Posted on 03/14/2010 8:44:34 AM PDT by NCjim
DUBLIN – It often starts as a voice in the wilderness, but can swell into an entire nation's demand for truth. From Ireland to Germany, Europe's many victims of child abuse in the Roman Catholic church are finally breaking social taboos and confronting the clergy to face its demons.
Ireland was the first in Europe to confront the church's worldwide custom of shielding pedophile priests from the law and public scandal. Now that legacy of suppressed childhood horror is being confronted in other parts of the Continent — nowhere more poignantly than in Germany, the homeland of Pope Benedict XVI.
The recent spread of claims into the Netherlands, Austria and Italy has analysts and churchmen wondering how deep the scandal runs, which nation will be touched next, and whether a tide of lawsuits will force European dioceses to declare bankruptcy like their American cousins.
"You have to presume that the cover-up of abuse exists everywhere, to one extent or another.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
You’re doing an awful lot of ‘admonishing’, and in fact it looks more like a defense of those in the Catholic Church who are molesting boys.
Sorry, I’m not responsible for your comprehension problems.
No is denying that there are isolated incidents of abuse by Catholic clergy, but the fact that Protestant abuses are 5x to 10x more prevalent is of little consequence to those who work to undermine the moral authority of the Catholic Church. There is no argument that the Catholic church represents one of the largest obstacles to the agendas of the secular humanists, the leftists and communists, the fascists, and even to the envious Protestants.
The real story is the history of this is available to anyone with the integrity to actually investigate it. This exactly parallels the Nazi party's campaign of so-called "Immorality Trials" in which a rumor campaign and a full blown media campaign preceded the public arrest and trials of Catholic clergy and leaders with the expresses purpose of linking the Church with pedophilia and perversion in the public's mind. This was done to undermine the Church's moral authority and remove it as an obstacle to its political agenda. The useful idiots within the German Protestant Church were instrumental in its success and were rewarded with a cabinet level position, the Reichbishop, within Hitler's inner circle. That same blueprint has been at work here in the US for the last 20 years. It has successfully sought to exaggerate the incidence and culpability of the Church. One need only watch the glee with which the Main Stream Media repeats the exact same story, word for word, ad naseum and the Pavlovian joy of the anti-Catholics on FR to post this within the body of every thread involving the Church or its clergy.
"Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it." - George Santanya
Balding Eagle, when did you stop beating your wife?
The fact that Josef Ratzinger was not the Bishop of ANY of these Dioceses, thus had no power to do anything, and likely didn't have knowledge of it, when it happened doesn't seem to dissuade the media from breathlessly trying to connect him to the stories.
Funny you should ask, it was just this morning.
However, that begs the question of why the kneejerk reaction to any story about molesting priests? Do you believe there aren’t any?
The attacks on those who talk about them leads me to think that’s where you’re coming from.
Of course, you aren't, but you might reconsider how your posts are received.
What the ‘Useful idiots†don’t understand is that this is a war on Christianity, once the Catholic Church is destroyed, the Protestants will be easy picking.
The Irish mess is a continuing scandal, with the CICA report published less than a year ago. The German scandal is also ongoing, if this article from Der Spiegel On line is any indication:
Please note the date -- 1 February 2010. Not exactly last decade's news. Not exactly this weekend's news, either.
It is now being renewed again, despite no new developments, at precisely the time that the Democrats in Congress are pushing radical new abortion legislation disguised as a "healthcare bill", and at a time when the US Catholic Church is one of the few national organizations with the influence to delay or stop this federal funding of murder.
Two points: there ARE new developments, and you know how much creedence I give conspiracy theories.
If Pelosi, Reid and Obama have the power to get a Jesuit priest in Berlin to spontaneously confess to abuse charges just in time to de-rail RCC lobbying efforts here in the States, then I might as well give up: Obama really must be the Anti-Christ.
As for the influence of the RCC over the healthcare bill... it's obviously not working so well to change the "mind" of she-devil Pelosi and the RCC cohort in Congress.
As for me: I'm against the murder called elective abortion, I'm against the healthcare bill, and I sincerely wish the RCC would get the bureaucratic-lead out long enough to rid itself of the sodomites and pedophiles.
Again, I am not responsible for you. You are.
I see you have a little reading comprehension problem of your own.
Of course there are.
And given a Church with 1.15 billion members and more than a million clergy, there will probably always be a certain number of predators who manage to avoid detection for years.
My problem is with the implication of all this coverage, and that implication is that there are thousands of predators rampaging freely within the Church as the Pope assists them in covering up their actions.
The reality is that it is very difficult to catch predators dead to rights - and just because a predator is one's employee and that predator has managed to escape detection it does not mean that his boss was personally implicated in his crimes.
