"I am in no way wishing to be soft of pedophiles and those who covered for them, however justice and truth demand an objective analysis of the facts.”
Just an observation here, but a treatise on Clergy and pedophilia from a Penn State professor is rather ironic, isn’t it?
Just going to observe this thread.
An obvious conclusion is that every time we hear about a pedophile priest, it turns out he’s a homosexual.
Coincidence?
Obviously not.
One sickness breeds another.
I think what the Catholic community needs to do is find the statistics on what percentage of journalist are child molesters. Being that it is probably worse than priests (my guess), the Catholic community needs to preach that wide and far everytime there is a journalist’s story that priests have a liklyhood of being pedophiles.
Baloney.
Catholic priests and religious leaders have a higher authority they answer to and are viewed as someone who can be trusted more than the other careers listed.
When a priest or a pastor abuses that position and relationship, it is incredibly more harmful than any other.
Souls are at stake, not only of those abused, but of those who are witness to the evil.
Just stop inducting homosexual priests. Problem solved.
Let’s just prosecute those who warrant it, AND any and all institutions who try to protect them.
doesn't matter to the kid.
Here is some summary data from a John Jay Institute report done for the Conference of Catholic Bishops:
“The Catholic figures show that between about 4% of priests and deacons serving in the US between 1950 and 2002 had been accused of sexual abuse of someone under 18. In this country, the figure was a 10th of that: 0.4% But whereas the victims in the general population are overwhelmingly female, the pattern among American Catholic priests was quite different. Four out of five of their victims were male. Most were adolescents: two out of five were 14 or over; 15% were under 10.”
The original report has been moved and the link is bad but it could be found I’m sure. What this summary suggests is that the frequency of abuse by Catholic priests IS in fact much higher than in the general population (which includes other religions). And that there is a much higher rate of abuse of boys than girls. (Wonder why that is?)
Matthew 18
6d “Whoever causes one of these little ones* who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
7* Woe to the world because of things that cause sin! Such things must come, but woe to the one through whom they come!
http://www.usccb.org/bible/matthew/18
Justice and truth demand following what Jesus taught. Luckily, Jesus Himself is going to take care of the Justice part. Our part is to do what we can to minimize the opportunity for “little ones” to sin. I am not sure how trying to minimize the problem, by saying “everyone does it and some do more of it”, helps do that.
“euphebophilia” is a faggot euphemism used for covering up pedophilia (the term was manufactured by so-called “experts” in psychology)...just like abortionists calling babies “fetuses”. The Catholic Church has allowed itself to be infiltrated by sodomites at all levels and hasn’t had the institutional courage to purge them.
A better approach is to require that the Church should promptly report all abuse allegations to the proper authorities for criminal prosecution, and that the Church should be fully cooperative with and seek to expedite claims and proceedings over civil liability. Notably, the standard of proof in any civil and criminal proceedings is a matter not of what the Church prefers but of substantive, generally applicable law.
Basically the article puts forth the argument “everybody does it” as if that makes it right.
My own personal statistics:
I’m Catholic and never knew of anyone abused by a priest.
I was also in the public school system and knew three students that had sex w/teachers.
Though I have heard abuse reported in the news by both priests and teachers, I hear such stories far more often with teachers.
I think it’s clear, when it comes to one’s alma mater, football team, or church, excuses for pedophilia abound. Humans, gotta love ‘em.
Pathetic
Justifying sin by saying everyone does it. It’s not pedophilia because so many of the victims were teen agents
This is just sickening. Accept that the American Catholic clergy is corrupt and get on with it
Homosexuals infiltrating the church is a problem. They do this in a lot of institutions.
Does not matter how many facts you post; the anti-Catholic forces will swarm. Seems like the words “Catholic”, “pope”, or “priest” in a title set them off.
Much of what the article argues is correct. But the point the author misses is that, unlike many other religious denominations or other organizations, the Catholic Church is a world-wide hierarchical entity that had the ability (and incentive) to move offending priests from one place to another to avoid public scandal (and thereby endanger more children). There have been sex-abuse scandals at synagogues and Protestant churches, but most of them lacked the ability to cover things up by moving the offender to a different parish.
All the apologetics miss the one sin that has put the church in the position that it’s in. They aggressively hid and covered up for the pedophiles. Priests were not slapped on the face on the church steps and driven away.