Posted on 10/11/2003 5:56:40 AM PDT by RaceBannon
Vatican: U.S. Catholic Sex Scandal Was Overstated Reuters Friday, October 10, 2003; 4:16 PM VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The media has exaggerated a sex scandal that has shaken the U.S. Roman Catholic Church and unfairly tainted thousands of priests with overzealous coverage, Pope John Paul II's top aide said Friday. "The scandals in the United States received disproportionate attention from the media," Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano told Reuters in an interview. "There are thieves in every country, but it's hard to say that everyone is a thief."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I'm still waiting for that expose on sex abuse in public schools and universities.
The media's anti-Christian agenda is evident, as always. But the Catholic Church sure made this one easy for them.
It is. And you know what? If an organization that people trusted with the well-being of children was responsible and covered things up, I'd be outraged.
BINGO
Moving known sex perverts from church to church. Enabling repeat offenders to pry on new children. Shame on the Vatican. Shame.
Conservative has provided an excellent response. The historical perspective on this comes from www.rpinet.com ....
Just some more info on celibacy.
By itself, a decision to remain single could mean very different things (great selfishness, great generosity or inability to choose a spouse). In Matthew 19:12, Jesus praises a celibacy practiced "for the sake of the Kingdon." Optional, lifelong celibacy for men became more common with Egypt's desert hermits in the third century. By the year 303, the Council of Elvira (southern Spain) had prohibited sexual intercourse between a married priest and his wife. By the mid-fourth century, marriage after ordination started to be prohibited.
There are various reasons - influence of cultic purity laws for Old Testament priests, possible conflict over inheriting Church property, the teaching of Jesus cited above and St.Paul's teaching on celibacy (1Corinthians 7:32-35). The Orthodox Churches and Eastern Catholic Churches ordain married men as priests but select bishops from monks who have already made a lifelong promise of celibacy. A married priest who becomes a widower may not remarry.
The Second Lateran Council (1139) made celibacy mandatory for future priests in the Western (Roman) Church.
In the last 40 years the Catholic Chruch has allowed some married, Protestant ministers to be ordained priests after they became Catholics. Most of these priests are not in fulltime parish ministry.
In 1967 through his encyclical On Priestly Celibacy, Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the Catholic Church's rule about this.Section 1579 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that "accepted with a joyous heart celibacy radianty proclains the Reign of God." A gospel-based celibacy does not devalue marriage; it is another way of serving the Lord. What matters most for both vowed celibates and married people is generous faithfulness.
I am sorry to hear of your family member. It is an incidiousness that is being addressed; unfortunately too late for the victim in your family.
The following web site track ALL reported abuses across the US. It is definitely worth a visit.
I have no idea where you are from, but I've only known one priest in my whole life who was ever accused of improprieties, and it was of teenage boys. It came out last year, but had apparently happened in the 80's.
I have lived in 5 states, and have belonged to at least 7 parishes. In addition to the priests in those parishes, I've known many more having been introduced to them by my brother-in-law who is also a priest. So out of about 100 priests, only one of them has been allegedly a molester. That may not be the average, but I'm betting it's pretty close.
People may still be angry at the Church for 'covering up' the molestations and transferring priests from the 60's to the 80's, but as Crusader said, the parents of these children could have filed criminal charges AT ANY TIME! So it is not only the Church that has to answer for these cases being dragged out. The parents, law enforcement officers, psychological and counseling professionals and the justice system were also at fault. If these priests had been tried and put in jail when they were found to be not 'cured' by the counseling, there would have been many fewer molestations.
"It is fair to condemn evil, but one must keep it in proportion," said Sodano
Asked if there might have been a plot to discredit the Church, he said: "We don't have evidence of this but I know that many people have thought this."
It seems to me that there might be evidence to discredit the Pope. Every time the "Vatican" speaks, it is not necessarily the Pope, but more likely his underlings, who, by their own short-sightedness [I'm being generous here], end up smearing the Pope. This is VERY unfortunate.
They have to know that, as representatives of the Vatican, what THEY say can be misinterpreted as having been said by the Pope.
The Vatican said no such thing. Sodano was simply stating that the media spent a lot of time on a relatively small number of molestation cases in order to make it seem like there were many more cases than there actually were. The media did this with access to all the facts, but declined to use them because the facts didn't comply with their desire to put the Church in the worst possible light. When they did this, they put EVERY SINGLE PRIEST under suspicion, and Sodano is saying that this was not fair, and I agree!
If a high school teacher is caught molesting a student and is sent to another school without the school knowing about it, but it is later found out, should we suspect ALL teachers? No! We should be rightly angry with the administration that let it slide, but again, I would ask, where was law enforcement, where was the justice system?
The most blatant evidence that the media beat the drums on this in order to harm the Church is that they CONTINUE to ignore the fact that most of these cases involved pre-teen and teenage boys, and was more homosexual in nature. They will do nothing to harm their favorite minorities; but they'll do what they can to reduce the credibility of anyone who DOES speak out against the homosexual lobby. The Boston Globe salivated at the chance to do as much harm as possible to the one institution which stands against most of what the editors stand FOR. The Boston Globe is massively hypocrital in this regard. While it excoriates the Church for the heinousness of these crimes against children and young men, it also supports NAMBLA, the National Man-Boy Love Association which seeks to lower the age of consent for sex between adults and children. NAMBLA believes that introducing children and young adults to homosexuality is a freeing experience. Now how can the Globe jive that attitude with their outrage at what these priests did?
DO NOT GET ME WRONG!! I believe any priest who has molested a child or teenager should be arrested, tried, and put in jail for a very long time!! I am just sick of the assumption that most priests must be doing this because there is so much press coverage about it.
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