The Vatican’s new official defense makes you wonder who thought it would be a good idea to revive the story. Only about one in twenty priests touched children in their private parts!
Protip: when, say, a political candidate admits he had sex with “between 1 and 5” farm animals, you can discard one through four.
Scott
Damn, I wasn’t planning on doing anything for Blasphemy Day tomorrow, and now I may have to try to figure out some decent blaspheming…
r€nato
See? it’s only one out 20 apples in the barrel that are bad. And the church don’t necessarily cover up for all of them!
r€nato
…they can call it, “the Mark Foley defense”.
You can tell these Vatican flacks don’t have families of their own, huh?
Tom G
I’m in my mid-40s, and as far as I know, the Catholic church has been “busy cleaning its own house” for 2 decades now.
Also, alleging that other religious bodies are basically just as bad is a pretty poor “defense”. Are there any less self-interested studies backing that allegation up? I haven’t heard of any.
And not to nit-pick, but isn’t the newspaper the Christian Science Monitor (not Scientist)?
El Cid
I am sort of sad to admit that as cynical as I was about religious’ leaders’ capacity to abuse authority, the statistics which began emerging with the Catholic priest scandal — which I noticed a lot earlier than this particular article — overwhelmed what I would have estimated.
I would have estimated that there would have been a ‘lot’ of priests or other leaders involved in such abuses, but I would not have guessed that it would have been a truly significant portion of the entire roster.
This has all of course been caused by ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act also too.
SGEW
Obligatory Louis C.K. comedy bit here: “Louis CK Learns About the Catholic Church.”
Cerberus
They must be getting desperate.
I mean, the supposed reason they didn’t just flush out the pedophiles and hand them over to civil authorities was that they’d have to admit to papal fallibility, that the Catholic Church isn’t supernaturally better and more resistant to things like this.
But now, they’re fully willing to admit that “they’re as bad as other religions”. I guess the petard they tried to set on the whole stonewalling and cover-ups has finally exploded.
It also makes me wonder if one in 20 is the low-ball estimate.
SGEW
From the Guardian article the linked Mother Jones post links to:
(emphasis added)
This is just generally a pretty good idea.
Comrade Jake
Gotta love the “they weren’t pedophiles, they were just having gay sex with little boys” defense. Effing brilliant.
geg6
Fuck those demagogues in skirts who like to use their power and religion to rape, abuse, and torture little children. I was on to them as a child and got the hell out of that particular dysfunctional family as quick as I was able. Still love the theater of the church and its ritual, but have no respect for any of their moral pontificating. WATB, the whole buncha them.
Bootlegger
The estimated number of sex offenders in the priesthood, much less the estimate that other denominations are worse, is far greater than the general population. So, clergy are more likely than the general population to be sex offenders. Correlation=causation? No, but it would be irresponsible for us not to jump to conclusions and assume they are ALL sex offenders. Also.
Citizen_X
Clearly, the Church has to redouble its efforts against abortion and teh ghey.
Ash Can
Good grief. If Archbishop Tomasi keeps making statements like this one, he’ll have shot his feet clean off by the end of the day.
Ted the Slacker
Who needs PR these days? You just rent some unemployed wingnuts to secretly video some poor folks, then send edited clips through the puke funnel to maximize the manufactured poutrage and divert attention.
daniel thomas macinnes
Hey, Gamepro reference! I used to freelance for them years ago. That’s a hoot.
Cerberus
@SGEW:
Considering the high admitted percentage (far above percent for general population) and the divergence of response in favor of those caught versus actual parishioners (say if they’re an underage rape victim facing a deadly pregnancy).
I’d say once again satire just can’t keep up with the truth. Whatever the point was before, the catholic church has become entirely about protecting their existing wealth and raping kids.
Oh, and hating gays and sexual women (even rape victims). Must not forget their hobbies.
Deborah
@Bootlegger: For the Catholic clergy there’s a reasonable hypothesis that some number of teenage boys noticed “I’m really not attracted to girls my own age” and concluded “I must have a calling to be a priest.”
John PM
Between 1.5 and 5%? That would mean that in a large diocese like Chicago there would be potentially dozens of molesters!
This should really spell the end of the Catholic Church.
r€nato
@Cerberus:
Papal infallibility extends only to doctrine. It does not mean that the Church considers the Pope to be without error in all matters.