When a public school teacher is arrested for molesting a child, the immediate journalistic reaction is not: "Why did the president of the county school board allow this person to teach?"
There is usually no blanket assumption that a criminal's actions were common knowledge to his employers.
Unless the criminal is a Catholic priest - in that case his employer is considered guilty until proven innocent.
It's this double standard that grates.
You present a very reasoned argument - but as I said, few arguments, even yours, cover the issue that these priests and from time to time nuns are practicing the homsexual life. They entered the priesthood as gay men and your “point about healing or changing” may be accurate, but they words homosexual are still out of these stories. That is why the rest of society thinks gay marriage or gays in teh military is a civil right - they “see no evil.”
Calling other Freepers names reflects poorly on you.
You reference to a similar National Socialist onslaught on the Catholic Church in Germany between 1934 and 1938 is very apt. It is worth quoting in full a speech by the Propaganda Minister, Joseph Gobbels relayed on all German wireless stations on the 28th May 1937:
“A vast number of Catholic clerics have been tried for sexual crimes . . . It is not a matter of regrettable individual lapses, but of a general corruption of morals such as the history of civilation has scarcely ever known . . . No other class of society has ever come to shelter such depravity . . . In our civilised world no other class of society has contrived to practise immorality and indulge in filth on a scale resembling than that achieved by the German clergy in all its ranks . . . We cannot possibly impose sanctions on annatural vice and yet at the same time allow thousands upon thousands of priests and brothers of religious Orders to escape scot-free . . . A very large number of these priests and Religious work in the confessional . . . There is no doubt that even the thousands of cases which have come to light represent but a small fraction of the total moral corruption”.
Thus Joseph Gobbels, the ‘poisoned dwarf’ propgandist of the NAZI regime. Yet what he said could just as easily have been a recent editorial of the Irish Times, which is even more stewed in liberal bigotry than even the NYT, if that were possible. As the writer Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn once said “scratch a liberal and you find a NAZI”. I disagree that German Evangelicals were in anyway enthusiastic about this campaign. As today, so in the past, many of the people driving of this campaign were embittered Catholic apostates and of course homosexuals, who contrary to current propganda held enormous influence in the National Socialist Party—particularly among the Brownshirts.
Oh, so now it has gone from "5 times more prevalent" to "5 times to 10 times more prevalent" for Protestants. LOL! Your outlandish fabrications about this matter will never cease, will they?
In a previous post, you claimed that "Philip Jenkins, Pedophiles and Priests (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 50 and 81" was the ultimate source of your claim that sex abuse among Protestant clergy was "five times more prevalent" than among RC clergy.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2459653/posts?page=264#264
However, let's look at this claim a little more closely:
Philip Jenkins, Pedophiles and Priests, pp.51-52:
"But as has been suggested, this perception of 'clergy abuse' would be misleading because clergy of most major denominations were to some extent tainted by such cases from the late 1980s. The most quoted survey of sexual problems among Protestant clergy states that some 10 percent are involved in sexual misconduct of some kind, and "about two or three percent" are pedophiles, a rate equal or higher than that suggested for Catholic priests. These figures should be viewed sceptically; the methodology on which they are based is not clear, and they seem to rely disproportionately on individuals already in therapy. However, it is striking to find such a relatively high number suggested for both celibate and noncelibate clergy."
I don't have access to p.81 via Google Books, but it looks from the table of contents that that Chapter of the book is addressing the RCC clergy specifically, and is not drawing comparisons.
IOW, your "authoritative" source doesn't back up your claim by any stretch of the imagination. Perhaps you should be more careful about regurgitating old Catholic League Special Reports without tracking down their source material.
To sum up: your claim that "Protestant abuses are 5x to 10x more prevalent" is preposterous and is not supported by your own source. It is a "factoid" that has no relation to reality and only seems useful to the sort of anti-Protestant bigot who doesn't care about telling the truth.
Understanding Satan's process is important. The first step in Satan's process is for us to deny his works and either tolerate or participate in them. The second step is for us to deny Satan's existence. The last step in Satan's process is for us to deny Christ's existence. It is, as they say, a slippery slope. Those who revel in Satan's actions against His Church are well down that slope.
You can remain in denial and continue to contribute to the problem as you have so often accused Catholics and the Catholic Church of doing or you can get informed and get involved. If the problem were really of concern to you you would spring for a $20 book. I suggest you try looking st some of the informative sites. Start by reading this:
You can then begin further research through www.advocateweb.org
” ... but the fact that Protestant abuses are 5x to 10x more prevalent is of little consequence to those who work to undermine the moral authority of the Catholic Church.”
How did you come up with that?
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