Every time I think the Catholic-priest-molestation scandal can't get any worse -- it does.
On the morning of January 14 in Seattle, Ken Roosa and a small group Alaska Natives stood on the sidewalk outside Seattle University to announce a new lawsuit against the Jesuits, claiming a widespread conspiracy to dump pedophile priests in isolated Native villages where they could abuse children off the radar. "They did it because there was no money there, no power, no police".....
These abusers in Alaska, Wall said, were specifically sent to Alaska "to get them off the grid, where they could do the least amount of damage" to the church's public image.
Read the whole thing (found via PZ Myers, who has plenty to say too). The leaders of the Church cared nothing for the children who had been victimized, nor for those whom they knew full well these creatures would go on to victimize in Alaska, so long as everybody kept quiet. They cared only for the Church's reputation. So it's most appropriate that that reputation is now being slowly and publicly shredded, lawsuit by lawsuit.
Too bad it comes too late for the kids who committed suicide.
"The leaders of the Church cared nothing for the children who had been victimized, nor for those whom they knew full well these creatures would go on to victimize in Alaska, so long as everybody kept quiet. They cared only for the Church's reputation. So it's most appropriate that that reputation is now being slowly and publicly shredded, lawsuit by lawsuit.
ReplyDeleteToo bad it comes too late for the kids who committed suicide."
This is the same Satanic organization that tried to embarrass Senator John Kerry and Represenative Patrick Kennedy by warning them not to receive Communion because they upheld the law of the land, which allows a legal medical procedure.
I hope all Catholics understand that what these representatives of Christ on earth committed are crimes against humanity, and I hope they revolt against this disgusting, hypocrital Organization that wraps itself in a fake shroud of divinity.
Monsters.
Despicable.
ReplyDeleteI was able to get only through about 1/3 of The Stranger piece -- too much.
The practice of shipping abusive priests to far-off parishes, either in the same country or abroad (the more remote, the better ground for unperturbed abuse), is widespread in the CC.
If we think that what we've heard so far is pretty awful (and it is), I'm afraid this is nowhere near the full extent of the problem. Child abusers are serial predators -- they almost never have only one victim, and there are more victims who never come forward with their stories than those who do. It's tragically safe to assume that we should multiply the number of victims by hundreds, if not more. And we are looking at long centuries of this unholy enterprise...
I'd feel sorry for God if I didn't think we made him up so that we could justify our nasty selfishness and greedy aggression.
ReplyDeleteHe may have been more for some people, but those are fading away and there's little left of him but an excuse for war, oppression, greed and buggery.
Shaw: This is the same Satanic organization that tried to embarrass Senator John Kerry and Represenative Patrick Kennedy
ReplyDeleteYes, because abortion (and homosexuality, and divorce, and birth control) are absolute moral evils, no exceptions, while child molestation is apparently full of all kinds of grey areas.
Elizabeth: I don't blame you for not being able to get through it all. It's sickening stuff. And yes, it must have been going on for centuries. Andrew Sullivan posted some circumstantial evidence that priests had a reputation for this sort of thing as far back as 16th-century Spain, for example.
Capt. Fogg: nasty selfishness and greedy aggression.....war, oppression, greed and buggery.
Those are six of the seven sacraments, right? With the seventh, of course, being hypocrisy.
Yes, because abortion (and homosexuality, and divorce, and birth control) are absolute moral evils, no exceptions, while child molestation is apparently full of all kinds of grey areas.
ReplyDeleteThis is not even "grey," Infidel. We are talking about, practically, a green light for child molesters permanently on in the CC. "Go forth and abuse, no one will notice. And if they do, we'll make sure they stay quiet and you safe."
Perversely, the CC stance on abortion makes sense -- in addition to keeping its income steady (with weddings, baptisms, funerals, and donations from the new church attendees), more kiddies mean a fresh supply of new victims.
Like Elizabeth, I could only get so far reading this and then had to stop.
ReplyDeleteThere is so much wrong with organized religion in general but the Catholic Church is by far the most heinous offender of human decency.
I hope the light of day will shine strongly and constantly upon them all until all the cockroaches are blinded and burned away.
But wait. Here's another take:
ReplyDelete"You've got to get your facts straight," ... "The vast majority of the victims are post-pubescent. That's not pedophilia, buddy. That's homosexuality"
William Donohue
Pedophilia & sexual abuse of minors? Whatever. If you want to get the Vatican's attention you need to do something really 'terrible'.
