Proxima Centauri

Its not only paedophilia you can get away with if you are a Roman Catholic Priest. <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/12/21/1040174433214.html" target="_blank">You can also get away with murder.</a> its wonderful, the sense of moral responsibility these Roman Catholic leaders have.
Contraception they say is wrong. Its preventing life.
Abortion they say is wrong, its taking life.
Taking part in killing an 8 year old kid doesn't matter too much. They just move you to a different parish. . Bill Eakin, whose daughter Kathryn, 8, was the youngest victim, said: "I call on those who were in authority to answer the questions raised by this investigation."
Father Jim Chesney didn't pay for his crimes at all.
The Roman Catholic Church is corrupt and rotten from the top down.



[ December 21, 2002: Message edited by: B.Shack ]</p>

Amos

1)I did not say you were a protestant theologian. 2)I ask if it was you who wrote about mosques being built in England.
3)I don't object to importing people from male dominant societies but just stated that we do as an alternative to reproducing ourselves.

Now I am glad to read that you are pleased to import members of male dominant societies so you can show their women and daughters your values.

Proxima Centauri

Amos! stop trying to side track. the rest of us want to discuss moral outrages by Bernie the pimp and other Roman Catholics.

Amos

Amos does not need even need milk cartons or essay techniques in lower grade schools to detect child abuse. He has a friend who reported his own son in law for fondling his niece. He got six month's and served 6 months. I know the whole story because he is my friend.

Amos

May you wallow in it forever.

Proxima Centauri

Here's yet another link showing a putrid paedophile priest and a cowardly cover-up by the Roman Catholic Authorities.
<a href="http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_719465.html?menu=" target="_blank">Read this web page</a> if you dare, Amos.

seebs

While I am in full agreement that this stuff is horrible, I wonder if perhaps the brush is a little wider than it needs to be in some cases.

Proxima Centauri

We want to expost the Roman Catholic Rubbish same as your friend exposed his son in law. You have to expose these things to get them stopped.
Stop imagining just because a Priest handles mumbo jumbo pretended sacraments you have to defend him.

Proxima Centauri

I accept fully that not every accusation against a Roman Catholic Clergyman is true. I suspect, for example, that the Archbishop of Sidney may well be inocent of the charge against him.
There have, despite this, been far too many cases where paedophile priests have been convicted in Criminal Courts. Convictions have happened in different countries and different continents.

seebs

Yes. However, a couple of things bother me.

First off, I think that substantial portions of this abuse involve children old enough that no self-respecting psychologist would call it "pedophilia"; a 17-year-old hasn't reached age of consent in the U.S., typically, but is certainly not a "child". Some of it also involves women; there's a spine-chilling case in which a priest abused a number of nuns by telling them he was going to give them a chance to experience "the body of Christ". EWW! And yet, not pedophilia.

Secondly, I have not yet seen convincing evidence that the problem is actually any worse than it has been for the duration of written history in nearly all the roles in which people come into contact with children.

So... I think we may be getting a media frenzy, more than an actual large-scale crisis. A guy who came into another forum and brought this up, who also used British spelling, was an Aussie, and to hear him talk, you'd think that there were assembly line factories for abused children! However, no one's offered concrete numbers, yet, so I can't help but wonder if this is as much a question of reporting as of any significant change in behaviors.

Would that justify this? No. It's unbelievable to me that people acted in ways which allowed pedophiles and other abusers to continue abusing. I only partially buy the excuse of "got bad advice"; it's possibly true, and is some mitigation, but... No one should have been moved *twice*, nor should people have been moved around after the first person demonstrated that, in fact, they keep abusing. That was the time to say "this was bad advice, and we are no longer following it."

The thing is, though, I'm really not at all convinced that this is a Catholic problem, or even a religion problem; I think it's probably just that, with all the stuff about how priests are celibate, and people thinking of them as mostly sexless, it's *better news* than schoolteachers, policemen, or parents. I am not entirely rejecting the possibility that it's worse among Catholics, but I have seen no statistics to suggest that it is, and policies of "move them
elsewhere and don't do anything" are hardly unique to the Catholics.

Also, of course, I'm concerned about the effects of this on decent, honest, people who aren't involved. One of my friends is Catholic, and she loves to go to her son's little league games. For a while after this first came out, most of the other parents were, get this, refusing to sit anywhere near her during games. Why? Because there's a chain of people twenty people long between her and some guy who abused someone. That's pretty bad, too. I hate it when, in our earnest efforts to do something about wrongdoing, we go and do something else wrong.