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The Empire Strikes Back
Apparently the Vatican has finally decided that the best defense is a good offense. According to a bellicose statement issued Monday, the Catholic Church doesn't have a paedophilia problem, it has an ephebophilia problem, thankyouverymuch. Plus this:
The statement, read out by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's permanent observer to the UN, defended its record by claiming that "available research" showed that only 1.5%-5% of Catholic clergy were involved in child sex abuse.
He also quoted statistics from the Christian Scientist Monitor newspaper to show that most US churches being hit by child sex abuse allegations were Protestant and that sexual abuse within Jewish communities was common.
Only 1.5-5%! Not bad! And anyway, Protestants and Jews are doing it too. So there.
Admittedly, I'm not a theological expert, but to my ears this sounds only slightly more sophisticated than something you might hear from a red-faced five-year-old. Augustine must be spinning in his grave.
Wow, making an
Wow, making an unsubstantiated allegation of abuse in the Jewish community on Yom Kippur. I guess they figured nobody would be available to respond for at least a day. Talk about having something to atone for.
Actually it's not so much unsubstantiated
I remember hearing a story about child sexual abuse in orthodox Jewish communities on NPR earlier this year. Here it is: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101280775
Which doesn't excuse the poor behavior of far too many bishops of the church on this matter.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty is
Barbara Bradley Hagerty is not a credible source on religious matters. Google her.
Problems within one hasidic community, or even a region, do not speak to widespread problems throughout the US in Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionists, well maybe the Reconstructionists, they've always been wankers since they split off from the PFJ.
Worst case, one in 20 will molest a kid.
I like those odds!
The Empire is old and tired
So the Catholic Church is now prepared to admit, though in an underhanded way, that it is a magnet for sexually devious males. And just to be clear, I am not referring to the homosexuality aspect here, but the predation on children.
What Monsignori Tomasi still doesn't seem to get though is that the appalling thing isn't so much the percentage of priests who are pedophiles, but what the church does about them when such individuals become known to the hierarchy.
Is there possibly a link between conservatism and the inability to fully appreciate how much hypocrisy grates on people, especially when it comes from an organization that claims its leader to be endowed with the virtue of infallibility and demands strict obedience from its followers. I liked the response from Rabbi Potasnik to this charm offensive of the Catholic Church: "Comparative tragedy is a dangerous path on which to travel".
And the ephebophilia move: did the Catholic Church take that directly from the GOP playbook?
I wonder if the Catholic Church is full of former Goldmanites?
Shorter Holy See: "Why us? The fact that the press covers the Church's transgressions when everyone's doing it proves the Church is the real victim here. Oh, and rubes who don't know the difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia make God sick."
"Augustine must be spinning
"Augustine must be spinning in his grave."
I don't know. Wasn't Augustine the one who prayed, "Oh Lord, make me chaste, BUT NOT YET"?
Pope
Kevin, I must disagree with your point. To me, the point is clear, that child abuse is a human problem and statistically, the catholic clergy is about as human as the rest of the religious community of professionals.
POPE: But the Catholic
POPE: But the Catholic church are forever lecturing the rest of us about how morally superior they are. It stands to reason then that the religious argument that we need religion for moral well being is a fallacy, if indeed the very core of the world's biggest christian organisation is as rotten as all us child molesting heathens.... They have clearly failed to demonstrate any moral superiority, in fact the total opposite as they continually abuse the defenceless from positions of trust.
You can argue percentages all you want
But it's the Church's cover-ups, the known pedophiles who were shuffled from parish to parish, that demonstrate its moral bankruptcy. Of those 1.5% to 5%, how many have the Church turned over to the authorities for prosecution?
Precisely
When the fellow in the article says that the Holy See hadn't contradicted any of his assertions, that describes the real problem with the Vatican's statement: it's a deflection. How would the public react to the RC church if, every time a sexual predator were discovered, that person were publicly acknowledged, given a public trial by the church, and if found guilty, turned over to civil authorities for a criminal trial? I imagine that would make the higher-ups much more prone to catching potential abusers early, and getting them out of the clergy before it becomes a scandal.
A diphthong, a diphthong
Kevin used a diphthong! Since I took 5 years of junior high and high school Latin in the 60's I've seen nary a diphthong. I will look up pædophilia and fæces in my encyclopædia.