Such as work for social justice and peace.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Hunthausen
Cardinal Ratzinger hisself came to our fair city back in the day to deal with the Archbishop. Hunthausen remains a hero not least because he was willing to stand up to the brutes and reactionaries who seem to thrive in the Mother Church.
Thanks for the Hunthausen link, AS -- quite informative. Yep, social justice and equal rights, that's not what Catholic priests should occupy themselves with while there are still unmolested kids out there.
ReplyDeleteMatthew 18:6:
But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
Hm. Now that Jesus has mentioned it...
This all reminds me of William Blake's poetic lines about the "evil priesthood" with its regime of repression and ritual.
ReplyDeleteThe Church has sometimes stood up for the downtrodden when it was dangerous to do so, but its failure to deal with horrible child abuse taking place over decades threatens its standing altogether. No amount of what the High Anglican Archbishop William Laud called "the beauty of holiness" (i.e. the ancient traditions and ceremonies of the Church) can efface such hideous mistreatment of children.
What they need to do is quite simple:
a) get rid of the ridiculous celibacy rule and the ban on female priests.
b) defrock and insist upon prosecution of abusers.
c) next time around, choose a "Santo Papa" (or Santa Mama) who isn't already 80 years old and part of the "old guard" conservative hierarchy that has at least collectively allowed this scandal to continue.
The Church cannot claim to be a spiritual force while it harbors guilty priests and those who have deliberately hidden their crimes just to keep up the Church's reputation.
What has happened here is what is always threatening to happen to genuine spirituality (in this case the right term might be charitas or charity, which I take to be the Church's main concept--love put into action as a means of bringing people together to do good things): over time, the genuineness of the values gets hollowed out and is replaced with empty ceremony and reliance upon authority.
Thence comes corruption, and the reign of tyrannous abstraction, as Blake details in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: the upshot? We forget, one of his narrators says in Plate 11, that "All deities reside in the human breast."
"You've got to get your facts straight," ... "The vast majority of the victims are post-pubescent. That's not pedophilia, buddy. That's homosexuality"--William Donohue
ReplyDeleteThere will be the knee-jerk apologists like Donahue who will try to deflect the attention from this shockingly evil story and want to minimize its monstrosity by bringing up cynical excuses like the one he did.
But I don't think it will work this time.
The CC has lost its moral authority, for who would listen to anything it has to say after learning that it tolerated and covered up the rape of children, even handicapped, deaf children.
Debauchery doesn't get any worse than that.
No matteer how devout Catholics are to the teachings of Christ, they will remember that the vile, cowardly men who ran the Organization have forever defiled, in the most henious way, everything their founder stood for.
[I am very upset over all of this and have been since the stories about this broke in the early 2000s. I was molested when I was a little girl (5), not by a priest, but by a devout churchgoer. I'm okay now--after having been through years of therapy--but for a long time I did not deal with it in a healthy way, and will always feel sad that my childhood was stolen from me.
My sympathy is with the little ones and all those who have suffered this horror.
God almighty. I can only imagine the feeling - but I don't want to.
ReplyDelete"That's not pedophilia, buddy. That's homosexuality"
no, it's rape, actually and homosexuals have no patent on it. Nice try passing the blame Willie D, but you'll need a moron to buy it. Plenty of them around though - it's America.
"What they need to do is quite simple:"
ReplyDeleteActually, what needs to be done is shake the hell out of people until they see the absurdness in the whole religion concept.
Unfortunately, horrendous stories such as this will likely fall by the wayside as they have for hundreds of years so the lemmings can continue in their mindless acceptance of bullshit.
BB --
ReplyDeleteReminder to myself: best not to begin a post with "actually." It is a most impolite and dismissive word, in my view. Even though I'm not a believer, I won't give a millimeter on what I said to mollify your dismissal of "the whole religion concept." Reason is an excellent capacity and should guide us, but I'm not so certain as you seem to be that it is all-sufficient. Too often, we debase it to predatory cunning and use it as a weapon against our proper selves. I prefer William Blake to your "actually...."
And then* there is Matt Taibbi's take on the scandal -- I apologize for the long excerpt, but it's well worth quoting (IMO):
ReplyDeleteThese pompous assholes run around in their poofy robes and dresses shaking smoke-filled decanters with important expressions on their faces and pretending to great insight about grace and humility, but here we have the head of the largest Diocese in America teaching his entire congregation that when caught committing a terrible sin, the appropriate response is to blame the media and pull the “All the other kids were doing it, too!” stunt!
