The letter was written in language that was at once impassioned, personal and sweeping. And the pope did take the relatively rare step of ordering a special apostolic delegation to be sent to investigate abuse in unspecified dioceses in Ireland.
But even that decision raised questions among many who wondered what the investigators might unearth beyond what the Irish government found in two wide-ranging and scathing reports released last year. One report found systemic abuse in church-run schools; another said the church and the police in Ireland had systematically colluded in covering up decades of sexual abuse by priests in Dublin.
…
Last week, a psychiatrist who treated a priest decades ago in a German archdiocese run by the future pope said he had repeatedly warned that the priest, who was accused of sexually abusing boys, should never work with children again. The priest was re-assigned to parish work almost immediately after his therapy began, and one of Benedict’s deputies at the time has taken responsibility for that decision. Less than five years later, the priest was accused of molesting other boys, and in 1986 was convicted of sexual abuse.
The pope did not address that case in his letter to the Irish, nor did he call for CardinalSean Brady, the head of the Irish church, to resign. Cardinal Brady said last week that he would step down if the pope asked, after revelations that he took part in a church investigation in 1975 in which two children were forced to sign secrecy oaths.
The letter also remained tightly focused on Ireland — to the dismay of many victims’ groups around the world — even as the crisis has widened to include Catholics in Austria, the Netherlands and Germany.
The Catholic Church essentially decided, as an institution, to cover up child abuse and then to allow those predators to serve in parish churches even knowing what they had done. It is not a surprise that the Catholic Church had child molesters in its ranks. Pedophiles gravitate to places where they can have access to children, after all. But it is inexcusable that the Church would hide these monsters in its midsts.
I was raised Catholic and despite my lack of interest in the reality of God and despite the Church’s inherent sexism and conservatism, I still believe that the Catholic Church has a lot of good to offer the world. The Church I was raised in emphasized works — Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior provided us with instructions on how to live a good life — take care of the least amongst us being the gist — and you were to follow those instructions in all ways at all times. That attitude provides an important moral structure. Without that emphasis on works, with just the belief that mere belief is sufficient, you end up with the monstrous immorality of things like the prosperity gospel, Christ as a god of war, the Rapture, and a focus on sexual behavior to the exclusion of charitable behavior.
The Church is deep into the process of throwing whatever moral structure it may have once had. Their disgusting treatment of these monsters and their victims, their sexism, their homophobia, their insistence on denigrating safe sexual practices have all combined to sap the foundation of the Church. For all of its faults, it has tried, imperfectly, to protect and lift up the most vulnerable of us. It would be a terrible shame to lose that.
leanleft
Kevin
tgirsch
Kevin T. Keith
Judd
You know, at this point, it really wouldn’t be shocking any more even if the news were that the pope was skinning people alive, eating their still-beating hearts, and has published an encyclical claiming that doing so has always been required by the teachings of the church.
I really have to disagree with you that the catholic church has had anything good to offer the world in the last thousand years. (Prior to that, they don’t seem all that much worse than any other autocratic monarchy.) The kinds of abuses that they’ve participated in recently are a direct consequence of their moral system that places magical thinking above human empathy.
And as bad as mass child rape is, I’m not sure it compare unfavorably to the Inquisition. Then again, any day now, they may announce that they’ve been burning the rape victims at the stake. Who could be surprised?
In other news, the Catholic church wants legal permission to lie to the public:
http://www.feministing.com/archives/020574.html
Aaaand now they’re claiming that holding the pope responsible for his minions constitute “unjust accusations” just like Jesus Christ! I keep thinking that they can’t get any worse, and I keep being proven wrong.
Take a look at this article and tell me why the secular school system, which has a far higher percentage of abuse, is not given the same scrutiny as the Catholic Church? I’m not a Catholic, but the numbers in the school system shocked me even more that the Catholic Church ones.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21392345/ns/us_news-education/
Okay, I finally got off my duff to go and read your link.
…aaaand, second paragraph in: “That got [a teacher] fired from his first teaching job[.]“. Right up front, that shows the school system is light years ahead of the RCC, because they actually fired somebody. What you seem to have missed is that nobody blames the church for having some priests who are pedophiles. It’s a wide-spread and hard-to-diagnose problem. There has been some criticism of the church for having conditions that attract pedophiles, but that also isn’t the cause of outrage. The problem is (and you must have been living under a rock to have missed this) that the church’s response to finding a child rapist is to protect them from prosecution and send them more victims!
The article unfortunately fails to actually compare the number of abusers in education with the number of abuser priests. ~2.5k sanctions of 3M educators, w/ half of those involving conviction, all within 5yrs. ~4k accusations of 0.1M priests in >50yrs. If we pretend that accusations of priests occurred at a uniform rate, that’s ~5 accusations of priests for each sanction of an educator; it’s not obvious that those are substantially different rates of abuse, even before considering the relative frequency of a victim accusing a priest versus an educator. Nevermind the fact that it’s entirely unclear what actions are covered within each group. So, really, I don’t see how you’re concluding that the education system “has a far greater percentage of abuse“, unless you’re basing that on the fact that there are more teachers than priests (and if that were your concern, there’s an obvious solution of getting rid of all the damned priests). Also, the writer is obviously completely innumerate. (“nearly three [abusive educators] for every school day” is so stupid it’s not even wrong.)
But the rest of the article does make one rather vague claim that seems to support you here, that school administrators acted to hide the abusive teachers and that that resulted in the teachers continuing to abuse. But even that only barely corresponds to what the RCC did because all of the repeat offenders in schools appear to have succeeded by having changed jurisdictions, leaving an area that did successfully eject them. The article here claims itself that in the case of schools, recidivism could have been reduced by having a larger system of management that knew the overall doings of the abusers. In the case of the RCC, there’s a world-wide system of management, which oftentimes knew exactly who the repeat offenders were. Did it black-list them from it’s entire jurisdiction? No, it shipped them to Alaska where the offenders could run girls’ and boys’ dormitories in a village where the victims are too poor to even leave the parish.
So, even if we assume that the individual abusers in the school system are just as bad as those in the church (and that’s a fact not in evidence as yet), the RCC has done vastly more harm in its handling of abuses. And that’s before we get to the fact that they promoted the most infamous enable (and arguably keep him from being subject to further inquiries). But this only considers the festering pustule that is the RCC’s handing of the sexual predators in the US. There’s also the decades of systematic beatings and rapes in the Irish
prisonsorphanages.And I haven’t even gotten into the larger context of how the RCC is a blight on the world on topic after topic after topic. Do I need to go look up links for you? OR have you actually followed even a little bit of the news?