Asleep at the keyboard: the Philadelphia Daily News' Bill Bender
Is the Catholic Church now responsible for hunting down and shadowing every past employee accused of abuse, and then constantly publicizing their whereabouts, no matter how long ago the alleged abuse occurred? A recent front page article for the Philadelphia Daily News by William Bender certainly appears to suggest so.
There can be no doubt that the alleged crimes committed by former Philadelphia priest James Brzyski years ago were abominable. But in an especially bad piece of journalism filled with hype and sensationalism (see the image of the front page of the Daily News that day), Bender quite incredibly faults the Archdiocese of Philadelphia for not issuing perpetual public updates on the exact whereabouts of Brzyski, even though he last functioned as a priest some 30 years ago.
Consider the following facts which Bender either ignored or only summarily mentioned:
- Records show that when the Archdiocese of Philadelphia first learned of allegations of abuse concerning Brzyski in 1984, it immediately removed him from his assignment;
- Bryzyski never again functioned publicly as a priest once the Archdiocese removed him; and
- the Archdiocese has publicly posted Brzyski's assignment record on its web site for several years for anyone with an internet connection to review.
A special standard for the Catholic Church
Yet these facts appear to mean little to the Daily News' Bender. Despite the fact that Byzyski was last employed by the Catholic Church nearly three decades ago, Bender darkly warns:
"Brzyski is able to move from one community to another in relative anonymity – at least until his behavior gives him away – because the Archdiocese won't disclose his whereabouts."
"Won't disclose his whereabouts"? Really? Exactly what other organization tracks down and then publicizes the current addresses and phone numbers of former employees merely accused of abuse over a quarter of a century ago? Philadelphia Public Schools? The Boy Scouts? Some Hollywood studio? The Philly Daily News? Bender doesn't say.
Always available for a crazy quote:
David Clohessy from SNAP
Instead, in his article Bender turns to the predictable National Director of the anti-Catholic group SNAP, David Clohessy, who naturally agrees with Bender's implication that the Catholic Church should risk criminal and civil liability and track the exact whereabouts of its former employees and then hold regular press conferences to announce the results of its monitoring of former employees.
Ironically, the hysterical Clohessy never reported to police back in the 1990s that his own brother Kevin, a Catholic priest, was sexually molesting innocent young boys.
And to this day, neither Clohessy nor SNAP has ever once publicly reported the current whereabouts of Kevin. Yet that never stopped David from boldly claiming to Bender that Catholic bishops somehow have the "the moral and civic duty" to monitor and publicize the current whereabouts of its former abusive priests.
The hypocrisy is staggering, yet Bender appears so blinded by the dominant media narrative about sex abuse and the Catholic Church that he is unable to make sense of the simple facts in front of him.
Clohessy's brother was a molester?
Yes Lori he was. David's twin brother was a victim; a priest; and a molester. And "no one' knows where he is. (Sure!) Reason enough in my and other victims eyes for David to remove himself from the so called leadership of the so called "movement".
Why won't you publish the statement the U.N. made today on your church and it's treatment of it's own children? Why?
http://www.themediareport.com/2014/01/22/snap-un-vatican-catholic-church/
Jim–
Do you take seriously what the left wing nuts at the UN say?
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/02/05/un-slams-vatican-over-protecting-children-say-what/?intcmp=latestnews
You mean this piece about the hypocrisy of the UN re: minor abuse by priests?
Maybe, you mean this one?
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/un-attacks-catholic-teaching-under-pretext-of-protecting-children
Ok, I think I found that article you were looking for- it's this one:
http://blackbiretta.blogspot.com/
When will you compensate your raped?
They are not -my- "raped" and it is not -my- job to "compenate" them. When will you stop using your disgusting propaganda rhetoric and focus your energy on where pedophiles are today?
The Church has been compensating victims in the $ billions! Of course your goal is to simply see the Church disappear, Im sure, so the compensation would only be enough when that happens. Well, sorry, the Church will be around as long as there is mankind despite the horrible sins of a very small number of its members. In the meantime you comment is foolish since OUR Church has been compensating. So what is your point besides bigotry??
When will you compensate your own raped catholic children? Maybe the reason you refuse to pay all your victims is that there are so many of us, your raped, that we would bankrupt you. If that's true who is caught lying again? Your raped or you?
Poor, poor catholic corporate church. No money to pay it's raped victims but diamond chalices golden palaces and brocaded vestments galore. Deadbeats. you are all deadbeats. Read what the U.N. has to say about your behavior.
there is a great demand for the Catholic accoutrements. would you like to buy some nice brocade vestments and chalices jim? we have some parishes here in the diocese i belong to that have had some for sale for over 15 years. you could get quite a deal and then YOU could sell them to pay some of the victims of child abuse in the u.s. public school system, which at the height of the abuse scandal in the church, has numbers of pedophile crimes 100 times greater on a yearly basis than the combined alleged abuse in the Catholic Church over 30 years. you have been greatly fooled about the total perspective of pedophilia activity. the non-catholic u.s. christian churches have always had a 15 – 20% greater occurence of this hideous crime than the Catholic Church (again at the apex of the alleged number of crimes over 30 years) according to their own 3 major insurers. i can furnish the insurance company website and the AP release on the u.s. public school system numbers if you would like. you just let me know. the Catholic Church is the least offensive of the two entities i have mentioned. nothing to be proud of. it's like saying that i beat my aged grandmother less times per week than the other two guys that live on my block.
