[Catholic Caucus] Our Hearts Are Broken, but the Church Must Rebuild

CE.com ^ | 08-16-18 | Michael J. Lichens

[miserare]

Fugheddaboudit!For twenty years I have waited...and waited...for the Church to acknowledge and repair these hideous aberrations. Nothing was done. My patience has run out. I will worship God in my own way, on my own time. Without priests! And never contribute one red cent, ever again...to support criminal and evil conduct of priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, or any other representatives of the Catholic Church. I have read the lists. To think that I rubbed shoulders and worked with these Satanic men, in both the Harrisburg and Scranton Dioceses... dozens of them! If only I had known theywere abusing little boys and girls...I would have given them a knee to their disgusting pedophile balls!

[vladimir998]

When it comes to celibacy I’m afraid people often give answers about events in the Middle Ages. I’m a historian of the Middle Ages and know the celibate clergy predates the Middle Ages. It in fact goes back to the earliest years of the Church.

https://www.ignatius.com/The-Case-for-Clerical-Celibacy-P248.aspx

https://www.ignatius.com/Apostolic-Origins-of-Priestly-Celibacy-P120.aspx

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cclergy/documents/rc_con_cclergy_doc_01011993_bfoun_en.html

[Buckeye McFrog]

From Bill Donahoe's "debunking" piece...

Myth: Over 300 priests were found guilty of preying on youngsters in Pennsylvania.

Fact: No one was found guilty of anything. Yet that didn't stop CBS from saying "300 'predator priests' abused more than 1,000 children over a period of 70 years." These are all accusations, most of which were never verified by either the grand jury or the dioceses.

The report, and CBS, are also wrong to say that all of the accused are priests. In fact, some were brothers, some were deacons, and some were seminarians.

Krikey, if THAT'S how we're going to respond to this, the Church is in DEEP trouble. No one was found guilty of anything because in most cases law enforcement was never told. Combine that with the Bill Clinton-esque word parsing at the end and we look all just as dishonest as Wuerl.

At most I will say that the prosecutor took some very disturbing cases and mixed in some lightly-documented hearsay to pump the total up over 300 to build his future career prospects. But the damage that was done in the documented cases is very, very real.

Bill Donahoe needs to learn the First Rule of Holes.

[miserare]

Right on!

[Biggirl]

Also I think too that in the middle ages if I am not mistaken, the Church in the west had also seen when there was a whole empire, the Byzantine Empire, in which everything together, both church and state was bound.

[Biggirl]

Thank-you for you posting.

[Mrs. Don-o]

I am sorry, but according to the Religion Forum Caucus rules, you are not allowed on a Catholic Caucus thread.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Good point. Most heterosexual seminarians and priests who are unchaste, have tended to leave pretty quickly and get married to their girlfriends. I knew some when I was in my early 20's in the early 70's. There was a major exodus.

Which is OK: if they don't want to be chastely celibate, they should wed the girls they loved and be honest married people.

The unchaste homosexuals had no reason to go. They developed their deceptive double-life strategies, and stayed.

Eventually they reached "critical mass" where they took over the recruiting, formation, supervisory and oversight positions.

It was a revolting, sickening situation. But it didn't have to stay that way.

Only two of the 300-plus priests identified by the grand jury were involved in abuse in the past 10 years, and these had been reported by their dioceses.

[Biggirl]

May those young people get closer to God and feel His protection. Amen

[Chode]

they can start with defrocking and excommunicating every filthy disease ridden queer in a robe...

[COBOL2Java]

I was a Carmelite (O.Carm) seminarian, and there were one or two which *clearly* washed out of our formation program for homosexual tendencies. As I said above, this was in the 70’s.

Sad to say, there was one who left who eventually found his way up in Pittsburg. I learned much later on (via an acquantance) that he was found to have buggered some young men. Don’t know what eventually happened to him; for all I know, he may have been one of McCarrick’s chaps.

[NKP_Vet]

Try reading Donohue’s report. He’s not in denial of anything. The main thing he’s pisssed about is the report put out by the PA District Attorney was supposed to include other faiths and public and private agencies that deal with sexual abuse. It didn’t. The report mainly covered “accused’ clergy, the majority who are either dead or no longer Catholic clergy. Kind of hard for a dead man to defend himself. Donohue says in his report that the clergy who were tried and found quilty should be in prison.

[Mrs. Don-o]

I just read this article, "Ain't I a Fool" from America Magazine in 2002 about a man who was groomed and semi-seduced at 18 by a Brother on the recruiting team (he says in a "small religious order," so obviously not the Jebbies, but he does not say which one.)

He's writing mainly to explain why he never told anybody about this until 20+ years later, although it really messed him up.

I'm thinking, wow, there's a lot of people who learned, and yet did not learn, what the chaotic 70's should have taught us. It's like it's the 70's all over again.

[COBOL2Java]

I was listening to “Kresta in the Afternoon” on the drive home today and a woman called in. She’s a cradle Catholic in her 70’s. She said she was in tears about the entire scandal. Her basic expression to the bishops was “How DARE you! How DARE you!”.

I welled up listening to her.

[Mrs. Don-o]

There's a lot of rage out here.

When I heard Wuerl was using a truckload of collection-basket money to set up a professional PR-engineered website for burnishing his record and pumping up his image ("The Wuerl Report" -- the unmitigated gall) I had this impulse to chase him down a blind alley and go for his face with my fangs and claws.

We've got to get some smart aggressive Frank Keating types to bust these ---

No, I'll tuck those words back into my thesaurus.

Let's simply say: I want them in jail.