Pennsylvanian pedotopia

[Bereta_Eder]

catholic prisests shoulkd be allowed to be married just like orthodox. only when they aim to achieve the highest statues of priesthood they should remain celibate. there is a fault in the catholic church

[Lorizael]

If only Ben Kenobi were here to tell us how this isn't nearly as bad as it sounds...

That's what we have the Catholic League for, apparently:

Myth: The priests "raped" their victims.

Shapiro said that "Church officials routinely and purposely described the abuse as horseplay and wrestling and inappropriate contact. It was none of those things." He said it was "rape." Similarly, the New York Times quoted from the report saying that Church officials used such terms as "horseplay" and "inappropriate contact" as part of their "playbook for concealing the truth."

Fact: This is an obscene lie. Most of the alleged victims were not raped: they were groped or otherwise abused, but not penetrated, which is what the word "rape" means. This is not a defense—it is meant to set the record straight and debunk the worst case scenarios attributed to the offenders.

[Elok]

Well, one of the victims was told it was normal because "when Jesus came out, Mary had to lick him clean." But good news: this wasn't technically rape!

[Lorizael]

Also apparently this is a homo problem, not a pedo problem, because most of the victims were teenage boys, not children.

[rah]

Huh. Our parish priests spend most of their time, outside of services, attending to various crises. They hardly ever have contact with children outside of altar service, and then there's almost always a crowd of them around, little one-on-one. Do you mean it goes so far that you'd consider RCC priesthood a primarily "working with kids" kind of job?

(it probably helps that our parish priests are normally married, and most archdioceses have an abundant supply of seminarians lately)

Growing up in a catholic school we saw priests every day. They were also responsible for serious punishments (beatings). I'm sure if they were allowed to be married that it would have probably helped them release their sexual tensions in more traditional methods. The only one we didn't see routinely was the Monsignor. He was usually too drunk and out driving his Cadillac to lower himself to attending to school issues.

[Elok]

Well, there are clear gay problems too, like the recently-demoted Cardinal McCarrick ("Uncle Ted") who liked to diddle seminarians. I think it's unclear at this point what percentage of the priests are straight-up pedos and which are predatory cradle-robbing homosexuals a la Kevin Spacey. There's probably something to the claim that the press played up the pedo angle because they didn't want to have an enormous gay scandal; however, this doesn't really change the fact that a whole bunch of their priests are sexual predators. That's mostly a really fumbling attempt at ... both-sidesing? I don't even know how "but they mischaracterized the precise nature and motives of our perverted clerics" is supposed to help.

Xpost

[Lorizael]

I think it's not entirely unfair to focus on the pedo part rather than the gay part. You can be a pedophile and not act on your urges. But if you do act on them, you are a predator. The same is obviously not necessarily the case for gay people. Having a lot of gay priests isn't any more of a problem than having a lot of straight priests. (Selecting for asexual priests is the way to go, of course.) Having a lot of pedophile priests is understandably more problematic, because any lapse in celibacy is a crime.

The Catholic League's attempt to paint this as a gay problem, however, stems from the belief that homosexuality is inherently wrong/bad/evil. For example, I have a moderately conservative (anti-Trump) Catholic uncle who once tried to argue during Thanksgiving (iirc) that, of course, you always have to watch out for homosexuals, because they might be pedophiles.

[ZEE]

Christians

[rah]

We also went to a catholic boys camp when we were younger. It was at a seminary and all the counselors were seminarians. I don't remember any issues, but they may have been because they hadn't taken all the vows yet so they seemed more interested in the counselors at the women's jewish camp across the lake.

[Elok]

The most compelling argument I've heard for the gay distinction mattering is that, in an environment where lots of clergymen are diddling each other, there's a conspiracy-of-silence effect where any deeper transgressions, like going after teenage boys, go unreported, because a large percentage of the authorities are already complicit in forbidden behavior and everybody has dirt on everybody else. Now, this depends on there actually being a whole lot of actively gay priests, and I think I've met about three Catholic priests in my life. IDK.

[rah]

I take it more of "protect our own" like the cops over we have dirt on each other.

[Elok]

Oh, I'm sure that's an element regardless. But we seldom have pedo scandals; ours are just garden-variety "darn, where did that clergy retirement fund go PLEASE DONATE FOR OUR HUGE NEW CHURCH BUILDING!" I think I once heard about a pedo scandal in one of the Canadian churches or somewhere like that; IIRC the hierarch responsible for oversight was accused of a coverup and eventually got deposed. I wasn't following it closely, obviously.

[Jon Miller]

I take it more of "protect our own" like the cops over we have dirt on each other.

That is reasonable, but where does the 'protest our own' culture come from?

I can guess from US police.

JM

[Uncle Sparky]

'protect' became 'protest'... great typo!

[rah]

I think it's as old as time and didn't originate in the US. Groups of people have usually protected their own when faced with outsiders. Soldiers, clergy, aristocrats, etc.

[pchang]

Sex scandals in the Catholic Church predate the US by hundreds of years. I think Laz posted about the Pornocracy somewhere in the archives here.....