Excuse my pedantic excitement.......
Sadly, it's only because I
Sadly, it's only because I cut and paste both of those words directly out of the Guardian story.....
Or is it a pædeantic moment?
Or is it a pædeantic moment?
Maybe 5%?
If a professional talker or politician says; "1.5-5%", you could throw out all values between 1.5 and 4.9999%, and start speculating above that level.
Word power
This posting has received an R-17 rating by the Bloggers Association of America.
Only postings that conflate the various types of sexual offenses will receive a G rating. When it comes to sexual offenders, one size fits all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephebophilia
On the bright side...
You have to wonder how long and hard the Vatican thought about the strategy of blaming the children for the scandals, before rejecting it (officially).
most US churches being hit
Snark answer: he's not counting the One True Church as a single case, is he?
Real answer: adjusted for population?
If Roman Polanski can drug
If Roman Polanski can drug and anally rape a 13 year and have the liberal community forgive him, even blame the victim, no wonder the Catholic Church is so upset at the anger. We are all human, right? Even the child predators.
I'm part of the "liberal community" and I DON'T
forgive Polanski for raping a child.
That isn't a just a broad tar brush you're using, it's a frickin warehouse broom.
idiot
This is exactly the kind of moronic false equivalence that prompted the column in the first place. Let's just recap the high points of your stupidity: Roman Polanski is not the Catholic Church. He does not (to my knowledge, anyway) claim to be the body of Christ, led by an infallibly inspired heir to the apostleship of St. Peter. He does not, as does the Catholic Church, explicitly claim to be more, in fact, than human. He does not claim to be the moral and spiritual light of the world, qualified to pass judgment on all human beings. Secondly, you twit, I have yet to hear any liberal forgive Polanski, or blame the victim (who, btw, filed a motion to have the case dismissed for reasons of her own), but if they had, the two situations are in no way comparable. Idiot.
think harder
I'm part of the liberal community, and I'm obviously in favor of Roman Polanski serving time for the crimes of both raping that young girl and then fleeing justice for three decades. Probably there are people who don't agree with me who would call themselves liberal -- that doesn't mean the label applies to all us liberals, unless I get to be called a serial killer because Jeffrey Dahmer was white, as am I.
I suggest that you think much harder about why you think people you don't agree with politically are somehow in favor of rape and abuse. We are actual human beings, with children of our own. We're not the cartoon villains you seem to think we are. By casually slandering us in this way, you're denying our humanity, but also denying yourself a chance to understand the real world you live in.
liberal community or DLC
Perhaps the 'liberals' of the DLC do not want to see Polanski punished. Polanski may have made contributions to Gore's and Kerry's presidential campaigns. Leftists, on the other hand, like Marcotte and Truthdig have come out in favor of his arrest.
Augustine
Nancy Irving: I suspect that when Augustine was asking to be chaste,
he was not yet a priest.
Given the nature of his own conversion as he describes it,
he could well have been given that chasteness.
(Or he is lying like a rug in his "Confessions". I hope not.)
Yes, it was before he became
Yes, it was before he became a celibate.
Still, it does demonstrate the ambiguous relationship Catholics have with sin and forgiveness, in particular that a Catholic knows, BEFORE he sins, that the sin he is thinking of committing will be forgiven him.
Plus, it's funny.
WTF?
Who the fuck forgave Roman Polanski? Not me.
Per Wikipedia, "Ephebophilia
Per Wikipedia, "Ephebophilia is a word indicating sexual preference for mid-to-late adolescents" with "mid to late adolescents" being later referenced as "15 to 19 years old."
Wikipedia goes on:
"Because most late adolescents have physical characteristics near (or in other cases, identical) to that of full-grown adults, some level of sexual attraction to persons in the age group is common among adults of all sexual orientations."
I really don't think that's been the problem. It hasn't been an excess of 17 year olds. It's the young ones, 12 and 13 and younger.
And just how many of these
And just how many of these 'celibates' does 1.5% to 5% represent?
Doing the math
A quick Google search turned up a 2005 count of Catholic priests at 406,411. That means they're admitting to 6096 - 20320 sex abusers in their ranks...
The RCC made silence golden through the ages...