Bender seems to be on a 'bender' about this nonsense call for the Church to 'track and sack' former employees-
http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2008/03_04/2008_04_03_Bender_DisgracedDefrocked.htm
I wonder what this 'jounalists' particular, personal 'grievance' against the Church is that he keeps ginning up this silliness?
On the other hand, let them keep revealing themselves for the dishonest and sinister lot they are – this one ranks right up there with the UN calls for transparency and reparation by the Vatican for claimed victims of priest crimes.
Nope, no politicking in any of this, anywhere-
~~Church officials, however, know where most of the defrocked priests are living – they just won't say.
Public records show that Brzyski's last known address is an apartment in West Hollywood, Calif., and that he also has lived in Chesapeake, Va., and Virginia Beach since leaving active ministry.
The Archdiocese will not provide Brzyski's current address, as is its policy toward all 25 defrocked priests – the priests not living at Villa St. Joseph.
The Archdiocese says it informs authorities – usually the county district attorney or prosecutor – when a defrocked priest with substantiated allegations moves into their jurisdiction. The bishop of the priest's home diocese also is informed of his whereabouts to ensure that he doesn't attempt to rejoin the ministry there, said Monsignor Timothy Senior, the Archdiocese's vicar for clergy.
But the notification process does not extend to the public, or even to the priest's immediate neighbors. Nor will the Archdiocese provide an ex-priest's address upon request.
"Kids are not safe," said the Rev. Robert Hoatson, a Catholic priest and founder of Road to Recovery, a New Jersey-based organization that assists victims of clergy sex abuse. "The church should tell people where these guys are living. Are they in Florida? Are they in Timbuktu? Where are they living? Neighbors around them should know where they are."
Thank You Delphin,
We can only see by Delphin's latest post (I hope everybody reads) and the article by William Bender the catholic church will do what they want to do even if they say they are going to do something else.
We must take note to the date of the other article by Mr. Bender posted on the Bishop Accountability Report being 2008. It is now 2014 and the same concerns 6 years ago are being seen today as what the catholic church does with their THROW AWAY priests.
As with any hazardous material a large company like the catholic church wants it gone and does not concern themselves for the safety of the public. In this case the public happens to be defenseless children.
I will now quote what TMR has written asking the question "Is the Catholic Church now responsible for hunting down and shadowing every past employee accused of sexual abuse ?
If we are to believe the policy the archdiocese of Philadelphia had back in 2008, YOU CAN BET YOUR BOTTOM DOLLAR you should have been able to believe it.There policy then was to notify "authorities, DA's office and local prosecutors along with the new archdiocese of where they will be living.Has it changed ?
Although the public is not not notified to protect the abuser, in this most recent concern regarding Brzyski the residents of a Texas apartment complex would have somebody to turn to so they can voice their concerns instead of asking what do we do now ?
Yes, your church is responsible. The catholic church is who protected this diagnosed pedophile when over 100 accusations of sexual abuse surfaced. Your church is the one who fights any changes to the SOL laws that may have placed this animal behind bars.
Now, this animal is loose and your church and you are now throwing up your arms and saying he's not our problem. Will you and the catholic church be able to sleep at night if he is caught abusing another child. HE COULD BE ABUSING A CHILD RIGHT NOW.
You then ask the question what organization keeps track of ex-employees ? None , because they don't have to because other organizations turn over criminals to the police. Your question should have been what organization in this world protects and harbors criminals of one of the most heinous crimes known to man ?
In conclusion you then add the filler about SNAP's David Clohessy.
You are preaching to the choir sir, If he is guilty of committing a crime toss his butt in prison. I have no sympathy for abusers or those who protect abusers.
Dennis I have asked you this question before, and you did not answer. I will ask you again: Are you willing to have changes in SOL statutes be "across the board" with NO exceptions? That includes public schools, legions of protestant clergy, Jewish rabbis, Boy Scout leaders, babysitters, weird "Uncle Ernies", etc., etc, etc., ETCETERA AD NAUSEUM………
View the pedophile problem as a sandy beach. Remove ALL Catholic clergy over ALL of the ages that are unquestionably "pedophiles". You just removed a few grains of sand. You still have a sandy beach.
Me neither nor anti-Catholic bigots
On the 5th at 439PM “Dennis” goes on about (some parts of) the Brzyski saga, a topic he himself had raised with a link to a Dallas media report.
In prior comments that “Dennis” had not bothered to read (perhaps), I had pointed out that in the matter of Brzyski (hereinafter: ‘B’), from the time of his ordination until his laicization only 8 years had elapsed; I did not have the information we have now to the effect that the first allegations surfaced in 1984 and thus only 4 years elapsed between allegations and laicization (which was pretty good time considering that era 30 years ago). And we are further informed now that B was removed from performing ministry immediately after the first allegation and was never re-authorized to conduct public ministry.
I had further pointed out – in a that recent prior comment on a prior thread – that in 2013 or early 2014 in that Dallas housing-complex – no adults, even in this day and age and with the material they had accessed online, are reported to have contacted their local police, despite their personal observations of his highly suspicious discussion-about and activity-around young males (who in some cases were the younger relatives of some of the adults at the complex).
So a) there is not much here that justifies the usual-talking-points claim that the Church had either hidden or transferred or otherwise somehow covered-up B.
