Sex abuse scandal. Guess the religion?

[Imran Siddiqui]

Because the modern approach isn't working very well.

Your logic sucks. Modern approach isn't working for many doesn't equal that ancient marriage worked.

[Ben Kenobi]

I'd argue it's worse today than it was previously.

[Imran Siddiqui]

I'd argue exactly the opposite. In addition to the trapped-ness of women of ancient marriage, the vast majority of it was arranged based on dowrys or political advantage. Today marriage is mostly done for love. A marked improvement.

[Nikolai]

Ben, should the husband submit to the wife?

Since Ben didn't adress this, I'll answer.

Ephesians 5.21-33:

Instructions for Christian Households

21 Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

22 Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing [a] her by the washing with water through the word, 27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 After all, people have never hated their own bodies, but they feed and care for them, just as Christ does the church— 30 for we are members of his body. 31 "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." [b] 32 This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33 However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

So, the women should submit to their men. But the man should submit to his wife. Paul says so in verse 21. And really, women get the easy part. She shall submit, so shall the man. He, on the other hand, is called to love her and give his life for her, just as Christ did to mankind. And what did Christ do? He gave up his life, died a horrible death, he loved us with a perfect love, without any demands. He acted as a servant to man. So shall the man act as a servant to his wife. Jesus loved everyone, no matter who they were or what they've done. He demanded nothing, and gave up everything for us. This is what he has tasked us men to do.

[EPW]

Warned About Abuse, Vatican Failed to Defrock Priest

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.
The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.
The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.
The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.
In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy’s dismissal.
But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations.
“I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood,” Father Murphy wrote near the end of his life to Cardinal Ratzinger. “I ask your kind assistance in this matter.” The files contain no response from Cardinal Ratzinger.
The New York Times obtained the documents, which the church fought to keep secret, from Jeff Anderson and Mike Finnegan, the lawyers for five men who have brought four lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. The documents include letters between bishops and the Vatican, victims’ affidavits, the handwritten notes of an expert on sexual disorders who interviewed Father Murphy and minutes of a final meeting on the case at the Vatican.
Father Murphy not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and interviews with victims. Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities.
Instead of being disciplined, Father Murphy was quietly moved by Archbishop William E. Cousins of Milwaukee to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes, schools and, as one lawsuit charges, a juvenile detention center. He died in 1998, still a priest.
Even as the pope himself in a recent letter to Irish Catholics has emphasized the need to cooperate with civil justice in abuse cases, the correspondence seems to indicate that the Vatican’s insistence on secrecy has often impeded such cooperation. At the same time, the officials’ reluctance to defrock a sex abuser shows that on a doctrinal level, the Vatican has tended to view the matter in terms of sin and repentance more than crime and punishment.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, was shown the documents and was asked to respond to questions about the case. He provided a statement saying that Father Murphy had certainly violated “particularly vulnerable” children and the law, and that it was a “tragic case.” But he pointed out that the Vatican was not forwarded the case until 1996, years after civil authorities had investigated the case and dropped it.
Father Lombardi emphasized that neither the Code of Canon Law nor the Vatican norms issued in 1962, which instruct bishops to conduct canonical investigations and trials in secret, prohibited church officials from reporting child abuse to civil authorities. He did not address why that had never happened in this case.
As to why Father Murphy was never defrocked, he said that “the Code of Canon Law does not envision automatic penalties.” He said that Father Murphy’s poor health and the lack of more recent accusations against him were factors in the decision.
The Vatican’s inaction is not unusual. Only 20 percent of the 3,000 accused priests whose cases went to the church’s doctrinal office between 2001 and 2010 were given full church trials, and only some of those were defrocked, according to a recent interview in an Italian newspaper with Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, the chief internal prosecutor at that office. An additional 10 percent were defrocked immediately. Ten percent left voluntarily. But a majority — 60 percent — faced other “administrative and disciplinary provisions,” Monsignor Scicluna said, like being prohibited from celebrating Mass.
To many, Father Murphy appeared to be a saint: a hearing man gifted at communicating in American Sign Language and an effective fund-raiser for deaf causes. A priest of the Milwaukee Archdiocese, he started as a teacher at St. John’s School for the Deaf, in St. Francis, in 1950. He was promoted to run the school in 1960 even though students had disclosed to church officials in the 1950s that he was a predator.
Victims give similar accounts of Father Murphy’s pulling down their pants and touching them in his office, his car, his mother’s country house, on class excursions and fund-raising trips and in their dormitory beds at night. Arthur Budzinski said he was first molested when he went to Father Murphy for confession when he was about 12, in 1960.
“If he was a real mean guy, I would have stayed away,” said Mr. Budzinski, now 61, who worked for years as a journeyman printer. “But he was so friendly, and so nice and understanding. I knew he was wrong, but I couldn’t really believe it.”
Mr. Budzinski and a group of other deaf former students spent more than 30 years trying to raise the alarm, including passing out leaflets outside the Milwaukee cathedral. Mr. Budzinski’s friend Gary Smith said in an interview that Father Murphy molested him 50 or 60 times, starting at age 12. By the time he graduated from high school at St. John’s, Mr. Smith said, “I was a very, very angry man.”
In 1993, with complaints about Father Murphy landing on his desk, Archbishop Weakland hired a social worker specializing in treating sexual offenders to evaluate him. After three days of interviews, the social worker said that Father Murphy had admitted his acts, had probably molested about 200 boys and felt no remorse.
However, it was not until 1996 that Archbishop Weakland tried to have Father Murphy defrocked. The reason, he wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger, was to defuse the anger among the deaf and restore their trust in the church. He wrote that since he had become aware that “solicitation in the confessional might be part of the situation,” the case belonged at the doctrinal office.
With no response from Cardinal Ratzinger, Archbishop Weakland wrote a different Vatican office in March 1997 saying the matter was urgent because a lawyer was preparing to sue, the case could become public and “true scandal in the future seems very possible.”
Recently some bishops have argued that the 1962 norms dictating secret disciplinary procedures have long fallen out of use. But it is clear from these documents that in 1997, they were still in force.
But the effort to dismiss Father Murphy came to a sudden halt after the priest appealed to Cardinal Ratzinger for leniency.
In an interview, Archbishop Weakland said that he recalled a final meeting at the Vatican in May 1998 in which he failed to persuade Cardinal Bertone and other doctrinal officials to grant a canonical trial to defrock Father Murphy. (In 2002, Archbishop Weakland resigned after it became public that he had an affair with a man and used church money to pay him a settlement.)
Archbishop Weakland said this week in an interview, “The evidence was so complete, and so extensive that I thought he should be reduced to the lay state, and also that that would bring a certain amount of peace in the deaf community.”
Father Murphy died four months later at age 72 and was buried in his priestly vestments. Archbishop Weakland wrote a last letter to Cardinal Bertone explaining his regret that Father Murphy’s family had disobeyed the archbishop’s instructions that the funeral be small and private, and the coffin kept closed.
“In spite of these difficulties,” Archbishop Weakland wrote, “we are still hoping we can avoid undue publicity that would be negative toward the church.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/world/europe/25vatican.html?hp