@Comrade Jake:
The Church does, in fact, blame homosexuals and homosexuality for their numerous priest-on-boy sex scandals. (I guess the queers also made them cover it up and quietly shuffle abusive priests around so they can abuse again.)
Re-read the statement by the Vatican PR flack in that light and it makes more sense. In fact since the priest abuse scandal reached its height about four or five years ago, the Church has begun a quiet inquisition against homosexuality in the Church.
They can’t ever face the fact that it’s celibacy which is the root of their problems.
Jude
Oh, come on. Only one in 20? That’s not even statistically significant!
Yes, I know I’m going to hell.
SFAW
I am somewhat distressed that the link to Obama is not being discussed more fully. El Cid has the beginnings of such, but falls far short.
But here’s one of the things that I can’t wrap my head around:
1) Obama is just like Hitler
2) Obama’s evil minions are Nazis
2) Said evil minions practice hebephilia (along with ephebophilia, of course)
3) No self-respecting Nazi would practice hebe-philia
The cognitive dissonance is sufficient to make my head ‘splode.
But then again, Michael Moore is FAT! and Vince Foster!
Also.
r€nato
@John PM:
Every so often you hear about some neighborhood up in arms because a registered sex offender is moving in nearby.
Would you be willing to live in a neighborhood where one of 20 homes harbored a child molester – oops, sorry, ‘ephebophile’?
SFAW
One would hope their tactics include the soft pillow and the comfy chair. Unfortunately, history shows that hope to be foolish in extremis.
ellaesther
@Tom G: A) Yes. Christian Science Monitor — really people, is the web so hard to access from the Vatican?
B) What the fuck is this fuckery? I really feel for believing Catholics who have to deal with this. Those men are not the Church, they are not the Divine, they are not the reason (or should not be the reason) for faith. And yet they must have the power to mess all that up for a lot of really good people.
C) @SGEW: What a great quote. I believe I will be quoting it in the future! (Possibly in reference to Israel/Palestine, and I have to wonder — because it is a knee-jerk wondering on my part at this point — if the rabbi who said it would accept it in that context. But that’s kind of OT, so I’ll move on).
asiangrrlMN
@SFAW: Eddie Izzard fan? Cake or death? Cake for me, please!
As for the head pooh-bahs of the Catholic church, they can all DSIAF (the S stands for slowly). I would be pissed off, but I am too weary for that. Evil, it lives and is wrapped up in the disguise of so-called religion.
Original Lee
Related in a rather amusing way.
snoey
Put Bernie Law on the same plane as Polanski and we’ll talk.
Criminal priests have it on their consciences, the coverup stains the whole church.
Persia
I read an article a few years ago about how female rape victims abused by priests are generally called ‘seducers,’ no matter their age. The whole leadership needs to step down.
What really disturbs me is how much of an American concern this is– like the outrage over Roman Polanski, I’m happy to stand with the Puritans on this one.
SFAW
Some of his stuff is good.
I’m assuming you brang him up as a sidelight, rather than as the originator of the torture techniques, yes?
SFAW
Well, of course! It’s because they use their feminine wiles to seduce them pore innocent priests, what never done seed no girls when they was growin’ up.
fliegr
@SFAW: Nobody expects the quiet inquisition.
Punchy
Wow, further down that quote they blast the Jews as pedophiles, too. On their holy day. Holy smack talk.
For the first time in history, we may have a war on our hands based on differences in religion.
jrg
I wonder what “available research” showed that only 1.5%-5% of Catholic clergy were involved in child sex abuse. Does that include the abuses the Vatican succeeded in covering up? As others have suggested, I’m going to start at 5% and speculate upward.
A passage from the bible comes to mind: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the teenage jizz from thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”
Not sure if I got that quote quite right. It’s been a while since I went to church.
Persia
@Original Lee: Lee: It’d be especially interesting to overlay those maps with Republican vs. Democratic voting patterns. Or the STD one with abstinence-only education.
Max
OT –
Photo of “Air” Obama on the court. He’s got some vertical lift.
Good morning.
http://twitpic.com/jll5t
John PM
This whole scenario also reminds me of one of my favorite lines from Kathy Griffin, quoting her mother: “Oh, Kathleen, some of those priests hardly touched those boys.”
@r€nato:
Exactly!
Shinobi
Maybe the church is hoping that their flock wasn’t paying attention to the Nuns and doesn’t remember how percentages work?
Only 1.5% of trusted community leaders are actually unspeakably horrible monsters who abuse children! Hooray!