And b) we are faced with the fact that in our own era, and apparently only a few months ago, well-informed adults and relatives of young males did not contact law enforcement (or if they did, the news report doesn’t choose to mention it). Surely “shame” – that standard talking-points explanation proffered by Abuseniks to explain-away the serious if un-congenial fact that nobody made a report to the police back in the day – was not operative in the Dallas housing-complex instance.
And c) we are left with the fact that B apparently did not actually commit any crimes in the housing-complex in Dallas (although there is more than enough information to presume that B is somebody who needs some serious work in the therapy line). I am also not familiar with material that would support the “diagnosed pedophile” characterization (bearing in mind here the formal required parameters for that formal clinical diagnosis of pedophilia).
I also note (repeating what I said in my prior post on the B issue) that the Church has no legal authority to monitor persons no longer associated with it (especially after a period of a quarter of a century or so).
And I continue that particular thought while noting that “Dennis” then swings into his Statute of Limitations bit. It is apparently of relevance here because nobody had reported anything to the police 30 years ago. Or were reports made by somebody and the police realized there wasn’t enough to prosecute, and that it is only much later that the allegations morphed into more outrageous proportions? Those Philly Grand Jury Reports are of interest here, but mostly because they are not the fruits of full and careful and documented investigation and for all practical purposes they simply rehearse allegations that the DA’s staff chose to repeat in the type of formal document where demonstrable evidence is not a primary requirement.
The time has come to ask the question: is it really possible to accept as a sort of ‘universal solvent’ explanation for so many adults not making reports to police in prior eras that the whole and sole reason for that neglect was “shame”, and then to claim that the Church in the present era is the only suitable target for current brouhaha?
As I have said many times before, there are other hardly-less-plausible alternative possible explanations, among which are: i) adults informed back then did not see the stories as containing enough to warrant a call to the police; ii) the police were called but did not see enough credibility or evidentiary support; iii) stories were carefully burnished - deceptively and intentionally – years or decades later when they were prepared for inclusion in lawsuits in an era when evidentiary principles were weakened and the passage of time had clouded whatever evidence there might have been; iv) stories and claims were simply created in this later era on the basis of the facts that a) the passage of time had worked to ‘explain’ the lack of evidence, b) there was much money to be made and with little risk, and c) public opinion had been swayed toward presumptively accepting the validity of the (un-supported) claims.
I think it has to be said that the core of this Catholic Abuse Problem – similar to the general Abuse Problem – is and has been at its core a cultural and societal issue in this sense: a) sex abuse was not considered a priority then as it has since become; b) many if not all significant elements of the culture of that past era were thus enmeshed in that different approach to sexual abuse (however defined, especially on the lower end of its spectrum); and c) that included police and courts, media, politicians, medicine and science, and adults generally.
Thus the Stampede and Anderson Strategies gambit to sidestep this rather significant problem – by hypothesizing a single monstrous entity (the Church) that somehow substantially controlled everybody’s minds and actions in the service of its own interests like a giant spider at the center of a web – is a hypothesis that remains seriously undemonstrated, grossly insufficient to cover all of the relevant variables and elements involved, and suspiciously self-serving (for various interests).
Some readers may recall the presidential elections of 1928 (with Catholic candidate Al Smith) and 1960 (with JFK): if the Church had had such amazing powers to manipulate American society, would not Smith have been elected in 1928 and JFK been elected in 1960 by a far wider margin than that razor-thin 100,000 or so votes?
None of which is intended to indicate or imply that the Church has not had her share of aberrant priests. But beneath and beyond the stories there are profound and powerful and deep factors that work against the Stampede vision – Cartoon, even – of the Church as Shelob, the giant monstrous spider-queen of Tolkien’s imagination, and the entire country as simply a network of caves and tunnels over which she exercised her utter and evil control.
Quite a while back on this site I used the example of MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) as a cogent example of a group seeking to change a substantial cultural priority. It achieved some real success, but it did not then seek to go back into those prior eras and claim that i) the entire national cultural inattention to drunk-driving had been merely due to the machinations of some specific element and consequently that ii) the changed-priorities and sensitivities of the 1980s (MADD’s primary period of effort) had to be applied retroactively to prior decades stretching back to (fill in the blank).
I also note that JR (the 5th, 346PM) has bleated accusingly in a typically content-less one-liner about nothing being said in regard to yesterday’s release of that UN Report about the Church. I had mentioned some thoughts about this UN matter in a recent prior comment and I will be putting up some thoughts specifically about yesterday’s UN Report in a few hours.
KenW,
I'm sorry I did not answer a question you may have been presented to me.
Why would I not want changes in SOL's across the board ? Oh I know you must think like others here who feel that I don't care about the protection of all children.
In case you ask later, I am also in favor for SEVERE punishment to those who have been entrusted with the safety of children and FAILED.
And you opinion counts for what?
Ommou, Yes I do think what they've said is true. This is exactly how your corporate church and you it's overly subsurvient right wing have behaved. You've been called on your true behavior. You've been called on it by the representatives of the majority of the humans on this planet. Now will you be at long last "open and transparent" in your dealings and show your history with us?
And when will those documents on all our "fake" victims cases be turned over to the U.N.? Let the people of the world, YOU MAY HAVE HEARD OF IT, THE WORLD? Decide who's lying and who isn't.
Sorry about the double post. I'm a "left winger' and very proud to be so. I believe that the 99% of the humans on this planet are far more important than the 1% that "own" this planet.
What I don't get is why the right wing have nots like yourselves.( No one here is in the 1% I'll bet.) Why do you subserviate your selves and your children and your planet to shilling even to the point of killing for people you'll never be? A class you will never have access to. I don't get it.
