Posted on 08/31/2012 8:03:38 PM PDT by Morgana
....but not Fr. Groeschel?.
Fr. Groeschel is 79 years old and not well. He is a professor of pastoral psychology and was trying to make a subtle point. He failed at this and is obviously breginning to lose it. If you look at the incident through Christian eyes you will see things differently.
On January 11, 2004, Groeschel was struck by an automobile while crossing a street in Orlando, Florida. He received a traumatic head injury and broken bones and over a four hour period, had no blood pressure, heartbeat or pulse for about 20 minutes. A few days later the trauma triggered a near-fatal heart attack.
Peace be with you
The "benefit of the doubt" was concerning whether or not the person had read the post #55 before he/she stated it was all just a "smear campaign". If it were merely that, then there would not have been a public apology for what was said and a clarification from both Fr. Groeschel and his organization. My personal feelings about the priest have nothing to do with it.
If this was a subtle point, I’d really hate to hear what he thinks about child sex abuse when he’s not trying to be subtle.
He failed at this and is obviously breginning to lose it. If you look at the incident through Christian eyes you will see things differently.
And looking at that “through Christian eyes” would be what? Is it really “Christian eyes” that sees Jerry Sandusky as being “some poor guy”? Is it really “Christian eyes” to blame the victims for not doing more to stop their abuse (and I’m not talking 18 year olds but the 10 year olds that Jerry Sandusky molested or the 10 year old altar boys that were abused by pedophile priests).
Is it “Christian eyes” that sees that “priests who were first-time abusers should not be jailed because “their intention was not committing a crime.””?
A lot of people are claiming that Father Groeschel is old and feeble and senile and sickly and some are claiming that he is confined in a nursing home, yet in the interview he gave to the National Catholic Register, he stated that “he continued to counsel priests and that he worked some 12 hours a day.”
I understand that Father Groeschel is staunchly pro-life and probably a good man, but that good does not negate the great harm of blaming the victims of child sex abuse, trying to paint them as the aggressors and “seducers”, stating that pedophile priests should be given a onetime pass, a get out of jail free card because it wasn’t their intent to commit a crime and rape a child, the first time they did it.
This I find especially grievous coming from someone who has a PhD in psychology and is still counseling priests.
No sympathy here...get real.
The subtle point is that he wasn't talking about prepubescent boys, but about the predominant demographic of the victims of these in the scandals; teenage boys, and more specifically homosexual teenage boys.
No instance of clergy abuse is acceptable, but the so-called priest scandal is more of a homosexual issue than a pedophile issue. I know that the agenda of the left and their useful idiots, the anti-Catholics, want to limit the discussion to "Catholic Priest bad", but, whether or not that fits your agenda or if the subtleties are lost on you, it is more complex than that.
Peace be with you
How very magnanimous of you......
I can certainly understand why you would want to make this about me, but it isn't.
If the "so-called" priest scandal WERE about a homosexual issue rather than a pedophile one, would the pro-homosexual liberal agenda response be any different? Could it possibly be that the Catholic Church presents a facade of holiness and purity that hides a deeply rooted and ongoing (for centuries) depravity among a part of its clergy?
Let's pretend for a moment that this "problem" is really an issue of homosexual clergymen that find resistance to available, nubile teenage boys too impossible to resist, does this somehow excuse those clergymen from "taking the bait"? Is there not a vow of celibacy that they make which precludes ALL sexual activity and not just heterosexual types? What you as well as many other Roman Catholics seem to do - including the subject of this thread - is act as if the "boys will be boys" and "we're all sinners anyway" excuse or the blame it on the "victim" response somehow defuses the REAL scandal which is that you have men who publicly take vows specifically naming this behavior (among others) and who insist upon moral purity among their own flock, but who do not demonstrate the same discipline. It is called HYPOCRISY and whatever condemnation that rains down on the church's head is well deserved.
If you then go back to the issue of pedophilia and child molestation and rape, these ARE genuine crimes against society AND God and should NEVER be rationalized or justified. Even less so for men of God. It doesn't take an "anti-Catholic" OR their "useful idiots" to grasp that and it is HARDLY subtle.
No, but it does take a useful idiot or anti-Catholic to think and act like this is exclusively a Catholic Clergy issue and that the Church has done nothing about it.
Peace be with you.
I guess you didn’t get a chance to read my post back in #22.
Why does it seem like the knee-jerk reaction to ANY mention of Catholic clergy child sex crimes is:
1. We aren't the only ones who have deviant clergy.
or
2. We HAVE been working on this problem, so cut us a break.
My point was:
"If you then go back to the issue of pedophilia and child molestation and rape, these ARE genuine crimes against society AND God and should NEVER be rationalized or justified. Even less so for men of God."
The words of the priest, who is the subject of this thread, are what should be shunned and criticized, NOT those who join in and express why his ideas should be condemned. Your not-so veiled attempt to lump everyone who dares to say anything negative into "useful idiots" or "anti-Catholics" categories, only proves that that whole point is missed or lost or, even perhaps, ignored.
The bigger question is why is every mention of a clergy abuse incident involving Catholic clergy celebrated by the anti-Catholics? Do you really believe that schadenfreude is a Fruit of the Holy Spiriy?
Peace be with you
Really? According to the 2004 John Jay Report commissioned and funded by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the predominant demographic of the male victims (males comprising 81% of the total known and reported victims between 1950 and 2002 in the US):
22.6% were age 10 or younger, 51% were between the ages of 11 and 14, and 27% were between the ages to 15 to 17 years.
