Posted on 03/22/2010 6:21:30 AM PDT by Gamecock
Pope Benedict's weekend apology to Ireland went further than any other papal statement on child-sex abuse by priests, but still fell too short for many victims of the scandals shaking the Catholic Church across Europe.
Following are details of some of the major abuse scandals in various countries:
SWITZERLAND: The Swiss Catholic Church is investigating allegations of abuse by clergy. The Diocese of Chur, in eastern Switzerland, said Saturday it was investigating about 10 complaints. The abbot of a monastery in the diocese said at least three of the 77 monks at Einsiedeln had committed acts of abuse since he took up office in December 2001, but no legal action had been taken.
NETHERLANDS: More than 200 Catholics have reported abuse after Radio Netherlands Worldwide and newspaper NRC Handelsblad revealed that three priests from the Salesian order abused pupils decades ago at a boarding school. The church there has set up an independent inquiry headed by a Protestant politician.
GERMANY: A Jesuit high school in Berlin reported cases of sexual abuse there in January, starting a series of revelations at other Catholic boarding schools and non-religious schools.
- The Regensburg diocese admitted physical and sexual abuse cases at a boarding school for its famous Domspatzen (cathedral sparrows) boys choir. Its director, Pope Benedict's brother, Rev. Georg Ratzinger, admitted to slapping boys to discipline them but denied knowledge of sexual abuse. The ensuing wave of abuse charges from previously silent victims has since reached about 250.
IRELAND: In April 2002, Bishop Brendan Comiskey of Ferns resigned over his handling of charges against a priest who committed suicide in 1999 while facing 66 charges of abuse.
- May 2009 - The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse issued a five-volume report that took nine years to compile. It said priests beat and raped children during decades of abuse in Catholic-run institutions.
- Nov. 2009 - The Murphy report, a government-commissioned inquiry into abuse in Dublin from 1975 to 2004 said church authorities covered up widespread cases of child sexual abuse until the mid-1990s.
- Dec. 2009 - After meeting two Irish church leaders, Pope Benedict said he shared the "outrage, betrayal and shame" over the scandal in Ireland.
- Feb. 2010 - Benedict held crisis talks with 24 Irish bishops at the Vatican. The bishops promised him they were committed to cooperating with authorities. Four bishops have offered their resignations and the pope has so far accepted one.
UNITED STATES: June 2002 - The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops agreed on a new policy that would forbid pedophile priests from ever again acting as clerics - but not necessarily expel them from the priesthood.
BRITAIN: July 2000 - London Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor acknowledged making a mistake in a previous post in the 1980s by allowing a pedophile priest to continue working. The priest was jailed in 1997 for abusing nine boys over a 20-year period.
AUSTRIA: July 2004 - Austrian News magazine Profil ran pictures of priests kissing and groping seminarians at a Catholic seminary in the St. Poelten diocese.
AUSTRALIA: July 2008 - On a visit to Australia, Pope Benedict apologized for sexual abuse by clergy. At that time there had been 107 convictions for sexual abuse in the church there.
MEXICO: March 2009 - Pope Benedict ordered an inquiry into the Legionaries of Christ priestly order whose founder was discovered to be a sexual molester. In 2006, the pope told the founder, Father Marcial Maciel, to retire to a life of "prayer and penitence". Maciel died in 2008. His order acknowledged in 2009 that he had fathered at least one child with a mistress.
CANADA: Oct. 2009 - Bishop Raymond Lahey of Antigonish, N.S., was charged with possession and importation of child pornography. Earlier that year, he had overseen a $13-million settlement with clerical abuse victims in the Antigonish diocese in a case dating back to 1950.
I obviously didn’t see that.
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Exactly right.
A Google search of freerepublic. com of "by Gamecock" comes up with 676 entries.
A Google search of freerepublic.com of "by Gamecock" AND "Catholic" comes up with 363 entries.
54% of all articles you've posted are anti-catholic.
Don't pretend you're something else.
Agreed. And I think this handful of posters has managed not only to alienate Catholics, but some of their more thoughtful, less vitriolic non-Catholic brethren.
Catholics have to get in line. The Protestants hate Mormons, Atheists, Jews, etc. etc. I think it is an inferiority complex.
As one of FR resident secularists, it’s a shame you see me as the enemy.
I’m not.
Oh, and come Easter, my 18 y/o daughter will be in full communion with the Catholic church. Her choice, with full support from her secularist dad (who will certainly be in attendance for the event).
God bless her! And God bless you too. :)
Don't take it the wrong way... there are lots of Protestants here who don't harbor anti-Catholic feelings. And there are a few Catholics who can be over-the-top too (and at times, admittedly, that has been me).
You'd think that, but if you did, apparently you would be wrong. The irrational hatred for the Church on the part of certain people on FR trumps everything else. It's sick, and it's sad, and it's not going to stop.
Bingo. It's irrational, and at times, maybe even diabolical (certainly that's the case for some anti-Catholics in the world at large). But the key is learning to pick battles wisely, and knowing when to let the other person's words stand on their own - when they've gone off the reservation entirely, the other FReepers and lurkers can generally tell.
Welcome to FR, by the way.
While some Protestants may hate Catholics, not all do. This is an issue that crosses the different denominations of Christianity.
Within the Protestant community there are roughly as many paedofiles as in the RCC (Roman Catholic Church - just a standard abreviation, no lessening or insult intended). However, having pointed out the parity in numbers, there is another problem that the RCC has that isn’t shared by Protestants and that is the Bishops. For most Protestant ministers there is no worldly authority above them and the sin is with them alone. In the RCC where a Bishop is aware of the problem with a priest then the Bishop will share in sin if he does nothing to stop it. The Bishop commits other sins when he covers it up (essentially conspiracy).