The proud 'leftwinger/99%er" class war monger should be willing to part with a bit of his own pot-o-gold; that huge pot he brags about getting from the Catholic Church settlement from his abuse claim, you know, the one which he stays awake at night worrying about how to hang on-to because, apparently, having money is more problematic than not having it (see his related comment on previous TMR article).
Isn't it always the same with these communists/socialists- they want to redistribute eveyone elses' money, while they are miserly with their own. Imagine if he had actaually worked for it, like the majority of the 1% did and still do! Well, except for Soros, he stole most of his wealth.
So, tell us, to what abuse victims group have you contributed your own booty, or did you actually start up your own 501(c)3, to help the poor things for which you lament constantly, on your own? Have you given any to your little side-kick/partner here, yet, you know, to give him some of that good old fashioned social justice?
"My little side kick here" was raped by your church and you, not by me.
And now after raping me you want me to give my compensation for my rape to a victim who you refuse to compensate for his rape?
This is the morality and intelligence you have to offer in this debate: a way for you to not pay, again?
Seems like the 99%/OWSers in Sochi, those wascally leftists, are falling a wee bit short of meeting the worlds expectations for providing even the most basic human shelter and provisions for the Winter Olympics participation or coverage (…Socialism/Communism a failure on the world stage? …Oh My!)
Ms. St. Eclair is also tweeting from there, wonder if she'll find a Catholic priest over there she can blame for all these social problems?
Wonder if she'll find anything to eat? Perhaps, feral dog, ala Obama?
Oh, the human misery of it all-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/02/04/journalists-at-sochi-are-live-tweeting-their-hilarious-and-gross-hotel-experiences/
As I had noted in my immediately previous comment, there is the matter of the UN panel’s Report that hit the news yesterday.
These are my thoughts.
From the very outset, there is the absence of an official text of the Report, or any version of a text at all. While we have already seen many media reports about what the text of the UN panel says (and the media reports vary with the interests of the reporting agency) – and those media reports milk it for all it’s worth – yet we don’t actually have the text of the panel’s Report.
Thus, apparently, the panel either issued selected bits to the media – but not the full text of the Report itself – or else the media received the full text and then simply went on their own shopping expeditions to pick and choose what they want readers to ‘take away’ from this (text-less) event. None of the media reports I read (including the AP, the NYT, the WSJ, the BBC, NPR, and Reuters) provided a hyperlink to the text, even though they had lots of screamy-y stuff to say about the contents of the Report.
Of course part of this may be attributable to the fact that what we are now seeing – as we saw two years ago with the Dutch Abuse Report – is simply a huge internet-media echo chamber, with various outlets parroting what they have read or heard from other outlets and perhaps tossing in a few bits of their own specific interests.
But the public, apparently, is not to be trusted with the text itself. (Not, I imagine, that it would make much difference to your average Abusenik; nor is this a development un-congenial to the Anderson Strategies.)
So right off the bat we are into suspicious territory because the UN panel for whatever reason(s) did not want the text to get out until the media (allies in the cause?) had prepped public opinion with the Correct spin. Had the panel released a publicly- accessible edition of the text simultaneously with the release to the media, or had the media put up hyperlinks to such an edition to the text (if one exists), then this wouldn’t seem so much of a put-up job as it already seems to be.
Thus, when we today want to get a grasp of the text, all we have to work-with are the snippets that the various media reports have chosen to feed us. (Curiously similar to the usual “Dennis” approach, come to think of it.)
So then, what have we got from the media ‘reports’?
The AP notes that the panel a) wants the Church to open all its files. And that b) the panel berates the Church for her positions on homosexuality, abortion and contraception.
But (a) sounds suspiciously like the old and usual Abusenik demand for open-files (as if with just the next document cache over the hill, everything they have been claiming will be undeniably proven to have been right and true all along). Which leads one to start wondering if the panel isn’t simply using its status and authority to plump for the Stampede and the Anderson Strategies menu.
And (b) doesn’t seem to be within the purview of the panel’s remit at all. Which leads one to start wondering if the panel isn’t simply using its status and authority to plump not only for the Stampede and the Anderson Strategies menu but also for the secularists and ‘liberal’ elites in the West’s culture-wars.
The NYT report indicates that the panel has neatly used that trope from the recent PA Superior Court reversal of the Lynn case: that the Church put its own organization interests ahead of the welfare of children.
And that the panel claims that the Holy See has not taken the necessary measures to protect children, has adopted policies and practices which have led to the continuation of abuse and the impunity of the abusers. This reads like something that could easily have been written in 1985 (even perhaps in the Doyle paper of that year) but cannot seriously be taken as a relevant observation in 2014. Which leads one to think that the panel is indeed simply using its status and authority to plump for the Stampede and the Anderson Strategies menu.
And that the panel demands that the Holy See cooperate with national law-enforcement authorities. Which – yet again – leads one to think that the panel is indeed simply using its status and authority to plump for the Stampede and the Anderson Strategies menu.
And that the panel accuses the Holy See of not reporting to law-enforcement. Ditto.
And that the panel claims that in requiring (as once was done, quite a while ago) that cases involving abusive priests be placed under restrictions reserving the matter to the Holy See and imposing confidentiality until the matter could be fully adjudicated in Rome, the Holy See was (sort of like in the Italian mob) was imposing a ‘code of silence’ (the Italian mob term is omerta). That any case was to be placed under silence until it could be canonically adjudicated in order to protect the integrity of the investigation and trial process – I note – does absolutely nothing to affect the civil ability of non-clerical personnel or laity or any other adult from reporting to the police in their jurisdictions.