ugh.

[Asher]

There's really no wiggle room left.

Ben, your church is run by a pedophile-enabler.

Repent.

[Ben Kenobi]

I'd argue exactly the opposite. In addition to the trapped-ness of women of ancient marriage, the vast majority of it was arranged based on dowrys or political advantage. Today marriage is mostly done for love. A marked improvement.

Well, love is working out so well that half of those marriages fail altogether. Maybe we don't know what we really want.

[Ben Kenobi]

Nikolai:

I already replied to ecofarm:

As a brother in Christ, he can choose to do so. Christians are called to submit to one another in Christ. As a husband he gets final say.

[Ben Kenobi]

Let's play look at the dates:

The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974.

Ok. So we know that the priest served there for 24 years and abused boys, as usual.

Father Murphy not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims

So why is the article slagging Ratzinger when the Police did nothing? Reports were released to the authorities. There was no coverup.

However, it was not until 1996 that Archbishop Weakland tried to have Father Murphy defrocked. The reason, he wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger

1996! That's 46 years after the priest started molesting boys. Yeah, Ratzinger is the responsible one here. I don't get it.

Why does everyone go after him and not the civil authorities who ignored the reports sent to them?

[Imran Siddiqui]

Well, love is working out so well that half of those marriages fail altogether. Maybe we don't know what we really want.

Only you would claim that marriages entered into because of love are not as good as marriages arranged for dowry or property ownership reasons.

[Ben Kenobi]

Only you would claim that marriages entered into because of love are not as good as marriages arranged for dowry or property ownership reasons.

Question, suppose an arranged marriage were a happy partnership for 50 years. Would you consider this inferior to, oh I don't know, Marriage number 3 for Liv Taylor, contracted with her lover of the moment?

[Imran Siddiqui]

Intelligent people usually like to take the averages of the whole rather than pick and choose extreme examples.

However, that does bring up the question of whether you would prefer an arranged marriage or would you rather wish to find someone you loved to marry?

[Elok]

Why does everyone go after him and not the civil authorities who ignored the reports sent to them?

Well, you can start a "now-dead civil authorities thread" to excoriate them, but

A. That problem is now pretty well fixed, as modern agencies are hypersensitive to allegations of molestation, while pervy priest coverups are STILL coming out of the woodwork.
B. Nobody is trying to defend them, which would make it a boring thread, but you feel compelled to defend Daddy's more or less indefensible conduct, albeit only by a lame "well, these people also enabled the ass-rape of altar boys!"
C. Those authorities did not, presumably, go on to become President, whereas Ratty is now Pope.

[Ben Kenobi]

Only you would claim that marriages entered into because of love are not as good as marriages arranged for dowry or property ownership reasons.

Clearly Imran admits that he believes this too.

You know, if you want to prevent this, you really need to firm up your premisses, Imran.

Only you would claim that on average marriages entered into because of love are not as good as marriages arranged for dowry or property ownership reasons.

This would prevent me from doing end arounds.

However, that does bring up the question of whether you would prefer an arranged marriage or would you rather wish to find someone you loved to marry?

Personally? It's moot for reasons that I'm not going to get into here.

[Ben Kenobi]

C. Those authorities did not, presumably, go on to become President, whereas Ratty is now Pope.

If I were one of the victims, I'd be even angrier that the only time this is 'news' is to take a cheap shot at the Pope. I mean hell, I'd have been living my entire life through it and the media doesn't give a **** about the abuse.