For too long the Bishops hid things and denied justice to the victims. Also it appears that quite often the Bishops worked together to hide things. The extremes of this conspiracy is what makes it stand out so much more than similar situations in other churches. To many it seems the Pope[s] have been aware for a very long time and chose to do nothing, which brings the whole church into question. This is just too big for any decent person to ignore and titillating enough to ensure that people pay attention.
Now let’s be fair. This problem isn’t limited to the RCC. It is a cancer inflicting itself upon all of Christianity [however, I do believe it is worse in the RCC]. The teachings of the RCC absolutely condemn such behaviour. The design of Pope - Cardinal - Bishop - Priest (yes I skipped a few) does not cause this behaviour, and should actually help keep it from occurring.
What can be done to keep this from happening? I honestly don’t know. This type of sickness is in the individuals. Only by making the RCC a place that won’t work for their desires we might have success. However, please remember that there is probably a significant number of Bishops that have this problem as well and how to deal with them is another problem all together.
I truly believe the unmarried clergy has given freaks a respectable place to hide among decent young men who seek to do God’s work. Perhaps this should be reviewed as this is a choice of the RCC. Eastern Catholics and Orthodox have a married clergy, but unmarried Bishops (and the unmarried Bishops are a source of embarrassment for these faiths, but a needed step to avoid nepotism)
The seminaries need to be cleaned out. The priesthood is for those that wish to be married to the church (or see paragraph above). Sexual deviancy should have immediate dismissal.
The parishes need to be cleaned out (although I do believe this is already being done). No mistresses, gay lovers or children.
Bishops need to be held accountable. If they faced jail time instead of recall to Rome, they might think about their actions ahead of time.
Please feel free to add to this list, especially those of the RCC as you suffer most when your church commits evil.
Please see my original post.
My problem is with “liberal secularists” (I was quite careful to include the word liberal). What you do with your own life is your own business. The kind of relationship that you want to have with God is between you and God.
When some liberal tries to force secularism on my children then I have issues.
No sir, I do not see conservative secularists as any kind of enemy because I know you respect individual rights. And I respect it right back. We will be allies against liberals, but we won’t discuss religion.
In other words, the Lord Actons are my friends, the Antonio Salazars are not.
As a secular humanist myself, I am in 100% agreement with this statement. There is no reason ANYONE should require your children to submit to a creed of any kind. Which is also why you should keep your children as far away of the public schools as possible.
The fact remains that, which the Church now tolerates Republicanism, its philosophy/world view is in conflict with the Classical Liberalism of the founding fathers, and the ideology of the RC should never be pushed as a GOVERNING IDEOLOGY of the nation as a whole. I hope that I have clarified my position for the RCers.
I would suggest your methodology is flawed.
I have been a member for well over ten years and have started over 1,000 threads. I would think I have more than “676 posts.”
So I did my own search on Google and here are the first 50 hits that came up:
-9 that had something to do with Rome.
-1 on PETA
-5 from my ongoing series titled Theological FAQs.
-19 dealing with various issues in the Protestant church. Many of which I would think Roman Catholics would have had fun chiming in on.
-The remainder were comments on other issues/topics elsewhere on FR, outside of the church to include air travel, space exploration and college football.
Hardly the picture you are painting.
There can be no denial that there have been priests who are guilty of doing evil. There can be, in all justice, a genuine concern about how the situation was handled by individual bishops.
There should also be recognition that the Catholic Church is actively seeking to acknowledge, address, and make the strictest possible efforts to prevent any further occurrences.
That should also be acknowledged.
Instead, what a small per cent of faux priests have done is being laid as a heavy cross on the shoulders of the overwhelming number of good and faithful priests. It’s tantamount to putting yellow armbands on every priest—”see, there goes a priest; he’s a pedophile.”
Some on this Forum have even posted that if a man wants to become a celibate priest, it “says something about him.”
That’s a hi-tech form of scapegoating an entire group of dedicated men because of the evil deeds of a small percentage of their number. It’s like branding the parents of a large family as “bad parents” if one of their children were to go wrong, even though the rest of the children did not.
Clearly, that does seem like an agenda.
The seminaries are already being cleaned out. I don’t have numbers in front of me, but the statistics show the majority of abuse cases to be prior to the last decade (or two?) Although even one case is too many, there are far fewer new cases reported. And I don’t think you’ll find a single freeper who doesn’t think all culpable priests and/or bishops should have their feet held to the legal and ecclesiastical fire.
And while we are seeing some really orthodox new priests, there is much work to do in the Church, because it is infiltrated with liberal theologians and laymen left over from the 50’s, 60s and 70’s.
More and more, I wish FR had a “place this user on your ignore list” filter.
LInks?
The most probable pedophiles in order are:
Fathers
Teachers
Coaches
Protestant ministers
Priests are way down on the list.
So if a Father is a teacher of mid-high history, coaches the girl’s basketball team and is a youth minister at his church on weekends/Sundays — watch out! He would be much more prone to pedophilia that any priest.
What a hoot. Here ya go sport:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=%22by+Gamecock%22&as_epq=Catholic&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=10&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=freerepublic.com&as_qdr=all&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=images
The list of articles you've posted include beauties like:
- Why Catholic churches are like shabby department stores
- Pope's brother says slapped pupils at choir school
- You Need A Holy Ghost Enema
THX.
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