Posted on 03/23/2010 6:37:37 AM PDT by marshmallow
What's the real cancer at the heart of the church? Not pedophile priests...they're a symptom of a much deeper problem. Gerald Warner at the Daily Telegraph let's fly in this article about the real problem underlying the child abuse scandals. I think he's on target in much of what he says.
The secular press are fond of saying that the child abuse problem is caused by the demand for priestly celibacy. There is an underlying cause, but it's not that. The underlying cause is that too many Catholics have lost the plot completely. For the last forty years the church has been infected with modernism, and the key tenet of modernism is that there is no such thing as the supernatural. What you see is what you get.
This serious sickness at the very heart of the church swept through monasteries, convents and seminaries. The honest priests, nuns and religious lost their faith and got out. The lazy ones stayed put and enjoyed a meal ticket for life. No longer believing in the reality and power of the sacraments, they drifted into a no man's land in which they were priests, bishops and religious without believing in religion. What were they supposed to do? They decided to re-create the church as a kind of dining club with a social conscience.
When it came to sexuality, well since the invention of the pill, everyone else was playing around with whoever they wanted. The apostate priests had no reason to insist on such an outmoded thing as chastity, and if no one else had to be chaste, why should they? If they no longer had to believe in heaven or hell (you make your own heaven or hell here on earth don't you know?) then there was no real penalty if your sexual tastes were, errm, unconventional. Homosexuality was presented as natural, and sex wasn't for procreation, and everybody was sexually active, so why not play around with whoever you liked?
A therapeutic culture swept in and suddenly nobody was a sinner. "I'm OK. You're OK." You don't need punishment or banishment. You don't even need forgiveness and a demand for reparation. You need therapy. No wonder they covered up. In their anthropology no one was a sinner. No one was bad. They were just wounded. They were just sick. They needed help.
G.K.Chesterton said that "Every argument is a theological argument." and it is always and everywhere true that a moral crisis is linked with a theological crisis. Benedict XVI's letter to the Irish church rightly calls for a spiritual and liturgical and theological renewal. The pedophile priest crisis is not just a crisis of morals, but a crisis of belief.
Finally, this crisis of belief is not just a crisis among a few twisted and evil perverts. It is a crisis of belief in our whole church. Archbishops, Bishops, Abbots, Mother Superiors, Seminary Rectors, Theologians, Priests and people have all been swamped with something other than the red blooded Catholic faith of our Fathers. They've been tromping along like drug addled zombies following a feel good false religion that has been used to deceive millions.
We all need repentance in the face of this. We all need to turn again to the awareness that the devil is real, that sin is real, that nice people are capable of terrible evil. We must be on our guard. We must believe in the power and reality of the sacraments. We must be New Testament Christians with missionary zeal, the discipline of ascetical prayer and a warrior spirit.
Nothing else will do.
The “Winsome Doctrine”.
“. . .they were priests, bishops and religious without believing in religion.”
“Believing in religion” is not the answer, but rather the problem. The church went astray when it began “believing in religion,” i.e. itself, instead of humbling and simply submitting to the Lord.
Lost focus = lost mission.
Infiltration of churches by male homosexuals is the root cause.
What’s the real cancer at the heart of the church?
The belief in Humanism that has run rampant throughout the Roman Catholic Church,gives many in the church an excuse for accepting the behavior of pedophiles in the priesthood.
Prior to Vatican 2, many would have been railroaded out.
It’s time for the Church to return to it’s roots in the belief of God rather than the worship of man.
This is nonsense. The percentage of priests in the Catholic Church who have been accused of sexual abuse (about 4%) is the same as clergy in other demoninations that allow their clergymen to marry (about 4%). So celibacy has nothing to do with it, and allowing priests to marry wouldn’t even begin to solve the problem. (This 4% figure, by the way, compares to about 8% in the general population.)
The overwhelming majority of sexual abuse cases involve a stepfather (or boyfriend of the child’s mother), or some other household member. The next largest group are those who are well-known and in the house on a regular basis, such as friends of the family.
