, executive director of the Institute on Religious Life and professor of philosophy at the Norbertine seminary in Orange, California, states that fewer than 2% of priests have been involved in pedophilia, as compared to 4% of married people and 7% of the general lay population. The statistics show that the problem of pedophilia is no greater among priests than among the general population.
How many teachers, policemen, fathers, firemen, and others are involved in such problems?
Breaking news yesterday was that a R & B singer had filmed sex with a 13 year old. These things are getting to be common occurrances.
Our society is very, very sick.
How does one forgive that?
But that requires true repentance. There is very little evidence of such among the perpetrators and enablers of these crimes against children.
In the Catholic Church "forgiveness" is the result of a 4-part process (at least it was before the “reforms” of Vatican II). It goes like this:
1) examination of conscience;
2) confession of sins;
3) do the assigned penance (punishment or restitution); and
4) sincerely resolve to avoid the sins in the future.
Contrary to popular misconceptions, “Forgiveness” is not such a free and easy thing.
To imply that people are saying that, "it just happens in the Catholic Church" is a lie. To claim that "MANY" much smaller churches have "MANY" more incidents than the Catholic Church is very suspicious.
Hmm… after a brief Google search I found this stating that the pedophilia rate of the Catholic Church is 4% compared to 1% in the general population. Here's a quote from what's probably a more balanced analysis putting the levels all over the place for priest and the population.:
"One of the first efforts to study the rate of child abuse in the church came in a 1992 Canadian survey by John Allan Loftus and Robert Camargo. They studied 1,300 Catholic priests and brothers at one treatment center. They found that 2.7 percent had sex with children up to age 13 and another 8.4 percent with teen-agers up to age 19. However, the study subjects were not representative of the whole priesthood.I think the key sentence from the article is that," There is no definitive research on the frequency of such abuse in either the church or society. Few abusers will talk."Other researchers, including those within the church, have offered lower estimates. A study by the Chicago Archdiocese looked back at personnel records of 2,252 priests over 40 years. Only 40 of them -- about 2 percent -- were reported as offenders, according to Philip Jenkins, a Pennsylvania State University historian who has studied sexual abuse in the priesthood. "
I think the 7% pedophilia rate among the general population that you quote is garbage. That's just not who we are. Just like the Catholic Church, America has its problems and constantly needs renovation. Still this is the absolute best society in the world, and we prove it every day. Despite the crime and corruption, we feed the world, we defend the world and we have more happy, healthy and long lived people than has ever existed in all of recorded history.
I generally respect the Catholic Church. Sometimes it's unfairly treated, but in this case it deserves most of what its getting. Even if the Church's pedophilia attack rate on its young members is no higher than that of their parents, that doesn’t excuse them for allowing those attacks to take place. Like any other very large and very old organization, they're slow to make reforms. They're never had to operate in such an open and litigious society. I'm not surprised that it takes perhaps a billion dollars in lawsuits to get their attention. I don't expect its clergy to be saints, but I do expect them to quickly correct this tendency to blame their own problems on us. Just like I resent your puny accusation that, " Our society is very, very sick." Don't blame your personal problems or problems of another on America! That's weak.
I've stated on Free Republic before that because of the Catholic Church's size and diversity, what people read into it says more about themselves than the Church. Perhaps the same thing can be said about what we read into America …
Most of the editorial staff at the NYT is proudly gay, so every mixed up teen seduced to the gay death style by a priest or anyone else is a potential date for them.
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