SFAW
Put Bernie Law on the same plane as Polanski and we’ll talk.
Ah, yes, Bernard Cardinal Law. The Church’s attempt to follow one of Corporate America’s favorite dicta: “Fuck up and move up”.
What he did was arguably worse than what Polanski did. With Polanski, he was/is a sick bastard, but it’s only his actions that caused the problem. With Law, his decades-long cover-up allowed plenty of other sick bastards to molest a large number of kids, well after the first incident was known to the Boston Archdiocese.
Heckuva job, Bernie. I don’t believe in the afterlife, but it’s because of people like him that I sometimes hope there’s a Hell – even if I get to join him there.
SFAW
Of course, if I had half a clue, that last comment would have started out block-quoted:
r€nato
@Punchy:
who could have imagined this from a German pope?
toujoursdan
I don’t think the rate of abuse is much higher in the RCC than in Protestant or Jewish congregations, and I suspect it is probably about the same as you’d find in day care centres, the Boy Scouts, summer camps, YMCA facilities and elsewhere. So I agree with him on that point. There is a percentage of the population with a predilection for abusing minors. I am not even convinced that the rate of abuse is higher because of the celibacy requirement.
What bothers me here is that they completely miss the reason for the outrage. It wasn’t so much that abuse happened, as heinous as it was, the outrage is over the fact that the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church conspired to protect abusing priests: shielding them from authorities, paying off parents and then transferring them to unsuspecting congregations where the same priest abused again and again and again. If they did get caught, they were transferred to other states or countries to avoid prosecution. Bishops who were exposed as enabling these predator priests were shuttled off to the Vatican and disappeared from public view instead of being held accountable.
They don’t address the institutional cover-up at all, and I am not convinced that there has been much change.
Secondly women are abused at a rate 5 times higher than young men, but that issue isn’t being discussed at all. So as I see it this is more about saving face than dealing with the problem and protecting victims.
bellatrys
FYI, folks, “ephebophilia” is a particularly repellent – and fairly recent – bit of abuse-rationalizing sophistry: it means that they were *teens* who were abused, approaching or at the age of puberty, and thus not “children” – so it’s like, TOTALLY wrong & unfair (because it’s inaccurate) to accuse them of being *child* molesters! You’re making Baby Jesus cry with your lies!
Because, you know, it’s SOOO much better to rape a junior-high student than a grade-school student…
(The “other denominations do it MOAR, so there!” is a very old justification, used to soothe the consciences of Catholics at the very beginning whispers of scandal in the early 80s. “But they were TEENS!” only appeared during the Boston investigations, iirc.)
–Persia, I’m sure that’s what they said about my grandmother back in the Twenties….
Punchy
@r€nato: Especially one named after breakfast food that contains ham.
Chad N Freude
@SFAW: The hideous torture techniques of the Spanish Inquisition (which nobody expects) have been temporarily revived in a limited-run stage production in Los Angeles called “An Evening Without Monty Python”. Eric Idle put together a series of the most popular and famous MP skits with a 30/40-ish cast. Funny on TV and DVD, absolutely hilarious in a theater full of fans.
Now back to our regularly scheduled inapproriatophilia, already in progress.
asiangrrlMN
@Original Lee: Wait, so MN is full of saints? No wonder I’m bored here!
@SFAW: Oh, sorry. To me, any mocking of the Spanish Inquisition makes me think of Eddie Izzard. NSFW, kinda.
It starts around 4:48, but the whole thing is funny.
Chad N Freude
Let us not forget
asiangrrlMN
@bellatrys: Yes, this, too. No matter what name you slap on it, it’s still rape and abuse. Period. End of story. And the Church covered it up for decades. THAT is the outrage. The rest is just smoke and mirrors.
SFAW
@Chad N Freude: Yes, and I’m sure Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick did a fine job in “The Producers”.
SFAW
I thought the (s)Aints were from New Orleans?
Chad N Freude
@SFAW: Dunno, didn’t see it. The MP replication is truly excellent — Eric Idle directed and, I suppose, cast it.
kay
@toujoursdan:
What bothers me here is that they completely miss the reason for the outrage. It wasn’t so much that abuse happened, as heinous as it was, the outrage is over the fact that the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church conspired to protect abusing priests: shielding them from authorities, paying off parents and then transferring them to unsuspecting congregations where the same priest abused again and again and again. If they did get caught, they were transferred to other states or countries to avoid prosecution. Bishops who were exposed as enabling these predator priests were shuttled off to the Vatican and disappeared from public view instead of being held accountable.
