This is the best part of the week. It's the longest possible time before more churhc.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100412/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_chile_church_abuse
I can't remember the last time i read something coming from the catholic church, and i thought to myself, that makes sense, that's a good point. It is always one travesty after another. Either it's them taking the time to be concerned about witchcraft because of the popularity of harry potter/twilight, or setting up a hot line to call about catholic priests abuses and the system crashes on the very first day because thousands of people call in and they only have the capacity to handle 100. So now we find out that the reason priests are abusing children is because of the evils of homosexuality. That may not be exactly what this guy said, but it was clearly the implication. Celibacy is good and is not related to paedophilia, homosexuality is bad and is related to paedophilia.
First off, nobody would ever suggest that celibacy causes paedophilia. If i had to be celibate for the rest of my life, that wouldn't cause me to start lusting after children, that's simply stupid. But if you are a paedophile, and you are trying to think of a good place to work the church is pretty inviting. Lots of time with children. Parents and children both hold you to be in a position of trust, nobody wonders why you aren't married or dating women. The entire set up works to your benefit. And on the other hand what man would want a life where you cannot have sex and cannot have children. (not to say every single man needs to want to have sex/children, but it is biologically built into human beings and the absence of that desire would imply some sort of You are driving away normal healthy men, and inviting perverts who cannot fulfill their sexual desires anyway so they might as well be priests. And while i don't really give this much credence it is my understanding that it was considered a worse sin to have sex with a woman as a priest than with a child. It was a greater breaker of the vow of celibacy. I think it's unlikely, but not necessarily impossible that some priest had it drilled into them so deeply that it was wrong/evil to be attracted to women that they start to convert their sexual energy to an attraction for women.
As far homosexuality being linked to paedophilia, that may well be true, i don't know. But it's not relevant to the discussion. People aren't upset that paedophilia exists in the world, people are upset that it exists in such great quantities in the catholic church, and that the catholic church allowed it to continue with virtually no attempts to stop it, and worst of all that they have always refuse, and continue to refuse to accept any real responsibility. When the sex scandal first started happening in the US, i remember the european cardinals didn't really want to get involved, or get the catholic church involved because that was just a problem in america, for europe and the rest of the world there was no such problem. And now it is all coming out in europe may well be much worse than the US certainly ireland was. And this discussion of homosexuality is just another responsibility dodge. No there's nothing wrong with us, or celibacy, or the way we conduct church business, it's homosexuality that causes these evils. Really? That's the best you got, you could have at least said it was the one armed man, at least then i might have gotten a chuckle out of it.
I can't remember the last time i read something coming from the catholic church, and i thought to myself, that makes sense, that's a good point. It is always one travesty after another. Either it's them taking the time to be concerned about witchcraft because of the popularity of harry potter/twilight, or setting up a hot line to call about catholic priests abuses and the system crashes on the very first day because thousands of people call in and they only have the capacity to handle 100. So now we find out that the reason priests are abusing children is because of the evils of homosexuality. That may not be exactly what this guy said, but it was clearly the implication. Celibacy is good and is not related to paedophilia, homosexuality is bad and is related to paedophilia.
First off, nobody would ever suggest that celibacy causes paedophilia. If i had to be celibate for the rest of my life, that wouldn't cause me to start lusting after children, that's simply stupid. But if you are a paedophile, and you are trying to think of a good place to work the church is pretty inviting. Lots of time with children. Parents and children both hold you to be in a position of trust, nobody wonders why you aren't married or dating women. The entire set up works to your benefit. And on the other hand what man would want a life where you cannot have sex and cannot have children. (not to say every single man needs to want to have sex/children, but it is biologically built into human beings and the absence of that desire would imply some sort of You are driving away normal healthy men, and inviting perverts who cannot fulfill their sexual desires anyway so they might as well be priests. And while i don't really give this much credence it is my understanding that it was considered a worse sin to have sex with a woman as a priest than with a child. It was a greater breaker of the vow of celibacy. I think it's unlikely, but not necessarily impossible that some priest had it drilled into them so deeply that it was wrong/evil to be attracted to women that they start to convert their sexual energy to an attraction for women.