Homosexuals aren’t supposed to be allowed into the priesthood. This is evangelical law from the Vatican. But too often, especially in liberal dioceses here in America, bishops have their suspicions that an applicant is gay (or even worse, they know it for a fact) and they look the other way.
Years later, when the young priest is well-known and loved as a brother in the parish community, comes the allegation of abuse. And 90% of the time, it’s from a man who was a teenaged boy at the time of the alleged offense. So now the bishop is faced with another decision. Most of these cases energed in the 1980s, when even mental health professionals still didn’t know a lot about the nature of child molesters and that they can never be cured.
So nobody wanted the poor gay priest to go to prison as a child molester. The liberal bishop compounds his error by quietly moving the offending priest to a different parish, ordering him to control his urges by praying and taking cold showers. But now we know that a child molester can’t be cured. The nature of his illness compels him to seek out new opportunities to molest children.
In most cases, these offenders were molested as children themselves. Many of them have substance abuse problems. They are sick people, and there is no cure.
There’s a reason why most of these cases arose in just two dioceses: the Diocese of Boston and the Diocese of Los Angeles. They are the two most liberal dioceses in America. The men in charge tolerated a homosexual subculture in the seminaries and in the priesthood.
Going where angels fear to tread. I was raised as a Catholic, now a Protestant.
I disagree with your view that it is modernism that is the core problem, although I am a traditionalist and see this as a great problem in almost all areas of social life.
I believe the problem is that well meaning Catholics in the heirarchy believe that the Catholic Church is all important, on a level with God, so that it must be protected at all costs. So the evil men do the evil and then the “good” Catholics sweep it under the rug because they want to protect the all important Catholic Church. So children are abused, year after year, and “good” men protect their abusers to protect the Church.
God and God’s laws first. Ignoring this has been where Catholics have gone seriously off the reservation with their “church over all other things”type of Christianity.
Sorry brothers and sisters but that is how I see it.
Well I see it as a bureaucracy that handled sex abuse of minors, several decades ago, in a manner not at all unlike that of society at large. I also see a bureaucracy used to attacks from those who wish it ill, whose judgment may have been clouded to the extent that legitimate cases were handled poorly.
Saying the Catholic Church was the ONLY organization to be slow to understand the full ramifications of sex abuse of minors in its ranks is pure revisionist history.
So, a lot of Catholics became Episcopalians? Whodathunk?
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But without a belief in a higher power to hold you responsible in the next life, all things are morally equal. Any other system of morals is just for the convenience of society, or the individual, and has no authority whatsoever. This life is then all we've got, so we must maximize our own personal pleasure, whatever the expense to society or other people. If it feels good, it's moral "How can it be wrong, when it feels so right?" On the other hand, why bother with pleasure, or anything else. In a hundred years it won't matter to you. Might as well blow your brains out and get it over with. And a lot of people do. Not the way I want to live or believe.
We disagree but that's OK.
Pax Christi.
Great line, all too true.
You know nothing of the Church but what you have read in blasphemous tracts. If you truly want to understand either your enemy or your friend, read the Catechism of the Catholic Church. We don’t hide who we are or what we believe. What you have posted is so much drivel.
Tell me... can you cite a statistically significant amount of abuse that occurred in the last 10 years? 20 years? It’s very hard to do. Why? Because the Catholic Church is one of the few institutions on the planet to actually deal with the problem. However, since we are the very core and heart of Christianity that this world hates (and a VERY big target) we will continue to be the white elephant that the worldwide marxists and islamists highlight.
Many on this site like to point out that if you’re not taking flak, you’re not over the target. This applies to the Church as well. Protestant denominations encounter the same (or greater) abuse scandals but don’t receive nearly the scrutiny... why? Because they’re not a threat to the secularists.
Think about it.
Everyone seems to ignore the fact the the Church is under a concerted and focused attack by secularists. Any failing or sin will be amplified and promoted. If there was not a single boy molested by a homosexual priest, then some other “scandal” would be found.
