Priests, Abuse, and the Meltdown of a Culture. The lessons of an important new study.

National Review ^ | 05/19/2011 | George Weigel

[mas cerveza por favor]

It’s a disgrace. No question about it.

[Salvation]

Did you ever wonder if your judgments could be in error? I’m not defending Law; however, you have no recourse to know the state of his soul, do you?

[wideawake]

No blog, just the facts

An interesting claim, if there were no such thing as search engines.

[Judith Anne]

Will you please get to the source for this cut and paste? The poster says “Reuters, Munich Archiocese” but frankly I have been unable to find it, to verify the accuracy.

[Salvation]

Oh, I forgot, maybe you are his Confessor, breaking the seal of Confession! </sarc off

[mas cerveza por favor]

All of the Baptist information is based on self-reporting, and there has been no Baptist study over ANY time period. Are you only focused on the Catholics?

Why do you focus on the Baptists. I don't care as much about them because I am Catholic.

[Turtlepower]

73% of victims, according to the study, were under age 15, so why are you insisting ephebophilia is the problem and not pedophilia?

[TSgt]

Because it is their typical deflective “everyone rapes children” excuse.

[Mr Rogers]

“All of the Baptist information is based on self-reporting, and there has been no Baptist study over ANY time period.”

Wrong. There is no study of Baptists, so there is no self-reporting. There is no Baptist with the authority to require participation, and there is no good reason to believe self-reporting would uncover anything current.

According to bronxville:

“Insurance companies receive from Protestant churches each year about 260 reports involving allegations of sexual abuse committed against minors. This is LESS than the annual number of 228 abuse incidents reported against Catholic priests. That reality is particularly noteworthy because Catholics keep track of even “credible accusation,” which Southern Baptists don’t even bother to determine or keep records on.”

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2720579/posts?page=80#80

However, as I pointed out:

“There are roughly 300,000 Protestant congregations in America. There are roughly 22,000 Catholic congregations. (http://hirr.hartsem.edu/research/fastfacts/fast_facts.html)

260/300,000 = <1 in 1,000.

228/22,000 = 1 in 100.”

Thus, based on bronxville’s cited insurance claims, the problem is worse in the Catholic Church.

My point is not Baptist or Catholic. My point is that you don’t solve a problem by pretending it doesn’t exist. Calling it “Ephebophilia” when 3/4 of cases involve those 14 or less, or saying that cases fell dramatically 30 years ago when the study is based on self-reporting is minimizing the problem. I don’t care if the guy is Baptist or Catholic, he should be hammered.

I give you my word: I will not respond to similar accusations against Baptists by saying “Only 3/4 of reports involve those 14 and younger!” or by saying “It went away 30 years ago, and no one living knows anything about it!”

Discipline among Baptists is strictly local. There is nothing above the congregation. But based on bronxville’s numbers, it seems the problem is less common in Protestant churches - but any violators should still be hammered. As in reported to the police and prosecuted.

[Iscool]

In 2010, seven credible cases of abuse were reported in a church that numbers over 65 million adherents.

You don't wonder how many cases were NOT reported??? I suspect by the nature of the cover-up for who knows how long that there are many...

[TSgt]

I find it humorous that you and others are pinging the Religion Moderator over the presented facts especially when the source was given.

You can contact Reuters and the Munich Archdiocese is you want more detail.

It really pains some folks to have the truth presented or even discussed.

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil...

Incredible...

[mas cerveza por favor]

Because it is their typical deflective “everyone rapes children” excuse.

Even if everyone did, that would provide no excuse for Catholic priests.

[TSgt]

My point is not Baptist or Catholic. My point is that you don’t solve a problem by pretending it doesn’t exist. Calling it “Ephebophilia” when 3/4 of cases involve those 14 or less, or saying that cases fell dramatically 30 years ago when the study is based on self-reporting is minimizing the problem. I don’t care if the guy is Baptist or Catholic, he should be hammered.

SPOT-ON! (but you'll still be labeled anti-Catholic for even suggesting the church did something wrong)

[Neoliberalnot]

Gay infiltration of Catholic Church: Check, once a success, now failed
Gay infiltration of Boy Scouts: Check, failed
Gay infiltration of Military: Check, Maybe
Gay infiltration of adoption agency: Check on same-sex adoption, yet to be appreciated

[GOP_Party_Animal]

Also, the idea of blaming Church problems on society is backward. Christians are supposed to the leaven of society.

That's exactly the point of the article. Some Church leaders allowed society at-large to dictate morality instead of Church doctrine. The author points out that it was the influence of the Left that caused these problems. Now the Left blames the Church for being too conservative.

I can't argue with some of the knee-jerk Catholic haters here though on the point that Bishops were derelict in their duty to remove abusive priests. But even before that point, the Church relaxed its views on allowing homosexual priests. They made the problem by shunning doctrine, then failed to correct their mistakes through the 70's and 80's. It's tough to tell, but I believe the conservative resurgence in the Church is setting things right.

[Alex Murphy]

The bishops’ response to the burgeoning abuse crisis between the late 1960s and the early 1980s was not singularly woodenheaded or callous. In fact, according to the John Jay study, the bishops were as clueless as the rest of society about the magnitude of the abuse problem and, again like the rest of society, tended to focus on the perpetrators of abuse rather than the victims. This, in turn, led to an overdependence on psychiatry and psychology in dealing with clerical perpetrators, in the false confidence that they could be “cured” and returned to active ministry — a pattern that again mirrored broader societal trends. In many pre-1985 cases, the principal request of victims’ families was that the priest-abuser be given help and counseling. Yes, the bishops should have been more alert than the rest of an increasingly coarsened society to the damage done to victims by sexual abuse; but as the John Jay report states, “like the general public, the leaders of the Church did not recognize the extent or harm of victimization.” And this, in turn, was “one factor that likely led to the continued perpetration of offenses.”

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....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.
-- 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.
-- from the thread Kneeling Before the World

"The Dublin Archdiocese's preoccupations in dealing with cases of child sexual abuse, at least until the mid-1990s, were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church and the preservation of its assets," said the report. "All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities. The archdiocese did not implement its own canon law rules and did its best to avoid any application of the law of the state"....
-- from the thread Pope calls Irish church leaders to Vatican to discuss abuse report

[TSgt]

I’m not defending Law

Quite the contrary. I ponder what the world would be like if you put as much effort into protecting children as you do the priests who rape them.

[Iscool]

In 2010, seven credible cases of abuse were reported in a church that numbers over 65 million adherents.

You don't wonder how many cases were NOT reported??? I suspect by the nature of the cover-up for who knows how long that there are many...

[Religion Moderator]

Judith Anne, I found it with a Google of the first phrase: the link.

But, TSgt, any time you cut and paste from a website include the url or a hotlink - the moderators need that information to verify copyrights. An author, publication, date reference only works for items available only in print form - i.e. something you actually typed in.

[mas cerveza por favor]

Gay infiltration of Catholic Church: Check, once a success, now failed

The gay infiltration of Catholic Church is ongoing. The leadership has not yet acknowledged the problem nor enacted the necessary purge to fix it. The problem is self-sustaining because gay and gay-friendly officials continue to recruit homosexual priests.