As far homosexuality being linked to paedophilia, that may well be true, i don't know. But it's not relevant to the discussion. People aren't upset that paedophilia exists in the world, people are upset that it exists in such great quantities in the catholic church, and that the catholic church allowed it to continue with virtually no attempts to stop it, and worst of all that they have always refuse, and continue to refuse to accept any real responsibility. When the sex scandal first started happening in the US, i remember the european cardinals didn't really want to get involved, or get the catholic church involved because that was just a problem in america, for europe and the rest of the world there was no such problem. And now it is all coming out in europe may well be much worse than the US certainly ireland was. And this discussion of homosexuality is just another responsibility dodge. No there's nothing wrong with us, or celibacy, or the way we conduct church business, it's homosexuality that causes these evils. Really? That's the best you got, you could have at least said it was the one armed man, at least then i might have gotten a chuckle out of it.
posted by Trashcan at 4/13/2010 11:59:00 PM
3 Comments:
"One of the girls, identified as Paula, said that she and the priest started to have sex when she was 16 and that it lasted until she was 20."
How is that pedophilia? I don't know where psychologists draw the line for childhood, but 16 is totally over the line.
On the essence of the article, I've never really understood why the church should take responsibility for anything.
First, government workers face a huge number of sexual harassment cases: should the White House take responsibility?
Second, separation of church and state. Anything that goes down in a church is out of the government's/law enforcement's jurisdiction. That means it's also out of their jurisdiction if somebody comes by and executes a pederast priest, so the system still has a way of working itself out.
You talk about blaming responsibility being a "responsibility dodge." I don't see how that's any more of a dodge than blaming the church. Blame the individuals and execute them, or at least castrate them.
If anything's to be done with the church itself, maybe it's to require a happy marriage to enter priesthood instead of celibacy. The bible doesn't indicate anything about celibacy anyway.
1st the point on what is pedophilia, yes i agree it has been mislabeled by popular culture (and for simplicity) by me. Pedophilia is defined by want to have sex with pre-pubescent children. There is another term, which i no longer rememember for want to have sex with children going through puberty, and certainly by the age of 16 you have reached sexual maturity, and it no longer qualifies as pedophilia, or that other one, but it may well still be illegal. If the state defines it as statutory rape, then it's a crime regardless.
In terms of responsibility, if it was determined that a corporation fostered sexual harrassment by creating an atmosphere where is permitted, or by say taking executives they knew were committing sexual harrasement and moving them to different departments repeatedly so they could continue their actions, you better believe that company would lose a sexual harrasment lawsuit, and the whole company would be found liable, not just the individuals. The problem is that people higher up the ladder knew these things were going on but because they heard about it in confessions, or because they wanted to avoid publicity they ignored it/moved priests around to let it continue. It may not be entirely clear how much the current or former pope knew about these things, obviously they weren't involved in the day to day decision making, but it seems to me that coming up through the priest rankings that it is unlikely they never had any inkling that this kind of thing was going on. If they didn't have any idea, then yes i think they did have a responcibility to make sure some sort of measures were taken to prevent it, at the minimum throwing those priests out if they didn't involve the courts (although i think they should have, and legally speaking there were obligated to inform the police.)
If the church was willing to blame the priests and execute or castrate them then that would be okay with me, but the church fails to do that because it believes in forgiving their sins instead. My point with their defense of celibacy and the attacking of gays was that they want to keep moving forward as if nothing has happened here. There is nothing wrong with the system they created. Maybe that's true, but i for one do not believe it, i believe the celibacy requirement was lead to an influx of people who could not find wives either because they have some sexual perversion that causes not want wives, or because they have some personality defect that prevents them from being able to attract one, to become priests. Frankly i wouldn't really want either. I believe doing away with the celibacy requirement would be a huge step forward in preventing pedophilia among priests, as well as increase the number of priests which are very low right now. It's an everyone wins situation and as you pointed out there is nothing in the bible about celibacy, but they refuse to even acknowledge the possibility.
(also if you really could go mure pederast priests then i believe the system would work itself out, but that's not allowed.)
According to my anti-statist position, the separation of church and state means that U.S. and state laws do not apply within churches, Loky. Consider them to have diplomatic immunity. If this were the case, your statement that "(also if you really could go mure pederast priests then i believe the system would work itself out, but that's not allowed.)" would be false. That is to say, yes, it would not be allowed by the church, but the church have no police of their own, so there would be no one to arrest you or charge with a crime, besides God of course. But I know God condones pederast killings.
Because there is no separation of corporations and state, you're right about that example, but it's not a good comparison to crimes within a church because of the constitution.
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