From the WSJ
"Several top Vatican officials have rushed to defend the pope's handling of abuse cases worldwide, noting his record as a forthright fighter of sexual abuse. Roman Catholic officials have also asserted that abuse cases are no more prevalent inside the Catholic priesthood than in the rest of society, echoing their response to allegations of sexual abuse that first exploded in the U.S. in 2001."
Why heck, everybody else is doing it!! What's the big deal?
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How do they explain this? Refusal to address this problem is costing them dearly.
ReplyDeleteHow to Destroy a Church
COMMENT ON IRELAND
"Virtually no young people go to church. The main churchgoers would be my generation, still, and older," says McGlynn, who is 57. "The church has lost an entire generation."
"I haven't been to church for quite some time. My faith has been seriously damaged," he adds.
He's part of a much broader trend, says Patsy McGarry, religious affairs correspondent for the Irish Times newspaper.
More than 90 percent of Irish people attended mass at least once a week in the 1970s. Today the figure is about half that, he says.
"The church has lost working-class urban Ireland," he says.
The faithful were shocked and disgusted to learn that Irish bishops had covered up abuse in the name of protecting the church and its priests, he says.
Scandal of sexual abuse by priests shocks Brazil's 125 million Catholics
• 10% of country's clergy are sex offenders, says Vatican
• Paedophilia trial reveals vulnerability of the poor
A growing sex abuse scandal is rocking the world's largest national congregation of Catholics. This week a Brazilian priest was given a lengthy jail sentence after a court heard extracts from a diary that read like a paedophile priest's how-to manual. A magazine earlier published evidence that, according to estimates by Vatican investigators, one in 10 of Brazil's priests was involved in some form of sexual misdemeanour.
The signs of abuse in a country that is home to about 125 million Catholics will be of particular concern to the church hierarchy. Until now Catholic leaders have comforted themselves with the belief that, no matter how battered its reputation in rich nations such as the United States, the church continued to be held in high esteem in the developing world.
Ms Jurkwicz said the problem had been exacerbated by the vast social divide between Brazil's haves and have-nots. "The victims are almost always poor, vulnerable people," she said, arguing that Brazil's wealth gap made it easier for priests to exploit youngsters with impunity.
Jim
This is nonsense. To suggest as Bill Donohue that the Catholics are unduly singled out for criticism is beyond belief. Teachers (both men and women) are prosecuted on a regular basis. When he said, "Had the Catholic Church simply tossed the offenders out, it would have been branded as heartless." Heartless, what an idiot. Look, these people are criminals. Several years ago when I was a school superintendent in Illinois, we had a fifth grade teacher who molested children. He went straight to jail and no one thought we were being heartless. We were simply protecting children. Should Dennis Rader (the BTK killer in Kansas) be allowed to just be reassigned to another Lutheran church (he was their president) so as not to appear heartless? According to Donohue this would seem to the proper thing to do. He doesn't seem to understand you owe the criminal nothing but a fair trial. Evidently Donohue has no concern for the victims, just the image of the church. Read his remarks below and try not throw up your last meal.
ReplyDeleteJim
Criticism of Catholic Church is unfair
By Bill Donohue, Special to CNN
March 19, 2010 1:17 p.m. EDT
tzleft.donohue.catholic.league.jpg
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
* Bill Donohue says church treated sex abuse as internal matter, as did other leaders
* He says critics are unfairly implying Church acted differently in failing to disclose such cases
* He says other faiths, professions have had similar problems but less publicity
RELATED TOPICS
* Church Abuse Scandals
* Roman Catholicism
* Sexual Offenses
Editor's note: Bill Donohue is president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and author of four books, including "Secular Sabotage: How Liberals are Destroying Religion and Culture in America."
New York (CNN) -- The rash of stories about priestly sexual abuse in Europe, especially in Ireland and Germany, has put many Catholics on the defensive. They should not be. While sexual molestation of any kind is always indefensible, the politics surrounding this story is also indefensible.
Employers from every walk of life, in both the U.S. and Europe, have long handled cases of alleged sex abuse by employees as an internal matter. Rarely have employers called the cops, and none was required to do so.
Though this is starting to change, any discussion of employee sexual abuse that took place 30 and 40 years ago must acknowledge this reality. Thus it hardly comes as a surprise that Cardinal Sean Brady in Ireland did not summon the authorities about a case involving a priest in the 1970s. What is surprising is why some are now indicting him, acting as if his response was the exception to the rule.
Selective indignation at the Catholic Church is not confined to Brady. Why, for example, are the psychologists and psychiatrists who pledged to "fix" abusers treated so lightly? After all, employers from the corporate world to the Catholic Church were told over and over again that therapy works and to give the offender a second chance.
Indeed, the zeitgeist of the day was that rehabilitation not only works, it is virtuous. That such advice was wildly oversold can now be agreed upon by almost everyone, and that is precisely why it smacks of politics to deny how strongly held the rehabilitative ideal was. Had the Catholic Church simply tossed the offenders out, it would have been branded as heartless.