I was raised Catholic but stopped going to church at the age of 12. I was a complete idiot at that age with regard to almost every other area of human knowledge, but even I knew back then that the church was a scam. There are good and decent people working as individual priests, but the institution as a whole is a gang of cheap charlatans preying on peoples’ guilt feelings (which of course are cultivated intentionally by the church, which teaches children to be ashamed of their natural sexuality) in order to solicit a lifetime of contributions.
When I see a Catholic priest chanting his ridiculous incantations and waving his holy smoke over someone’s gravesite or at a wedding, the vibe I get is exactly the same as the one I get watching a plumber groan and moan and babble gibberish about all the different things wrong with your kitchen pipes, when in reality all he had to do was replace a washer. It’s the same as picking up your car after an oil change and listening to the mechanic rattle off a list of charges totaling thousands for the nineteen extra things he looked at under your hood, just out of concern for your safety… And when you protest, no, there was nothing wrong with my alternator, I’m not paying for that, he tries to bullshit you — oh, yes there was, trust me, if we hadn’ta fixed that, your car woulda died on the highway within a week.
That’s all the church is. They’re a giant for-profit company using predatory salesmanship to sell what they themselves know is a defective, outmoded, basically unnecessary product. They’ll use any means necessary to keep their market share and if they have to lie and cheat and deflect and point fingers to keep the racket going, they’ll do it, just like any other sleazeball company.
But I think it’s time we started considering that what the church is is even worse than that. It’s possible we should start wondering if the church is also a criminal organization that in this country, anyway, should be broken up using RICO statutes.
One of the few areas where I agreed with George Bush was in the notion that a country providing safe haven to terrorists should itself be treated as a terrorist organization. Morally this isn’t a difficult one to figure out; a country that keeps house for a bin Laden and doesn’t assist other countries in trying to catch him is a rogue state, one that should be booted out of the community of nations.
We don’t permit countries that harbor terrorists to participate in international society, but the Catholic Church — an organization that has been proven over and over again to systematically enable child molesters, right up now to the level of the Pope — is given a free pass. In fact the Church is not only not sanctioned in any serious way, it gets to retain its outrageous tax-exempt status, which makes its systematic child abuse, in this country at least, a government-subsidized activity.
*I'm afraid that BD will likely remind me it's not proper to start a sentence, much less a whole new comment, with and then (ouch).
Too often, we debase it to predatory cunning and use it as a weapon against our proper selves.
ReplyDeleteActually, it seems to be religion that is most often used to legitimize "predatory cunning", which looks like a reasonably-good two-word summary of the Catholic proesthood's attitude towards children.
Some people may find religion appealing for emotional reasons which are completely opaque to me, but that doesn't change the fact that religion is horseshit.
Infidel,
ReplyDeleteThere's that disrespectful and uncivil word "actually" again, now coming from one of our own contributors -- it shows that you cannot make a civil case for what you advocate. While I am no proponent of any religion and find the abuses within the Catholic Church disgusting like everyone with a sense of right and wrong, I tire of you on the more general subject. You don't show that you can entertain it with any sophistication -- your whole argument comes down to blurting out one cuss word and declaring your incapacity to appreciate any other views but your own intolerant one. That's insufficient, and I don't think one needs to be a believer of any sort (I am not) to see that it's insufficient.
We have a policy here that troll tactics aren't allowed, and it should apply to our own posts as well. Your original post was informative, but your recent comment sounds an awful lot like a drive-by of the sort we generally don't even allow to be posted.
Eigentlich, tatsächlich -- wer braucht English?
ReplyDeleteInfidel - that doesn't change the fact that religion is horseshit [sic]
ReplyDeleteif would have been infinitely more polite and accurate to say that any belief system (religious or political) that contradicts and violates its own moral precepts becomes a perversion of itself; but to dismiss religion categorically is to discount those folks who struggle with their spirituality ... and dishonor others who do good works according to their faith. Hells bells, even a good atheist is known to do volunteer work.
Although I am a non-believer who resents when door-knockers flaunt their religion in my face, a categorical imperative compels me to stay out of their face in kind, and I am way too liberal to take this kind of holier than thou attitude.
Pardon me, but in truth I am holier than thou. Did you think that was a pizza pan floating in the air behind my head?
ReplyDelete