And that the panel has decided now that the Holy See should always have been reporting regularly about all this, as a Signatory to the UN Charter on children. This point involves the questions I raised about the Vatican’s curious status in that Charter’s text in a previous comment. It seems very very odd that after almost a quarter of a century (since the Holy See became a signatory in 1990, at the outset of the Charter), the panel should only now suddenly decide that the Holy See should always have been submitting reports all along; no previous difficulties along this line are reported to have existed in any of the media material I have seen today.
But this sudden decision by the panel certainly might give the impression that the Holy See has been delinquent in its reporting obligations for almost 25 years (and, but of course, to a certain mentality this would spark the certainty that the Church had failed to make timely and required reports because it had so much to hide). Which leads one to think that the panel is indeed simply using its status and authority to plump for the Stampede and the Anderson Strategies menu.
The WSJ notes that the panel asserts and infers that Church policies and practices (such as they once were) lead “to tens of thousands of children world-wide being abused”. The panel apparently offers no evidence or justification to support the validity and accuracy of this assertion – which assertion, by amazing coincidence, conforms to the usual Abusenik talking-points. Which leads one to think that the panel is indeed simply using its status and authority to plump for the Stampede and the Anderson Strategies menu.
And the WSJ reports without analysis or examination that the Vatican hadn’t made its reports.
Reuters repeats the panel’s insistence that the Church “hand over” all of its files on sex-abuse. Which leads one to think that the panel is indeed simply using its status and authority to plump for the Stampede and the Anderson Strategies menu.
And – perhaps given its European slant – Reuters reports that the panel wants the Magdalene Laundries matter looked-into (which indicates just how out of date some of the panel’s 3×5 cards really are).
SNAP is allowed a word, and characterizes the Report as “a wake-up call” to the Church, which may have been said in 1985 or even any time before 2002 or so, but surely this bit does not reflect a mind working in the world of 2014 (or, at least, this bit reflects an effort to get people’s minds working in a world that existed in 1985 rather than in 2014).
The BBC goes with the panel’s insistence that the Vatican must remove abusers immediately, again indicating the panel’s working along the lines of a prior era and not the world of today.
But then the BBC mentions an interesting bit indeed. Apparently, in December, the Vatican had “refused the panel’s request for data on abuse on the grounds that it only released such information if requested to do so by another country as part of legal proceedings”. So it would seem, then, that the panel was trying to insinuate itself directly (for whatever reasons) into the Catholic Sex Abuse Matter and the Stampede by asking for materials that were not actually within its purview under the Charter; the Vatican said it couldn’t do that; and then in January the Vatican was – perhaps for the first time in 24 years – called before the panel in January, with this Report as the result. Which leads one to think that the panel is indeed simply using its status and authority to plump for the Stampede and the Anderson Strategies menu.
But I also came across a piece by John Allen, Jr., the National Catholic Reporter writer, on his personal blog (you can access it as ‘johnlallenjr’ at wordpress-dot-com).
He was apparently present for the January panel sessions. He walked away from the sessions thinking that “the back and forth suggested that the child protection experts who make up the UN panel felt that the Vatican, however belatedly, is moving in the right direction”.
But he also notes that “the written report doesn’t contain much reference to [the Vatican representatives’] testimony, and its tone is unsparingly critical – suggesting either that at least portions of it were actually drafted before the hearing took place, or that, upon reflection, the experts were less persuaded the Vatican has turned a corner than they seemed two weeks ago”.
Now this observation is substantive and thought-provoking. Of itself it opens up the clear possibility that the panel was not simply conducting a business-as-usual inquiry but rather was working on some pre-arranged and pre-determined agenda. Taken in conjunction with what other points can be gleaned from various media reports, and taken in conjunction with the glaring failure to provide an official text simultaneously with a clearly well-orchestrated wide-ranging media release, this possibility gains serious credibility and probability.
And Allen notes that the panel “suggests that the Vatican modify, or even abandon, Catholic teaching on issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and contraception” and also “that Catholic venues should provide family planning services including birth control”.
He also makes reference to “Item 55” of the Report, indicating that this Report is not a brief one and thus highlights even more vividly (and perhaps luridly) the panel’s failure to provide an official text to the public at the outset.
So I would say that there is and is-not much that meets the eye in this UN panel’s Report. And it surely seems possible – perhaps also probable – that this whole business has been drummed-up. Would the UN – or even one of its lesser sub-entities – actually take a position on the Stampede in the US? I don’t think so, at least not if that were the only set of ‘interests’ plumping for it.
But I do think that the gist of the panel’s material (such as we know it at this point) indicates a larger secularist agenda that reflects secularism as it is trying to effects its objectives both in Europe and in the U.S.
But there is no doubt that, in any case, it will provide some further fodder for the purpose of Keeping The Ball Rolling over here. Even if the Ball has to be Kept Rolling backwards now, to a world of decades ago.
Confusion big time. The Catholic Church IS NOT a member of, or signatory to any UN "whatever"; the Vatican is. So, why does this committee focus on the Catholic Church intead of focusing on the Vatican? They have revealed their dirty hands too soon … and the is good.