Great points. I’d take it one step further, though. I’d take it to lay staff and church members, who were too cowed or scared or blind to see anything. I quite frankly don’t buy that they didn’t know. They didn’t want to know.
What’s heart breaking about it is they targeted kids who were already vulnerable, for one or another reason. I wonder about that. I wonder if the lay people and church members didn’t protect because they somehow deemed children who are already vulnerable as marginal in one or another way, and less worthy of care and protection. It’s harsh, but that’s what I wonder about.
Violet
The Catholic church can’t allow all the priests to be prosecuted because they wouldn’t have any more priests left. It’s not like they have a bunch of them on the bench that can fill in. It would be incredibly expensive too. I know they’re really rich, but not all dioceses are. And then there’s that papal infallibility nonsense.
Seems to me they’re a bunch of sickos. They’re just like the Pharisees that Jesus spoke out against. All outside trappings and rotten on the inside.
asiangrrlMN
@kay: I’m right there with you, kay. People knew. I think your estimation about the value of the children is spot-on, too. They were throwaways.
This is making me very upset.
R-Jud
@kay:
I don’t wonder, going by the kinds of abuses that happened to orphans and other unfortunates at the hands of the Christian Brothers in Ireland for all those years. Perhaps it’s unfair to tar non-Irish clergy and lay staff with the same brush as the CB, but, given my own experiences as a Catholic schoolkid just with the nastiness and sadism of certain nuns with respect to certain kids, I think I am justified.
Keith G
@r€nato:
Spot on.
The gay priests I have known (a few) were cool guys who seemed rather adjusted to who they were and what their life’s calling was about. Obviously, I cannot say for sure, but I doubt they were offenders. The one who wanted to date me, Fr Mark, a Jesuit (of all things) was plainly interested in guys his age. I was 20 he was 23 and we both were working with a college-based community non-profit. BTW I was/am a vocal non-believer. None-the-less, we “didn’t”.
I did end up introducing him, to another gay OSU student, a Mormon. They seemed to hit it off.
Renate, I do postulate that many of the offenders are no more gay than prisoners who engage in situational same sex activities. They are sexual beings searching for an outlet and finding (what has been considered for most of human history) an easy target.
As long as sexual repression is a sacrament for that silly church, so to will be sexual abuse. Period.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Shorter RCC: We’re all pedophiles now.
This is just me, but if I were trying to prove my organization didn’t have a serious kiddy diddling problem, I would stay away from stats like this. Makes it kind of hard to play the “Oops, we had no idea it was this bad card.”
Of course, if my organization was known for running around screaming Teh Ghey iz teh Debbil! I wouldn’t try (even subtly) to hint that other people are nasty old ‘phobes for pointing out my organization’s kiddy diddling problem.
Mr Furious
@Max: Pussy. He should try that with a bundle of brush! Or on a mountain bike!
R-Jud
@John PM:
I used to date one of her brothers. They are a funny goddamn family.
The Moar You Know
@SGEW: You’re the gift that never stops giving. That was fucking awesome.
Ash Can
@ellaesther: “I really feel for believing Catholics who have to deal with this.”
Heaven bless you. There are at least a few of us progressive Catholics around, doing what little we can to drag our Church into the modern age. Pope Benny and the hordes of conservative bishops are making us feel pretty lonely, though.
These guys either don’t know or don’t care that they’re behaving just like crooked cops, covering for other crooked cops and thwarting investigations into wrongdoing. It’s maddening.
Mojotron
They knew. Alaska was one of the locations where they would dump their problem priests:
Keith G
@Keith G: Let me please clarify and emphasize: When I typed the phrase “silly church”, I was aiming at the hierarchy, the establishment, if you will.
toujoursdan
I have a lot of trouble pinning this on the celibacy requirement or sexual repression because that assumes that a rape of a minor is a relational/sexual act and not primarily motivated by power and control. We don’t believe that raping women is sexual any longer. It is seen as a violent crime based on domination and control. It’s no different for a child, IMHO.
It also seems to assume that if you take away “normal” channels for sexuality, people will turn to abuse and I don’t tend to believe that’s true either.
Most children are raped because they are generally physically and emotionally weaker than adults and are a vulnerable target. They can more easily be controlled and made to serve the emotional and physical needs of an adult than another adult can. The issue here is the lack of mutuality on the part of the adult, empathy for the child and concern over how the experience affects them. And that is where the focus on prevention needs to lie.
