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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 ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9226-2003Oct10?language=printer
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Owl_Eagle
" WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
DIVERSITY IS STRENGTH"
The media did not exaggerate anything. For starters, it's hard to believe the media wasn't aware of at least some of the allegations before this exploded in the press...they could have saved a lot of misery for victims by investigating earlier.
Doesn't the Vatican get it? Are they still out of touch and arrogant? Even one victim, even one coverup from those who were trusted with the emotional and psychological well-being of children deserved every bit of coverage, and more.
If anything, the stories came too late and coverage was minimized too soon. Message to Vatican: Get a Clue!
Actually convicted, would be Geoghan, possibly Shanley. Accused - less than 50.
Pinging the catholic list.
These were children. The more innocent the victim, the more heinous the crime. The church systematically dealt with this wide-spread problem like a mafia family.
I don't care if it was two children instead of thousands. The fact that they covered it up for so long means they KNEW there was evil in their house and did NOTHING to eradicate it.
NYer, it's a much larger number than that.
Over 300 priests have been removed from ministry over the last ten years due to credible charges of sexual abuse.
The purple at the Vatican should zip it. The issue was never the priests who abused children.
The issue was the systematic cover-up by the American hierarchy. How many children were abused because bishops didn't take action at the first accusation?
THAT is the scandal, and the Vatican still doesn't seem to get it.
The Catholic Church has been assailed and slandered by the America press since the first printing press hit the U.S. Being Catholic in the colonies was illegal. Catholic villages were burned down, as well as Churches. Catholic priests were rounded up by the Protestants and sent back to England to be tried as 'heretics'. Sometimes they were just hanged on the spot.
When the Irish came to America during the potato famine some American newspapers depicted them as alligators washing up on shore, wearing bishops mitres. Harper's Weekly, the equivalent of today's "U.S.A. Today" regularly attacked the Catholic Church in a vicious fashion, even going so far as to rip Catholic doctrine to shreds and illustrating Catholic priests as buffoons forgiving sins with long rods in their caricature cartoons.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the news media overplayed the homosexual priest scandal in the Catholic Church. They did this in at least three different ways.
(1). They wrongly reported the incidents as 'pedohpilia', when in fact it was a homosexual problem. Nearly all the victims were sexually mature males over the age of puberty. This was done because the media had to protect their darling "diversity" while not overlooking the scandal. (I do not claim that this lessens the ugliness of the problem, but it sure as hell twisted the nature of it). Truth means nothing to the media.
(2). They converged on this scandal like famished vultures, seeking to pick the bones of what they hoped was the dying Catholic Church. They didn't care a whit about the general problem of pederasty and homosexual rape of children in this country, but only the priests in the Catholic Church. To illustrate this I will point you to the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe, who set up a "hotline" asking the people at large to report any incidences of priestly abuse to them. If they were truly interested in protecting children they would, of course, have asked the general public to tell them of ANY instance of child sexual abuse, regardless of who did it. Their focus was limited, obvious, and malicious.
To further illustrate how the media themselves covered up the general problem of child sexual abuse to make it appear as largely a "Catholic Church" problem, I will tell you that during a mere six year period, (from 1996 to 2002), there were over 600 teachers and principles convicted or punished for sexually abusing minors in the state of Texas alone. This compares to the 400 or so Catholic priests who were charged during a 30 year period. Figure out for yourself why the media didn't report on the much larger national problem and chose to focus only on the Catholic Church's problems.
(3). They constantly mis-reported the number and percentage of priests involved in the scandal. They never told you about the priests who were acquitted. And they constantly reported that about 2% - 5% of all priests may have been involved; and they arrived at this bogus number by claiming there were 40,000 priests in America. The truth is, of course, that there were over 95,000 priests on active duty during the period of the scandal, (roughly from 1970 to present). How convenient a way for these liberal scum to double the real number.
Of course the examples of media hype and feasting are vast, and not limited to what I wrote above. I just don't have the time to waste telling people what they already know but blind themselves to due to their own hatred for the Catholic Church.
I see you've been sucking in the opinions of the media, this mafia rot is a media analogy.
Actually, the Church did as much to prevent the problem as any other institution was doing at the time, (including our public school system), it's just that during the 70's, 80's and most of the 90's it was thought that this problem could be cured through psycho therapy. Although I admit there were some liberal, assinine Bishops like Cardinal Law who carried it too far by re-assiging the worst of them.
I will also tell you that the LAWYERS of the victims knew about this problem just as thoroughly as the bishops did, and even they did not go to the police or file criminal complaints. The victims families and their lawyers were as happy as anyone else to accept monetary settlements and have the homo priest get sent to six months of therapy. This is why, in the end, no criminal charges were filed. NOBODY went to the police, not the victims or their parents, not the plaintiff's attornies who had been handling these cases for years, and not the bishops.
The problem was a cultural and systemic one that went far beyond the Catholic Church. But too many Catholic baiters and haters out there are using this thing to attack us with. Have fun while you can, what goes around comes around. The Protestant Churches are now joyfully and willingly ORDIANING homosexual perverts to the rank of Bishop, and some Protestant denominations are sanctioning the marriage of homosexuals. At least the homo pervs in the Catholic Church had to infiltrate with stealth and hide behind corrupt bishops.
Go HERE and read. This was released in 1990(although the Church has spoken on this problem as early as 1966), and states clearly that men of homosexual proclivities should not be accepted into seminaries or ordained because it can cause intolerable temptation to them and can lead to scandal.
The problem with this directive is that it was DELIBERATELY suppressed by some highly placed bishops in the U.S. as soon as it was released.
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