JR: "You've been called on it by the representatives of the majority of the humans on this planet. Now will you be at long last "open and transparent" in your dealings and show your history with us?"
The same "representatives" who would rather go against the Convention they were supposed to be promoting. The UN Convention of the Rights of the Children states in no uncertain terms that the well being of a child must be protected BEFORE and AFTER birth, but the so-called experts prescribe abortion instead.
Of course such people do not represent humanity; they are an ambarrassment to humanity.
PKH every sperm a child? I hope you never self pleasured. (assuming you're a male) Oops there goes humanity; lost on a kleenex. This is the right wing's game, ignore and abuse the already born. And praise a zygot to the heavens.
Jim,
Your response to PKH on 2/6/14 at 1:37 can be a very serious choice to make for a catholic male.
Since numerous upon numerous medical findings have found that masterbation can prevent prostate cancer it can be a big choice since the catholic church believes it to be a sin.
Do you self-gratify or do you go to a hospital once or twice a week to receive your chemo and radiation treatment and then say to yourself "well at least I was being a good catholic" ?
Gee, the rest of us must have missed that part of PKHs comment that claimed 'every sperm a child'; on top of which, predictably, the side-kick weighs in with his insightful interpretation of medical or clinical studies regarding the benefits of 'masterbation' [sic] – which must be his very own non-Catholic version of masturbation, something at which, I will concede, he probably is to be considered expert.
The Google and Bing Master (bater?) did not do due diligence lest he might have learned the actual truth about his dubious claim (hmmm, doesn't that sound familiar?) regarding the bennies and risks of, well, what the rest of us call a sad, selfish and lonely existence.
But, even better than that; where-oh-where are we ever to find any evidence of antiCatholic bigotry in this latest twin diatribe that does nothing to serve the minor abuse matter dialogue, but, oh-so-'eloquently' serves their endless know-nothing bigotry – which is, as so well-documented, the sole intention of these two frauds.
What a deficit to the faith to have 'lost' these two.
Hey boys - both hands on the keyboard, please.
I believe you to be a 55 year old nun D. That's how you come across (again pardon the pun).
If you are a man and normal men self pleasure; then do you confess these mortal sins?
If you don't self pleasue and are unmarried, that might explain where all your rage comes from. To quote Lou Reed, "Take a Walk on the Wild Side"
Dorthy Parker called her pet parakeet, Onan, because he spilled his seed upon the ground.
Again with your version of 'normal'? We've already determined that when it comes to expertise in normal human sexuality, it's not going to be your face or contact info we're provided.
If you have a recipe for blueberry pie or some other stated expertise you'd like to share (ex. How To Procure a Financial Settlement from the Catholic Church Without Really Trying), you're on.
Not so much a fan of Reed; Parker was funny in a tragic way – both ended up being typical leftist lost souls, in the end, sadly.
On the 5th at 1022PM ‘Ken W’ is graced with an apology from “Dennis”. As I have said before, an Abusenik bearing the gift of (smarmy) apology should no more prompt an appreciative smile than the rattling of a rattler in the desert should prompt the pleasant presumption that the rattler is saying ‘Howdy’.
On numerous occasions in comments I have pointed out the problems with the extension of SOLs as a legislative and justicial ‘solution’ to anything. “Dennis” has responded to none of those problems. If I may, I will put forward here a summary of the problem with SOL-extension.
The Statute of Limitations principle is based on the realistic fact that ‘evidence’ degrades over time, whether it be a) material evidence or b) witness memory (and (b) also includes the possibility that persons so-inclined might deliberately deform their ‘testimony’ by manipulating in some form the events they claim to remember – or not-remember, as the case may be). There is simply no way for human perception to overcome this hard reality; only some effort to mimic the Divine Omniscience could claim to have resolved this problem.
Thus the recognition of the realities underlying the SOL principle has resulted in various time-frames being legislatively imposed upon various types of crimes. Murder, for example, in recognition of its actual and utter life-ending result, has no limitation placed on it. The indubitably unique and utter finality of murder’s consequence has moved legislators and society to allow such a crime to remain permanently open to investigation, Charges, and trial.
But moving further down – so to speak – the list of crimes, limitations apply.
The purpose of the SOL then, is to guarantee the legitimacy of the justicial process (and thus, as well, the integrity and legitimacy of the Sovereign Justicial Authority – i.e. the government – itself).
Which itself is based upon the concept of ‘justice’ as it has evolved in the West over the course of centuries: justice by human government must be primarily a matter of the integrity of a process which recognizes both i) society’s need for recognizing and punishing crime and ii) the limitations of human perceptual apparatus and knowledge.
This is especially true in a democracy where the trust of the citizenry is vital to their accepting the impositions of government. And anything that can threaten that profoundly basic and essential general trust in the legitimacy of the government’s deployment of its Coercive Power must be avoided, or else run the risk of a) undermining the government’s very legitimacy, b) lubricating the government’s perpetration of injustice, as well as c) inaccurately and thus unjustly deploying the Coercive Authority and thus making the government both a party-to and a perpetrator-of injustice upon those whom it subjects to the process of investigation and trial.
There has always been a visceral human tendency against this approach (which is why the development of this approach in the West in the past centuries – modeled to no small extent on the even earlier developments in the Church’s canon-law and canonical principles and process – is rightly seen as so extraordinary a development). In fact, in light of the abiding human tendency to work out ‘justice’ more viscerally and irrationally, the development of Western law might be seen as Providential and even miraculous.