There are lots of reasons to end the celibacy requirement. It isn’t a matter of doctrine, but discipline: it was instituted in the 12th Century because of issues of church property and inheritance, and this is no longer needed in our legal system. It also keeps the best people from choosing ministry.
But I think it’s a mistake to tie it to this abuse.
linda
oh my:
The president of the World Bank said Monday that America’s days as an unchallenged economic superpower might be numbered and that dollar was likely to lose its favored position as the euro and the Chinese renmimbi assume bigger roles.
“The United States would be mistaken to take for granted the dollar’s place as the world’s predominant reserve currency,” the World Bank president, Robert B. Zoellick, said in a speech at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. “Looking forward, there will increasingly be other options to the dollar.”
http://www.pekingduck.org/2009/09/world-bank-head-dollar-will-lose-its-place-to-the-euro-and-renminbi/
jrg
That’s a fashionable statement, but not everyone agrees with it. Steven Pinker and Randy Thornhill come to mind.
I think you might be confusion correlation with causation. It’s possible that people choose a profession that requires celibacy in order to repress their own desires.
bellatrys
@asiangrrlMN:
It’s way worse than that – I put all the stuff together about my grandmother (her fierce hate of the Church despite her family being way involved in their parish, her dropping out of school as a teenager, her phobia of Men (not women!) in Black, and some other stuff that all fits together) when I heard on NHPR about how the Archdiocese of Maine had surrendered records to the AG going back eighty years – it all clicked for me when I did the math. Different diocese, same era…
But *then* it got even worse, when I read about, and then bought and read, the book Fallen Order – covering up for ordained pederasts molesting schoolkids as a concerted activity complete with document burning goes all the way back to the time of Galileo.
At which time, mind you, being a “sodomite” could get you executed, if you didn’t have friends in high enough places.
Yeah, we need Cardinal Law back to face the music, instead of rewarded with a sinecure…
Comrade Darkness
@Ash Can: progressive Catholics
I actually went and got another cup of coffee and that didn’t help my grasping that. Isn’t being Catholic *defined* by top down fealty to the edicts issued from the top? Since you are breaking that essential definition, where does that leave you?
The infrangible brand aside, even if the mother church were back down to a hollow core, al la Pope Urban the VI or Leo X, there is still no mechanism for change to work upward. The org structure was designed specifically to withstand that. History would indicate that the reaction from the top of the hierarchy will be the opposite of “progressive” if they even get around to noticing something is up.
But, you know, knock yourself out.
Just Some Fuckhead
5% seems really high to me.
Tsulagi
Yeah, that was brilliant PR, especially for outside the U.S.
My SO had an argument with her mom over priests and their proclivities during one visit home to Argentina. With nieces, nephews, and cousins going to church activities and/or Catholic schools, SO said they needed to watch out for buggering priests. Mom had a funny defense and was convinced of its certainty: Only American priests are perverts.
That kind of really smart defensive PR reminds me of one put out by a major HMO over the quality of its care. Believe it was Kaiser. They said they were better than average in that only .5% of those entering their hospitals died due to medical error. Great, only 1 in 200 going through their front door on a given day slip on a deadly banana peel and don’t come back out vertical.
bellatrys
@kay:
kay, re the first, I was just blind with fury when I heard a nun who worked for our diocesan office for many years say that she was always so upset that they covered it up and treated the victims so badly, she *knew* it just wasn’t right…but never, ever went to the cops.
re the second, this fits with my grandmother’s circumstances and reading about how the Boston molesters picked kids from poor, often Irish/Italian families and broken (but devout) homes to abuse was another huge wallop with the cluebat.
BeccaM
Bad enough these clergy — who were supposed to be the very watchword of ‘trust’ — would abuse their position (as well as their youngest and most vulnerable parishioner charges).
The real abomination is when their superiors found out, covered it up, and simply shipped the offender to a new parish — not warning the people that they’d just sent a predator into their midst. And then doing this over and over and over. The Church took one crime and compounded it massively.
BDeevDad
My kids can’t use the excuse that other people are doing it. The Catholic Church needs to grow up.
Comrade Dread
This was a horrible betrayal of children, morality, and innocence.
I don’t understand why anyone would try and mitigate this. It is sin, and a full accounting should be made and the guilty should face whatever penalties the government jurisdiction they are in demands.
