Posted on 05/19/2010 8:30:24 AM PDT by TSgt
TSgt. I did not actually mean you. And as for being objective I think it is not me who is non objective.
Do you ever wonder what I think should be done to those proven guilty or those who did engage in coverups? Did you ever ask me if I thought the Church had failed greatly in protecting children and in following her own laws regarding these cases?
My statement about how the Bishop in India should be pelted with sh*t should give you a clue. And believing that even a person who later is found guilty has every right to defend themselves and protect their rights under civil/criminal/canon law does not mean I do not care for the victims. But the law if taken away will also mean the innocent will be subject to the abuse of police powers.
Bottom line those who are guilty should pay the full penalty.
It is getting heavy.
But even with the potential for class action status and Vatican liability the church continues to stick its head in the sand.
Perhaps they could settle it ala Tobacco settlements? A one time class action lawsuit and one time settlement? This wold of course exclude future cases of abuse and cover-up.
Still, you do not explain your ridiculous logic.
True.
I think at the moment the question of Vatican/employer and bishop/employee is being argued in federal court.
And likely the main question will be of how much, and how often, control the Vatican exercises over the bishops.
I don’t think I would want to be arguing the Vatican’s position.
What happens to the “victims” who admit they lied? Does the church demand they be jailed? Anything?
Of course, unless the statute of limitations applies in a given instance of abuse.
Do you really think that is all they have?
I think the statue of limitations makes sense for a lot of reasons. If the time limit has expired why not just release everything? No harm will be done except to the reputation of those that did the wrong thing.
Immunity is the least of the Pope’s worries at this point. We’re talking major money if some Court qualifies these under a class action lawsuit.
If you don't think false allegations happen all the time by young gay men who are used by atheist organizations and anti-Catholic groups, you obviously lack the ability to read or you prefer to be fed lies or you're part of the God-hating war.
There's an old political adage that says "you can't beat something with nothing". As to claims of abuse being more prevalent within one organization or another, those aren't statements of opinionated bias - those are statements that someone can actually prove (or disprove) with math. And to date, I've never seen a Catholic do the math. But I have seen a number of Catholics make unsubstantiated claims that abuse rates are two...three...sometimes even a hundred times worse in Protestant churches than in Catholic ones. Does that make them "atheist haters of God"?
The John Jay Study (see threads here, here, and outside coverage here) - commissioned by the U.S. Catholic Bishops' National Review Board itself - found that the number of accused Catholic priest abusers equaled four percent of the entire Catholic priest population. The John Jay study's findings are more than conclusive - they're exhaustive of the entire US population of Catholic priests. Surely you're not suggesting that the New York Times would be as more reliable source of information than the John Jay Study?Dr Eckleburg: Your posts have ratcheted up the dialogue considerably.As I've said elsewhere, every study I've been shown of "Protestant" abuse (which include many of the websites your Google search links to) included volunteers and laypersons. The John Jay Study did not address these groups when they looked at Catholic parishes. If we exclude volunteers and laypersons from the "Protestant" studies (thereby creating a "pastor vs priest" apple-to-apple comparison), we arrive at a roughly 1% abuse rate for all "Protestant" pastors, or (in other words) at least a four times greater likelihood that any given Catholic priest will be a sexual predator, as compared to any given "Protestant" pastor. And that's according to the numbers and studies that Catholics keep telling me about.
Let me throw in one caveat to those comparisons. I found something interesting when I broke down the "Protestant" abuse cases by denomination / affiliation / theological leanings. The more free will / Arminian / synergistic the theology is, and the more independent the association is (as opposed to denominational affiliation), the higher the abuse statistic goes - and conversely, if you just look at the Reformed Protestant denominations, the number of "Protestant" abuse cases statistically drops off the chart by comparison. It's only the average of all "Protestant" pastors that is around 1%. Some independent churches have statistics that are far, far higher than the Catholic average of 4%.
-- Alex Murphy, April 2, 2008"(S)hould denominational ratios be skewed by independent ratios?"....AFAIK, no one has ever attempted to quantify abuse statistics to show where abuse runs high (or low) among Protestant, Evangelical, and Independent church leadership. My attempts appear to be the first. And I would agree with you that we should compare apples to apples by keeping it ratios to ratios, and not raw numbers to raw numbers. See especially the thread Teachers Vs. Priests - Unequal Treatment In the Media? in which I say
While 25,000 hypothesized "accusations" is roughly six times the number of Catholic "accusations", 25,000 cases out of 1,600,000 teachers gives us a 1.3 to 1.56% ratio of sexually abusive teachers out of the entire public school system over a fifty year period - more than twice the volume of Protestant pastoral abuse, and less than half the volume of Catholic priest abuse.-- Alex Murphy, April 2, 2008If we're after equal treatment in the media, I would expect there to be at least double the number of Catholic news stories as Public School stories, and four times as many Catholic news stories as Protestant news stories based on the percentage of perverts that exist with their respective organizations. IMO the disproportionate amount of coverage is the result of increased interest, when those organizations are caught protecting the abusers at the expense of the victims.
It is not sexual misconduct, rather it is sexual assault, that Catholic priests were accused of in the John Jay Study. The topic isn't "who's accused of sexual misconduct", it's "who's accused of committing a felony against a minor"....Should I consider the intentional conflation of "statutory rape" with "sexual misconduct" to be deflecting attention? Damn straight I do, skippy....Of the 38% of all Protestant clergy being accused of some level of inappropriate sexual contact, only 4.6% have engaged in actual sexual intercourse outside of marriage. And none of them of rape.
If the Catholic apologist were really comparing apples to apples, the real statistics would speak of Protestant clergy accused of criminal sexual contact with minors, or would adjust the John Jay study's four percent upwards to include inappropriate but otherwise legal sexual relations. But the Catholic apologist does no such thing. They start with John Jay's 4%, move on to Protestantism's 38%, and leave the reader thinking that 4% "statutory rape" is comparable to 38% "inappropriate relations". Sometimes you have to keep score, to tell when the other side is moving the goalposts on you.
-- Alex Murphy, September 29, 2009
"...the scandal was never really about the 4% abusers in their ranks. The real scandal was that 66% of bishops covered for the 4%, negatively affecting 95% of the dioceses in the United States - actions which cost the Catholic Church over three billion dollars paid in settlements and awards to the victims."
-- Alex Murphy, September 29, 2009
I expect this one will cause the thread to attain orbit.
Me too and the article has too few facts. But it is implied by many posters that caring about knowing facts and complying with law means not caring about the victims.
That should be the last of their concerns.
***How are Catholics priests any different from other Christian ministers, rabbis or the population in general? I’m sure you must have stats or you wouldn’t be so rabid.***
What do you can a Protestant minister who molests children? An inmate.
What do you call a priest caught molesting children? Father.
That Debs, is the issue.
Why? Do you know of any? Maybe what ought to be done is what should of been done when all the allegations were being made: call law enforcement.
Its a crime to lie or make false statements.
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