But even after the adoption of such principles in the West we saw for so long the ‘lynch-mob’ phenomenon, whereby persons either a) too impatient for the process or b) too cocksure that they knew who was guilty of what, or c) both, quickly strung-up whomever they chose (or desired) to get their hands on.
However, with the coming of the Age of Revolutions in Europe in 1792 we saw develop in the West a new and dark thing: a large-scale formal and official throwback to that more primitive justice-doing, but now wrapped up in the rational-sounding terms and concepts of Western justice. Thus: since the Revolution (whichever one it might be) is so vitally important to ‘the people’, then those whom it declares to be criminals must and legitimately can be done-away-with forthwith, without all the fuddy-duddy (nowadays they say ‘fetishizing’ and ‘obsessive’) concern over due process of law and the principles of evidence.
Thus i) the Revolution’s concern and purpose and objectives are so incomprehensibly noble and good that it can legitimately dispense with Western justice; ii) anybody who still insists on Western justicial principles is clearly an enemy not only of the Revolution but of the people; and thus iii) the Revolutionary government can and must do whatever it takes to achieve its goals and objectives, since iv) the Revolution is so marvelous in its objectives that it can be judged by no higher law or Law.
The West – especially in the past few decades – has itself been infected by this Revolutionary concept of justice. Although – recognizing both the need and the ability of modern mass-governments to manipulate public opinion – this regressive throw-back is dressed now in the more popularly-appealing conceptual clothing of Victimization: the ancient enemy of Western principles – untrammeled and Law-less government deployment of its powers – has now, like a bank robber hiding behind hostages, transformed itself into a more ‘sensitive’ type of Revolutionary entity, i.e. the swift and merciless avenger of the Victim.
In this new and neat staging of the ancient show, the government authority has now masked the deployment of its unprincipled and untrammeled power in what turns out to be a replay of the old Revolutionary presumption: what the government does is so very unutterably good and necessary that no fuddy-duddy concern-for (or fetishization-of or obsession-with) ‘old’ Western principles can be allowed to stand in the way.
Thus “Dennis” here has revealed precisely the poisonous fruits of this lethal tree: since we are concerned for “the protection of children” (various bits of exaggerated formatting omitted) then nothing else can be allowed to matter or to stand in the way. Thus “the protection of children” functions now, so seductively and deceptively, as the ‘front’ by which the Revolutionary derangement of Western law – which Revolutionary derangement was itself a regressive throw-back to the primitive justice-doing of the Dark Ages – returns to undermine what was once considered one of the most valuable achievements of Western civilization.
(Readers of a certain age may thus review the ‘progress’ of Victimist law and think to themselves that the Commies actually won after all … and conceptually that would not be so very far from truth. Such are the complex realities of this dynamic and multi-dimensioned world we live in.)
We also note the Revolutionary impatience with the overall process; an impatience which reflects not the matured civic competence of a classical Western citizenry of the past centuries but rather the primal and unripe impatience of those earlier tribal humans who could only manage a more simplistic and visceral type of ‘justice’.
And this is the ultimate monstrosity hiding in the conceptual clothing (and Wigs) of Victimist and thus of Abusenik ‘reforms’: the regression to the primal and primitive dark-woods world and spirit, out of which the West had at such great cost climbed. This spirit, infecting citizens of the West even as it seduces them into thinking it is doing them ‘justice’, will work not any sort of ‘new’ dark magic but rather will work the old dark-magic out of which the West had so strenuously and painfully climbed.
None of this is intended to absolve such cases as there may have been in the Church or as there may be in any particular venues. But on the fragile wooden sailing-ship which is the Western achievement and its society and culture, you can’t set fire to the hold in order to get rid of the rats that are there or that you fear are there or that you are so very sure are there.
Plump for secularism! Plop for religion. Pull for Publion's boundless conspiracy theory that now includes the UN.
How does one get into the ivory tower you all live in? do you ever leave it. do you ever get out and about with normal people?
Before you get vicious (per usual) gay people and socialists are normal people now.
First, Of course you are responsibile for your own raped. that's all the U.N. is doing. Holding your corporate church responsibile the same way any organizations officers are held responsibile for their actions and or lack of actions in regards to raped children.
Second,cardinal Law; cardinal Mahoney The Austria and Irish prelates when put on the spot for their own crimes against catholic children went where first? Where did they go to take their orders or to avoid prosecution and find a hiding place? Why it was to the vatican state. The same place the policies of excommunication for talking about being abused were instated back in 1962 under John XXIII.
You all can squeal and scream; name call; demean; abuse and refuse to pay; and not accept responsibility and nobody cares. Because the world knows what you've done.
Render unto the Boy Scouts the things that belong to the boy scouts. Render unto the vatican that which belongs to the vatican. Our rapes were planned, protected and enabled by the policies of your corporate church. Those policies came from nowhere else but the vatican. The go ahead for the creation of the order of the paracletes came from Rome. their funding came from Rome and they were international in scope. The policy of excommunicating anyone who spoke of their or their children's rape came from the Vatican, and from nowhere else.
Not one bishop, archbishop; cardinal or pope have had to serve any jail time for their crimes and most of their victims have received no compensation. Name any other institution besides the catholic corporate church that's gotten away that scot free for raping children? You can not.
When one has been raped. One does not posture or pose as raped. One is a raped victim. One has been raped.
We tell you about our rapes. You say" That's a lie". "You weren't raped" "You just want money"
You even say "We don't want to give you money even if you have been raped" "What else besides money will make you people happy? Will make you go away?"