Ash Can
@Comrade Darkness: The Catholic Church actually isn’t quite the monolith that you make it out to be, or that the conservative Church hierarchy would like it to be. Vatican II, for example, had significant input from the laity and lower-level clergy. Only when the changes were finalized was the top-down structure asserted. Likewise, of course, millions upon millions of practicing Catholics, mainly in the industrialized nations, ignore a variety of Catholic teachings. Here in America, there’s a tacit don’t-ask-don’t-tell mentality pervasive in the Church in this regard. Conservative clergy may complain about it, but it’s not going to change significantly any time soon, and it’s understood by conservatives and liberals alike that to rock the boat and take meaningful action against the “cafeteria Catholics” would result in an alarmingly high number of parishes going broke and shutting down. It’s an often uneasy detente, but it exists nonetheless.
Comrade Darkness
@Keith G: It does matter what era of ordination you’re dealing with for the statistics. The priests I know personally got into it during the Vietnam era, and they were in the priesthood (at least partially) to dodge the draft.
This variance in self-selection over time could be useful in determining statistically if people with sexual issues are more likely to enter the priesthood. Post draft, the selection would have returned to the “norm”. Although, actually it didn’t in another way, the attrition got high enough recruiting started up from Asia and those priests were partially drawn into it by citizenship.
I do suspect self-selection is a big part of the problem. But it is not restricted to the Catholic Church. I remember a particularly egregious case in the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And it is not restricted to the U.S. as there have been problems in Ireland, Poland and Germany that I’ve read about and I’ve not been trying to read about it. This is also not dissimilar to the historical problems in boarding schools in Britain (and probably everywhere), which they have made serious changes to clean up.
Any time you have people with absolute power over children there are going to be problems. The trick is that you have to build an organization that is not inclined to burying the abuse.
JackieBinAZ
@toujoursdan: I know it’s the standard line that rape is about power and not sex but it’s a lot more complicated than that – more like a power-and-sex cocktail. We see plenty of non-sexual ways that people use to subjugate and violate people to gain control over them. But some people deliberately choose this most intimate and personal avenue to wield their control. Let’s pick on some other group and point to cops – what makes some threaten to beat a suspect and others pull out a baton and threaten to sodomize him with it? Is it a matter of degree or a sick twist? Whether they do it forcibly or by coercion, the sexual piece adds a new energy and is critical to the gratification they want.
Interrobang
This happened in Canada, too, and was part and parcel of the systematic, government-backed ethnocide programme against native people here, but it also happened at orphanage schools like Mount Carmel in Newfoundland. (You can Google “residential school scandal,” if you like.) The CBC dramatised the Mount Carmel events as the excellent “The Boys of St. Vincent” back in 1991.
Comrade Darkness
@Ash Can: Yeah, I understand the balance of power you are describing. It’s the same one that got the Church to recognize the Umbanda and Yoruba religious beliefs blended into the practices in Brazil, after years of shaking a theological finger at them. The Church would have lost the world’s largest Catholic country if they had held the line. That was quite blatantly the only reason the Church let it drop.
As to the U.S. which makes up in dollars what it lacks in total numbers, sure, maybe you can play this tug of war with the Vatican. I guess my confusion comes in somewhere around, but why work so hard? If you are rejecting the definition of Catholic, which is unity, by winking and nodding it away . . . what is Catholic? It’s only a brand name now that you are removed the essence of it. What is it you are trying to preserve . . . the ritual, the pagentry?
(I’m just mystified here, btw, nothing more.)
kay
@bellatrys:
I read some of the Boston stories.
When you interview children who have been abused, it isn’t the actual event that grinds them down and makes them so unutterably sad and hopeless. It’s the fear they suffer anticipating the next event, because the fear is constant, and unless they retreat completely into fantasy, they can’t escape that.
So, that’s my problem. That’s the part I have difficulty forgiving, because that, to me, is torture. They don’t just live with it for a short time, the time the act takes. They’re sick with fear, all the time.
toujoursdan
@JackieBinAZ:
I completely agree with this. My, perhaps poorly made point, is that the breakdown isn’t due to the celibacy requirement per se. It’s allowing people with power and control dysfunctions however they are channelled into the clergy or positions of leadership in the first place.
(And, FWIW, I am a progressive Episcopalian/Anglican so have no dog in this fight.)
Persia
@jrg:
It’s also likely that a profession that requires celibacy will exclude many candidates with healthy sexualities, leading to a chronic shortage of priests and a reluctance to dismiss ‘bad’ priests because of the shortage.
