Posted on 11/16/2007 10:08:43 AM PST by Mrs. Don-o
A study presented to the [U.S. Catholic] bishops on Monday by Karen Terry and Margaret Smith of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on the "causes and context" of the [sex abuse] crisis....said the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy, which peaked numerically in the mid-1970s, for the most part reflected "overall changes in behavior, attitudes, and media representations in American society during this time period."
"This is in conflict with the idea that there is something distinctive about the Catholic church that led to the sexual abuse of minors," Terry said.
[snip]
...During a press briefing on Tuesday, Bishop Thomas Wenski of Orlando also cautiously suggested that, at least in some ways, the church has not been given a fair shake.
"It is a bit disconcerting when the headlines talk about incidents that happened 30 or 40 years ago..." Wenski said.
...To be clear, most bishops are not arguing that the suffering of victims, or the need for effective controls against sexual abuse, has been exaggerated....
In the long run, [the study's] most significant fallout may come in the arena of today's growing discussion of Catholic identity.
In theory, Catholicism is supposed to shape a distinctive culture among its followers based on church teaching and tradition; put crudely, Catholics are supposed to be different...As then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, today Pope Benedict XVI, put the point in 1984, "Among the most urgent tasks facing Christians is that of regaining the capacity of non-conformism, i.e., the capacity to oppose many developments of the surrounding culture."
[Archbishop George added} "The more interesting question, though, is whether or not the church herself, and particularly the priests and bishops, should be held to a moral standard that is higher than that of the general populace..."
(Excerpt) Read more at ncrcafe.org ...
as the Catholic Church singled out because "any stick is good enough"...?
And how does anyone --- individual, church, institution, movement --- regain "the capacity fror non-conformism"?
Ping
Just as I thought. Doesn't make the abuse excusable, and it doesn't make the priests involved less guilty for their actions, but it puts the reason for the increase of abuse squarely where it belongs, in the cultural attitudes of the time.
1) Carefully preserved records going back many decades. As this investigator explains, with the Catholic Church "investigators and prosecutors have access to extraordinarily full documentation in the case of priests: correspondence, medical and psychological counseling records, and employment history starting when the man was a seminary student. “Almost none of that would end up in a public school teacher’s personnel file.”
2.Deep pockets. With the Catholic Church, you can strip the parochial school, the parish, the Diocese itself of buildings, bank accounts, property: assets otherwise devoted to religious and charitable purposes become exposed to seizure in a settlement, whether the parishioners who end up paying the bill were involved in the abuse, knew of the abuse, or were even born at the time.
3. Gotcha factor. The Catholic Church has strong and well-defined doctrines against sexual misbehavior, and it's just delicious to secular/left media to catch a priest with his pants down. Are they also investigating the public schools, counselors and psychotherapists, health and futness gurus, Liberal Judaism or the Unitarian Church? The question answers itself...
Well said. BTW: You e-mail isn’t working. I get messages saying it’s not functioning due to prolonged inactivity. Have you changed your address? I haven’t—so send me an e-mail from your new address, or the old one if there is no new one.
The NEA never addresses the subject of “Naughty Teachers”.
The John Jay study established that 81 percent of the victims were male adolescents between the ages of 11 and 17. The offenses were committed almost entirely by gay men who had been ordained as priests.
The study proves that the priest abuse scandal is a really a GAY scandal.
See
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1867034/posts
Is America the leading country for sexual abuse from it's clergy, regardless of demonination? Or is it that America exposes, investigates, charges and convicts them more than others.
There have been severe issues of sex-abuse in Ireland (remember Sinead O’Connor? That was what she was protesting, in a most stupid way, when she tore up the picture of JP2), Mexico, Austria, and other nations.
thanks
I remain convinced that the reason the scandal was so widely covered in the Boston media was to pave the way for the homosexual activists to push for homosexual ‘marriage’. They knew that the Church was their most vocal and powerful opponent, and they needed to remove her as a force, and they did so by discrediting the ENTIRE Church because of the actions of a VERY few priests.
The short answer is, Yes.
You got that right.
Something interesting the article touched on was the fact that many tiny, symbolic things that used to give Catholics a sense of being "different" --- abstaining from meat on Fridays, fasting (real fasting) during Lent and Advent, etc. --- seemingly small in themselves, but they built up a sense of Catholic "identity" in the midst of a secular culture.
When these little identity-markers were dropped, the sense (as anyone will remember who was a twentysomething in the 70's) was that "well, all that's gone, we've been invited to be just like everybody else and hey, that's OK."
There was this general sense of looseness and slippage, as if the whole religious structure had been dipped in a Universal Solvent and nothing had to "stick" anymore because we were re-inventing the Faith, re-inventing Morals, re-inventing everything.
B16 is clearly calling Catholics back to the "distinctives," our One And Only Church peculiarities. A sense of the unchanging and the sacred. Chastity for real. And not a moment too soon.
One of the purposes of the NEA is to protect those naughty teachers from the consequences of their actions. Ironical, isn’t it?
During the 19th Century, Catholicism was disdained by the radical nationalists. No Catholic could be a good Englishman, Frenchman, or German. Or a good American. Many liberal Catholics felt the pain of this. With the Council, they got their chance to disgard all the distinctive touches, just as liberated Jews did the outward appearances of being Catholic.
Sorry,
...of being of a different “nation.”
Yes. That is b/c there are people in those nations, and people are flawed.
It was happening and continues to happen elsewhere in society. But the Catholic church gave an unprecedented amount of cover to the perpetrators.
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