Here's two more. I almost feel bad for missing these yesterday. They fit in neatly between that April '08 conversation concerning public anathemas against sexual predators and the September '09 discussion about Jerome Lawler's '66% of the bishops were complicit' charge:
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. "Religious" order, indeed!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.
The only thing that ends sinful behavior is repentance. Check your Bible if you don't believe me.
-- Alex Murphy, May 20, 2009"IMO the church has not made (or at least restated strongly enough) any statement that "such things are an abomination" that Catholics and non-Catholics can equally point to, that categorically applies the condemnation to guilty Catholic priests, bishops, etc. The Catholic Church needs to publicly excommunicate and make examples of the guilty, as a witness to any priest who's even considering preying on his parishioners. And it should go up as high as needed (Roger Mahony, anyone?) until every sympathiser and enabler is rooted out, and purity restored to the priesthood. IOW "put the fear of God in them!"...
... I wasn't aware of any "zero tolerance" policy in the Catholic Church today. I'm a strong advocate of the Old Testament case law (Deut. 19:15) that states "One witness shall not rise against a man concerning any iniquity or any sin that he commits; by the mouth of two or three witnesses the matter shall be established." Yes, there ought to be some sort of "due process" but IMO due process has been (is being?) abused within the American Catholic Church, within certain archdioceses certainly, towards protecting the guilty....
....Sin, confession, and church displine of the same is (or should be) an area inside of [the American bishops'] competence. What's telling isn't that the bishops' received bad advice on how to act. What's telling is what authority the bishops recognized and sought out, when looking for advice...Moreso, I would accuse that the bishops have rejected scriptural authority in favor of (to modify your term) modern pshrinkology. They didn't define the issue (and it's treatment) as a sin problem to be repented of. They treated it as behavior modification....
....IMO letters, papers, and procedures aren't enough, but yes the Catholic Church has taken numerous actions to root this out (although the coloring books are IMO a really bad and tasteless idea). This more-or-less speaks to the first point that I responded to at the top of this post. I'll readily admit one thing, however - the dispute over "proper response" is more of a cultural difference between how Catholics and Protestants address sin than anything else. We like our religious leaders to make public confessions and positional statements re good and evil. I'd daresay that Protestants (at least the pro-creedal kind) place higher value on such public statements than on any actual behaviors towards those same ends. It's hard to judge true repentence when you don't have a matching statement of confession, showing a change of mind to go with the change of action, IMO."
-- Alex Murphy April 2, 2008
Repentance involves both a change inward, the attitude of mind and heart, and the outward, a change of behavior.
So the Bible writers used very emphatic terms such as “do your utmost to found clean and unblemished...” and “abhor wickedness....”