...when it comes to anything sexual. They are more to blame for the inhibitions of repressed men and women throughout the world than any other faith. And their clergy depended on those inhibitions to protect them from being revealed as a group that counts among its numbers a scandalous percentage of victimizers of young and vulnerable people and goes to unimaginable lengths to shield those beasts from being exposed for what they are.
They've made "guilt" and "shame" the words that should appear on any crest that portrays them, and those clergy who are not guilty of specific acts of victimization are still largely guilty of helping to conceal evils they know to be true.
I had 16 years of Catholic school and I value MUCH of it, but I resent the legacy they chose to perpetuate more than words can ever say.
FIVE PERCENT!? This is
FIVE PERCENT!?
This is intended to be reassuring?!
And how long has it been since the first child sex abuse scandal
came to be public knowledge? How many years has it taken the Vatican to come up with even *this* lame response?
I'm amazed anybody believes a word they say anymore.
Looking at the wrong %
Give them the 5% or less figure, as if that were mitigatingly small. Well over 80% of bishops and cardinals were complicit in the cover-up.
It's the coverup, stupid
Protestant denominations, by and large, have developed policies and strategies to reduce child molestation in their churches and most have policies to promptly kick out (not to mention report to authorities) any of their clergy who engage in abuse. The Catholic church, on the other hand, has had a pattern of hushing it up. The number of allegations is a red herring.
Time for extreme intervention..
Let's just perform full castration on all these fellas who are "called" to the Priesthood. Done!
The Catholic Church has a PR problem as well...
Essentially saying 1 in 20 of our priest are rapist but hey, only a small percentage of that want to rape 10 year old boys, the others prefer 11 year olds and some even like 13, 14 and 15 year olds and you know, the Protestants and godless Jews are doing it as well and maybe everyone ought to just STFU and worry about your own business. Motherfuckers.
That statement just seems to lack a lot of the qualities that, I dunno, someone like Jesus might have had.
Any situation with a lot of
Any situation with a lot of prepubescent youths confined together will generate warmth. The Roman Catholic Church has not changed, become more deviant, rather public attitudes have changed and Roman Catholic attitudes are changing with them. To dismiss the distinction between paedophilia and ephebophilia is not helpful, one involves joining with the sexually innocent, the other with the sexually curious. Not at all the same thing. What sort of appetites do you imagine Caravaggio was happy to paint for? Western society wallows in all kinds of modish sexual fantasies, this just doesn’t happen to be fashionablle right now.
Pope Benedict
I read, somewhere and a while ago, that while Pope Benedict was Pope John Paul's #1 assistant, he wanted & tried to sweep their paedophilia problem under the rug. And now, this. Stands to reason. Before you slam me, please know that I AM Catholic but no longer have respect for the church.
the Vatican Parochial School Plan..
No Child's Behind Left
So, the Church finally hit
So, the Church finally hit on a defense, taken straight from the playground: "Everyone else does it too!" That's pathetic and despicable.
Re: who the fuck forgave Polanski? His victim, for one. Should he do jail time? Who knows?
Mrs Garside, you are not
Mrs Garside, you are not being fair. The RC Church is not defending anything, simply pointing out that these things happen, and always have. Bear in mind the incidents that have come to light are not new but occurred at a time when public attitudes were not so obsessive. Public attitudes change, look at smoking. What would be the point of pursuing today someone who, twenty years ago, used to drive after having a few? Besides, compensating ‘victims’ with cash payments is bound to winkle all sorts of recollections from the forgotten recesses distant memory. It would be much more appropriate to offer Episcopal prayers for those who still have residual feelings of harm, and for offending clerics to make a penitential pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, in sackcloth, or barefoot, or whatever it takes to calm public outrage.
Systemic abuse as cover-up
Just a reminder to those who wonder why bishops and even cardinals are so eager to cover-up these crimes.
The bishops, the cardinals, and even the pope himself almost all started out as parish priests with great access to children.
Common sense would tell you that some pedophiles would have moved up in the ranks. That might explain why there is so much cover up, instead of what Jesus would have done which is expose the criminals and help the victims.
These guys network, they know who they are, they look out for each other. And, they all know if there is anywhere on Earth that they might get away with their crimes against children it would be the catholic church.
Of course there are other places this goes on but the catholic church apparently has a system of protection built in. And it's world wide.
Church is the religious
Church is the religious place, also a sacred place, but priest is doing seriously bad thing. they must get punishment. Otherwise, the blame will polluted this sacred place.