Let's talk about the Catholic Sex Scandal

-redditardation- · 2017-03-14T10:03:39+00:00

I think the issue is that the rest of society finds the notion that a priest must commit to being celibate cruel and is essentially just breeding abusers.

If a person doesn't get any sexual relief their entire life they might be a lot more inclined to do something awry to fulfill the desire that has been building.

The best way to make the general public more sympathetic would be to highlight the rate of abuse of priests vs. the general populous. On first glance it seems to be on par:

http://europe.newsweek.com/priests-commit-no-more-abuse-other-males-70625?rm=eu

EricAllonde · 2017-03-14T09:59:27+00:00

I'm sorry, I cannot support you on this issue.

Here in Australia, we're currently having our own inquiry into child abuse within the Catholic church. Local reports put the number of catholic priests who committed child abuse at higher than 7% of the total, and in some catholic orders the figure topped 20%. The revelations are utterly horrifying, worse than anyone had imagined.

The Catholic church in Australia has also used a unique legal structure, available only to the church, to shield its Australian assets from lawsuits brought by people abused as children. Instead it has offered them pitiful, token payouts of just a few thousand dollars. In my view this shows that the church views these victims with contempt and feels no remorse for what it did to them.

Australia's most senior catholic, cardinal George Pell, fled to the Vatican some years ago and has since refused to return and answer questions from the inquiry over what he knew about child abuse by priests and when he knew it. There are allegations he was directly involved in covering up these crimes and moving priests to new locations where they resumed abusing children in their new & unsuspecting community.

Aside from the question of child abuse, the Catholic church has done immense damage all around the world, particularly through denying access to birth control in developing nations that sorely need it, along with vilifying gays and opposing marriage equality.

Weighed against those extreme negatives, I see very little positive contribution that the catholic church makes to the world. On balance, I think its continued existence is strongly negative for the world, and we would be better off without it. Thankfully religious belief is declining rapidly in western countries and I look forward to seeing christian churches, including the catholic church, all but vanish from western societies in coming decades.

devious29 · 2017-03-14T12:40:15+00:00

Many also claim that the Church didn't seek to resolve the issue, they just moved priests around.

This wasn't just the case for child abuse, there was the incident where terrorists planted three bombs on the high street of a large village, killing four men, two women and three children. The quartermaster and director of operations of the terrorists in that county was a Catholic priest. He was moved to a different country by the Catholic church, with complicity of the civil authorities.

There is altogether too much of a history of the hierarchy brushing things under the carpet that would be potentially damaging, often including threatening to excommunicate potential whistleblowers, to allow for enough doubt for them to benefit from. The changes over recent years (that were often forced on them) are a small step in the right direction, but little more. It's not that long ago since a diocese in America tried to get out of paying compensation to the victims of it's priests by ringfencing $55m of funding to maintain their cemeteries (whereas the budget for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is $80m).

Title	Let's talk about the Catholic Sex Scandal
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	5
Comments	20
Date	March 14, 2017 8:53 AM UTC (9 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/5zb1og/lets_talk_about_the_catholic_sex_scandal/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/lets-talk-about-the-catholic-sex-scandal.929162 https://theredarchive.com/post/929162

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