I guess technically a boy over the age of 12 is a “teenager” and not technically prepubescent, but I don’t think that many 11 to 14 year old boys suddenly wanted to explore their self discovered and newfound homosexuality by seducing an adult male priest twice or more his own age. Is that what you really want to say here? That a predominant number of those 51% of boys between the ages of 11 to 14 were themselves raging homo’s who went around seducing weak willed older men and targeting priests in particular?
And even if the priest himself was or had homosexual tendencies and was not just a garden variety pedophile, then I would have expected there to be more instances of homosexual priests having sex with each other and not predominately preying on 11 to 14 year old boys. Homosexuality and pedophilia BTW, while not mutually exclusive are not always one in the same. Not all homosexuals desire to have sex with children and not all pedophiles are homosexual in their adult relationships, not all pedophiles prey on children of the same sex, some will prey on either sex.
No instance of clergy abuse is acceptable, but the so-called priest scandal is more of a homosexual issue than a pedophile issue. I know that the agenda of the left and their useful idiots, the anti-Catholics, want to limit the discussion to "Catholic Priest bad", but, whether or not that fits your agenda or if the subtleties are lost on you, it is more complex than that.
I am glad you say that no instance of clergy abuse is acceptable but know that I am not limiting the discussion to "Catholic Priest bad"(the sexual molestation of children is in no way limited to Catholic priests – Jerry Sandusky being a good example), nor, having been raised a Catholic and having great respect for the Catholic religion, am now nor have I ever been anti-Catholic. I do not “celebrate” child sexual molestation, whoever the perp is. And I have never been a "liberal".
I do find it interesting that you chose to use the words “the so-called priest scandal”. Whether you choose to recognize as such or not, it was a scandal, a big scandal; a scandal not only in that priests were sexually abusing children under their care and guidance, but more importantly that the Catholic Church did so little over so many years, kept it quiet, swept it under the carpet, sometimes quietly paying off victims and their families while transferring pedophile priests to other parishes where they went on to abuse even more kids or sending them off for counseling at retreats much like the one that Father Groeschel ran for many years.
I am deeply disappointed by Father Groeschel’s statements, a man who I respect in many ways, and am willing to accept that he was misquoted or that his infirmity caused him to say things in such a way that it wasn’t what he really meant to say. I can accept that his apology was sincere. But then what is your excuse for claiming it was a “so called” scandal” and trying to lay blame on the victims?
Really? You think these scandals are celebrated by the non-Catholic Christians here? I haven't seen anyone rejoicing over this horrible behavior and, when the godless liberal media reports about genuine crimes committed by ANY Christian, we all suffer the blow back. I imagine for some Catholics here the ideal would be to never have to see any threads talking about the moral failures of the clergy of the Catholic Church - preferring to bury their heads in the sand. For the rest of us, we would prefer that the clergy not keep doing and saying things that warrant negative exposure by the media. Hiding from the truth is a big factor in why these crimes continued and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church legitimately earned condemnation from the civilized world.
The solution is pretty simple as far as I can see - condemn, defrock and accept the prosecution of those guilty clergy who commit or who enable the committing of child sex abuse. They have NOT earned the respect given them nor the right to continue to be the moral face of Christianity to a fallen world. I certainly do not relish nor rejoice that innocent children are being victimized by those who are SUPPOSED to be their spiritual protectors. As St. Peter Damian said in his Book of Gomorrah:
She humiliates her slave in the church and condemns him in court; she defiles him in secret and dishonors him in public; she gnaws at his conscience like a worm and consumes his flesh like fire . . . this unfortunate man [he] is deprived of all moral sense, his memory fails, and the mind's vision is darkened.
Unmindful of God, he also forgets his own identity. This disease erodes the foundation of faith, saps the vitality of hope, dissolves the bond of love. It makes way with justice, demolishes fortitude, removes temperance, and blunts the edge of prudence.
". . . I would surely prefer to be thrown into the well like Joseph who informed his father of his brothers' foul crime, than to suffer the penalty of God's fury, like Eli, who saw the wickedness of his sons and remained silent. [Sam. 2: 4] . . . Who am I, when I see this pestilential practice flourishing in the priesthood to become the murderer of another's soul by daring to repress my criticism in expectation of the reckoning of God's judgment? . . . How, indeed, am I to love my neighbor as myself if I negligently allow the wound, of which I am sure he will brutally die, to fester in his heart? . . . [48]
"So let no man condemn me as I argue against this deadly vice, for I seek not to dishonor, but rather to promote the advantage of my brother's well-being.
"Take care not to appear partial to the delinquent while you persecute him who sets him straight. If I may be pardoned in using Moses' words, 'Whoever is for the Lord, let him stand with me.' [Ezek. 32: 26]." [49] (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/929551/posts)
Unfortunately, I do, but if we judge only by behavior many on these threads are not very Christian, are they. Some of the anti-Catholics get positively giddy whenever there is a new charge against the "whore of Babylon". I actually believe that some are disappointed that sufficiently more children were not abused if it would have brought the end of the Church. It is no coincidence that that is a goal they share with Satan whose hand is seen in tha abuse and the divisive schadenfruede taht follows.
Schadenfruede is the pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. Not seeing it in these threads, in the context of Catholic clergy scandal, can only be willful ignorance. Can we at least agree that schadenfruede is not a Fruit of the Holy Spirit?
Peace be with you
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