As someone who's worked with abused kids (and abusers), I can tell you the subject just causes some people's brains to short-circuit. It's heinous in a way even murder isn't, mostly because of the motive (we don't condone murder, but we get what it is--someone is evil, or was pushed to strike back, or is nuts or greedy or whatever). It's not about agreeing with that, it's understanding it.
Molestation is something else. It seems like something a human didn't do, but an alien being.
To listen to the media, one would think priests do nothing but molest children. Even those here who pride ourselves on "not drinking the media Kool-Aid" have indeed been influenced by them; our intense denial only proves how insidious such influence is.
Add to this the undeniable facts that the church has a history of moving priests around when such situations occur.
I hate to use this cliche again but these factors really do combine to produce a perfect storm for the creation of a fall-back position of assuming guilt.
One has to take a deep breath, stop being emotional, and look at each individual case as one would with ANY individual charged with a crime. But most people don't--the treat priests not as fellow citizens but as members of an elite club, apart from the rest of us. Fair or not, but when I say "politician" or "country singer" or "movie star" or "Nobel prize-winning physicist," you have a set of assumptions about that person to begin with, which are then adjusted when I then say the individual's name. But even then, you've still got assumptions about those individuals--they're not blank slates, and that's because they belong to a group, and we all have our own judgment about groups.
If one doesn't despise priests, the accusation itself is shocking, and there have been so many accusations publicized that one might just think "Another one." The reaction would be far different if the report was about a regular blue collar worker.
But priests are not regular folks. The fact is, priests belong to a group which has had a great deal of publicity about the handling of such cases in the past. When you hear about plumbers who've molested, do you also hear that the plumbers union has moved such accused around to avoid trouble? When you hear of an ex-husband so accused, you know he's just a guy, not someone who might have done this before and been allowed to move away.
I agree that we have to be aware of the opportunities the leftists are taking to attack the church. At the same time, the faithful like yourself have to admit, the church left themselves wide open for this kind of thing. Your anger is justified, but you should spare some of it for the church.
Your anger is justified, but you should spare some of it for the church.
Trust me, I do, for any genuine perpetrators. But the title of this thread is "Nifonging the Catholic Church" and frankly I'm sick of priestly pedophilia, no matter how seldom it occurred (Ann Coulter says the percent of guilty priests is 0.12%) coming up on every single anti-Catholic bigoted thread on the Religion Forum
From the same old suspects, too.