Whereas the concept of 'Sola Scriptura' believed by so many - of authority coming only from scripture - is anti-scriptural. For as Christ said to Peter:
I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
Here we see that the authority of the Church explicitly comes from Christ. Scripture receives its authority from the Church, not the other way round.
I’m sorry you lost your way. You have left the Church for lack of understanding. Although the administration of the Church is by human and imperfect hands, it is still the institution foretold in Daniel to grow and fill the Earth and promised by Christ and His Apostles. I would simply point you to 1 Tim 3:15 to see that there is a visible Church on Earth and it is meant to be the pillar and ground of truth to the nations.
God bless you.
The REAL problem, the elephant in the corner, is
H O M O S E X U A L I T Y
In the cases of pedophilia- WHICH sex is being abused by male priests? BOYS. These are not heterosexual, frustrated priests who would marry if they could, but homosexuals who would go for young boys in or out of the priesthood.
And homosexuals who want other grown men for sex. There have been more than a few cases of priests found dead because they took home a man for sex who killed them. Can’t think of many who are attacked by outraged female prostitutes, can anyone?
So they avoid the real issue and focus on the pedophilia aspect while ignoring the underlying issue. If they got rid of every priest who abused young BOYS( have there been many instances of girls being abused?)- what do we have left? Homosexual priests who break their vows of celibacy by having sex with other adult men- other PRIESTS?
That’s ok??? Anyone raising a stink about that?
The marriage/celibacy thing is another Waterloo.
Allowing married men INTO the priesthood is one thing. That would bring in another type of man and eventually would shift the ratio of hetero- to- homosexual priests. As it stands now, I would bet that 75%-at least- of priests are homosexual. They ran to the church to obtain legitimacy and avoid judgement by society. Now they are Bishops, Archibishops and Cardinals. Is it any wonder that there is no ‘housecleaning’ on the parish levels? Anyone really think they are willing to expose themselves by applying the rules only in a downward direction?
Homosexuals are not legitimate priests. I don’t want ONE in the Catholic Church. If that means there are only a handful of priests left on each continent- so be it. If it means purging the Vatican-it must be done.
Homosexuality is the cancer here, child abuse is ONE symptom. It must be cut out ruthlessly , A maimed, but healthy , Church will survive.
If only the priests who sexually abuse children are rooted out( which I doubt will happen) that will leave the priests who are having sex with each other.
I’m NOT ok with that!
START with the pedophiles- I don’t care how old they are. No mercy. But continue- then address the celibacy issue.
Right now- they willingly took the vows- now live by them or GET OUT.
So allowing marriage isn’t the total answer- unless we want to let homosexual priests marry too. Now THERE is the real problem we face when considering allowing priests to marry.
Is everyone ok with THAT????
You’ve stated the reasoning that damage to the Catholic Church, which is all important, being Christianity itself, must be avoided; thus the child abusing priest is switched to another parish, quietly. That’s where that type of thinking has led . . . Church over the children. What did Christ have to say about the matter of hurting children by drawing them into sin? You know what he said — the millstone. Yet the “good” priests were put in the position of having to hurt children because of their view of the importance of the church.
Don’t get me wrong. I doubt you would make the decision to simply transfer the child abuser to another parish. But that was done over and over and over and over and over and over . . . and not all transfers were made at all levels by other child abusers. Some were “good” Catholics taking orders or “protecting” the Catholic Church.
My interest here is in persuading some Catholics who might someday influence some decision that the Catholic Church is not all important, that some harm to the Church can righteously occur . . . that there are other things to consider than the Catholic Church. Like God’s word, God himself, sin, right and wrong, common sense, protecting others from sin.
The first part of YOUR argument is correct, but the second part is not. Most pedophiles are heterosexual. Don’t be so quick to trade one scapegoat for another. But, more important than the homo/hetero argument, which is ultimately pointless, is that most of them, psychologically, are people who have trouble relating to people their own age. They need to feel they have a human relationship of some sort, and that they have power and control in that relationship, which is easy with children. It’s a need/power thing far more than a sexual thing.
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