JackieBinAZ
@toujoursdan: I think the celibacy requirement has a big role in attracting sexually confused, damaged and even sick people who might see the priesthood as a path to “fixing” their inclinations but find opportunity to act on them instead.
Ash Can
@Comrade Darkness: “I’m just mystified here, btw, nothing more.”
Sure, and you do raise some perfectly good questions, beginning with “What is Catholic?” The official — as in, promulgated by the Vatican itself — definition of the Catholic Church is the aggregate of everyone worldwide who has been baptized into the Church. Since this is so broad and vague (if not contradictory, even, since it has the effect of juxtaposing the authoritarian nature of the religion with its more human, messier nature), it invites a variety of answers and interpretations of what makes one a Church member.
Defined thusly, it’s easier to see that the “essence” of the Church isn’t necessarily — or even primarily — the Holy See and its authority. Naturally, there have to be ground rules, but as with all religions, Catholicism takes place on a very local level. We believe in what we do via personal decisions to believe in a deity and other intangibles, and to accept this particular religion’s teachings on those intangibles. Then we take it from there, deciding whether we feel comfortable with the local parish or prefer to join another one, one that’s more conservative/more liberal/more family oriented/more singles oriented/more socially active/whatever.
Based on this, it’s easy to see that the Church is different things to different parishioners. For some, it’s the ritual, like you say. For very many, to be sure, it’s familiar and force of habit — they’re from Catholic families going back countless generations, and it’s what they’ve always known. For others, it’s an active choice of this dogma over others. For still others, it’s the community. And so on, and usually a combination of any or all of these factors.
The fact is, the Catholic Church has something of a split personality. The vagueness inherent in its own definition of itself opens it up to disagreement within the ranks — as you say, a tug-of-war with the Vatican — that persists despite its authoritarian structure. Furthermore, and very importantly, the issues that get the Church into corporate-media headlines — abortion, homosexuality, pedophilia, real estate, schools, and such — are actually not central to the religious essence of the Church. To go all technical on everyone’s ass here, the religious epicenter of the Catholic Church is the Sacrament of the Eucharist (i.e., communion), and wrapped tightly around that are the Gospels. Wrapped in turn around that are the other books of the Bible, with emphasis on the Messianic texts, and everything — including all of canon law — follows from there. (Two millenia of tradition have obscured the fact that Catholicism is scripturally-based; this is one of the things that Vatican II and its changes addressed.)
In light of all this, it becomes much easier to understand how people who profess to be practicing Catholics can hold a variety of views on a variety of issues, and not in lockstep with what the guys in Vatican City say, either. It’s confusing enough for us; I can only imagine how it appears to someone who’s on the outside looking in.
ellaesther
@Ash Can: Thank you, this was really helpful. As you say, a lot of what you say here probably applies to many religions (it certainly does to Judaism).
And heaven bless you, too!
Paul L.
@Persia:
Interesting that same people who tar the entire Catholic clergy with the broad brush of pedophilia (Hollywood) are defending Roman Polanski.
Parole Officer Burke
@Paul L.:
Everything you find “interesting” is bullshit.
SFAW
And, pray tell, who would that be? Oh, right – “them”. Is Breitbart ghosting your stuff?
Emma Anne
@r€nato:
Argh! They are such morons! Gay priests are not a problem. Pedophile priest are the problem (and those who cover for them). If there is one thing the Catholic church can’t possibly afford, it is to chase good priests away because they are gay. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
bellatrys
kay, the other huge thing that came through was how often it broke their hearts because of families who chose to believe the molesting clergy over their own kids. (I suspect this happened to my grandma too.)
And the big enormous elephant that all the “look at the Orthodox! look at the day cares!” handwaving is to distract from is…the archdioceses had, historically, a HUGE amount of pull with the state. Not just in Boston/Philly/Baltimore, either, but in less-traditionally “Catholic” states like Colorado and CA, too. DAs didn’t pursue because cardinals said not to.
Yeah, I don’t think that Rabbi Shmoh was going to get the same kid-gloves treatment from a 1950s police department.
gwangung
@Paul L.: Hey, now the bigot’s a liar!
The moron simply doesn’t get it; it really, really, really helps to be somewhere in the general vicinity of the truth when you’re trolling for comments. Just pushing any ol’ calumny out there just means you’re a pathetic, toothless whiner.