>> I’m not a ‘Catholic basher’ by any means but I simply do not understand how the laws, which are in virtually every US State, requiring ANYONE who knows about child sexual abuse to report it to the relevant authorities under pain of criminal punishment are not being applied to these people. <<
Catholic basher? Maybe not. But there is a very simple answer to your question:
Nearly all of these instances (better than 97%) occurred prior to 1990. When they occurred, there was no such law on the books. As a Catholic, I have grave issues with how the bishops handled these cases, because they turned to psychologists, instead of ancient canon law and the sacraments to deal with these cases. Psychology, particularly at the time, was not friendly to religion, in general.
The priests should have been removed from any and all pastoral duties, according to the canon laws first established by the Nicene Council, and availed of the graces of the sacrament of penance. Instead, following the advice of the lay psychologists, they were sent for treatment, until they were certified, “recovered;” Rather than treat their crimes as sins, they were treated as symptoms of evil.
If that's true then I understand. However I believe that one has a moral obligation to report something as reprehensible as criminal child sexual abuse to the authorities whether one has a legal responsibility to do so or not.
While I don't presume to speak for the Almighty I can't imagine any circumstances where such behavior would please Him.
L
The priests should have been removed from any and all pastoral duties, according to the canon laws first established by the Nicene Council, and availed of the graces of the sacrament of penance. Instead, following the advice of the lay psychologists, they were sent for treatment, until they were certified, “recovered;” Rather than treat their crimes as sins, they were treated as symptoms of sickness (corrected per your post #18).
I've been saying virtually the same thing for years:
....Sin, confession, and church displine of the same is (or should be) an area inside of [the American bishops'] competence. What's telling isn't that the bishops received bad advice on how to act. What's telling is what authority the bishops recognized and sought out, when looking for advice...Moreso, I would accuse that the bishops have rejected scriptural authority in favor of (to modify your term) modern pshrinkology. They didn't define the issue (and it's treatment) as a sin problem to be repented of. They treated it as behavior modification....
-- Alex Murphy, April 2, 2008
I would have expected a religious order to recognize that raping a child is fundamentally a sinful behavior, before they would believe it to be aberrational behavior. It should be a warning sign to everyone that if a religious order looks to "the Psychs" for expert advice on dealing with known sinful behavior, instead of looking in their Bibles for solutions, they prove themselves to be scripturally deficient if not illiterate. "Religious" order, indeed!
We should not expect "psychological treatment" will end sinful behavior. That's what many bishops have believed, however, and look at what fruit it has yielded - $3,000,000,000 awarded in damages and settlements by Catholic dioceses within the United States alone.
The only thing that ends sinful behavior is repentance. Check your Bible if you don't believe me.
-- Alex Murphy, May 20, 2009[Faithful Departed author Philip] Lawler points out that while less than five percent of American priests have been accused of sexual abuse, some two-thirds of our bishops were apparently complicit in cover-ups. The real scandal isn't the sick excesses of a few dozen pedophiles, or even the hundreds of priests who had affairs with teenage boys -- the bulk of abuse cases. No, according to Lawler, it is the malfeasance of wealthy, powerful, and evidently worldly men who fill the thrones -- but not the shoes -- of the apostles. In case after case, we read in their correspondence, in the records of their soulless, bureaucratic responses to victims of psychic torture and spiritual betrayal, these bishops' prime concern was to save the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar and mortgages. Ironically, their lack of a supernatural concern for souls is precisely what cost them so much money in the end.
-- excerpted from the "Inside Catholic" blog article and 'Catholic Caucus' thread Kneeling Before the World....“The thesis of this book,” writes Lawler, “is that the sex abuse scandal in American Catholicism was not only aggravated but actually caused by the willingness of church leaders to sacrifice the essential for the inessential; to build up the human institution even to the detriment of the divine mandate.” Bishops again and again responded to the crisis as institutional managers, employing public relations stratagems to evade, deceive, and distract attention from their own responsibility. Lawler several times invokes the terse observation of St. Augustine, “God does not need my lie.” The bishops lied, says Lawler, and many of them are still lying. This is offered not as an accusation but as a conclusion that he believes is compelled by the evidence.
“The first aspect of the scandal, the sexual abuse of children, has been acknowledged and addressed,” Lawler writes. “The second aspect, the rampant homosexuality among Catholic priests, has been acknowledged but not addressed, and later even denied....The third aspect of the scandal has never even been acknowledged by American church leaders.” The third aspect, the malfeasance of bishops, “is today the most serious of all.”
-- excerpted from "Paved with the Skulls of Bishops" by Richard John Neuhaus"...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