And I say: Your raped deserve and demand compensation. We are not going away untill you do the right, the moral thing by us.
You have been forced to do nothing so far but for a few areas where SOL were recinded civilly or SOL never existed.
What lynch mob? The lynch mob that hasn't forced you to do anything?
Some lynch mob!
And on the 6th at 1119AM we hear from LDB, who for this occasion has chosen to come without a Wig or any other pretense and simply shares what presumably is his/her genuine self, the fruits of which are revealed to be a contentless two-liner.
Not to do any homework for LDB, but if s/he has any thoughts on where or how my thoughts on the facts of the UN non-release of its Report somehow don't connect to the conclusions I drew from them, then LDB could move the discussion along by sharing those thoughts, insights, and reflections.
Presuming, of course, that that's how LDB 'rolls'. But if not, not.
~~" if everyone followed the Church’s teachings on sexuality, we would not have this problem in the first place. To be exact, those who acquire HIV/AIDS typically do so because they live a reckless life, in sharp contradistinction to the Church’s plea for restraint."
————————————————————————————————————————–
Like usual I search the web and read the opinions and thoughts of others on a particular subject that is addressed here. This time around it had to do with the United Nations requests to the Vatican and the Catholic Church.
Like usual I once again went to the Catholic League web site operated by Bill Donahue, and once again without any suprises Bill Donahue tried to defend the Catholic Church and the Vatican of the actions brought to light by the United Nations.
His article was titled MALICIOUS U.N. REPORT ON VATICAN.
Again there was no suprises until I read the paragraph I posted above. THOSE WHO ACQUIRE HIV/AIDS TYPICALLY DO SO BECAUSE THEY LIVE A RECKLESS LIFE.
I ask TMR for their help in passing this comment onto Bill Donahue since his site does not have a comment section and ask him:
Did Ryan White (child) live a typically reckless life ?
Did Elizabeth Glaser (school teacher) live a typically reckless life ?
Did Ariel Glaser (child) live a typically reckless life ?
Did Jake Glaser (infant) live a typically reckless life ?
and did Paul Michael Glaser (star of Starsky & Hutch) have to watch his family die because in your eyes they lived a typically reckless life ?
and did healthcare workers who will most likely come to your house one day and unwedge your lifeless body from the toilet and wall so they can put life back into your body live a typically reckless life if they become infected ?
Normally now I might have typed words that would call him every bad word in the world, but I won't do that.
Instead I will let TMR and its readers come up with my next move.
I would like to know if TMR holds the same position as Bill Donahue when it comes to his statement ? If you fail to answer I will assume you have taken the position as YES.
Speaking of Dononue- he's got another solid statement on the hypocrisy of the Hollow-Woody types:
http://www.catholicleague.org/hollywoods-moral-compass/
There are actual meanings and/or metrics associated with words such as "typically"-
http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/statistics/basics/
Such a strange distortion of a statement. Overreaching much?
Delphin,
You know after posting my comment I should not or should never be suprised by any statement that comes from Bill Donahue's mouth. I remembered this is the same individual who went on record defending the statement that clergy abuse victims are the fault of their own abuse.
He does suffer from that incurable disease known as "foot in mouth disease".
One only has to either Google or Bing his name and read the hundreds upon hundreds of negative feelings and opinions that people who are far more educated then both of us combined have of this individual. Maybe those are the reasons why he is divorced today.
I truly feel sorry for you and the catholic church.
You have abusive clergy that you must teach your children to guard against, and you have an individual like Bill Donahue who represents you and your faith.
I am so very very sorry.
On the 6th at 1156AM JR apparently considers himself a good judge of what constitutes “normal people”. And on that humorous note we can proceed.
We are informed, apropos of nothing, that “gay people … are normal people now” and that “socialists” are too. Presuming there is a reason underlying this observation, are we then to infer that my “Commies” equals his “socialists”, and that he acknowledges that Victimist legal ‘reforms’ are indeed “socialist”? Or is the very question an example of my being “vicious”? It’s so hard to tell in the silly-putty, play-dough world of Abusenik coded usages and ever-mutating definitions.
Then more of the same talking-points about “your” (meaning, apparently, Catholic) “raped” – as if we all didn’t realize by now just how mutable and silly-putty-ish that term has become in their universe of discourse.
If JR can point out just how “the U.N.” (meaning that panel in Geneva) is doing anything more than spouting the usual Abusenik talking-points-sans-evidence, he is welcome to do so. That would be the “responsibile” conceptual step here.
JR references the 1962 Vatican directive to all Ordinaries. I will indulge the presumption here that JR has not consulted the text (although the English translation is, granted, a little rough). The URL for the text is at the bottom of this comment, for any who wish to read it.
The text of the 1962 Vatican Instruction deals specifically with the canonical crime of a priest soliciting impure thoughts or acts of a penitent during the sacrament of confession or in any place or moment before or after an act of confession (Sec. 1).
The crime (officially termed Crimen Solicitationis, hereinafter ‘CriSo’) is so particularly heinous because it takes place during the administration of the sacrament of confession, which is such a profoundly subversive outrage to the Church’s sacramental integrity that it must be formally handled both with greatest secrecy and also the greatest dispatch (Sec. 2).
The secrecy is enjoined upon the local cognizant Ordinary and on all the (very limited number of) ecclesiastics acting as staffers who will have access to the required proceedings (Secs. 3 and 11).
There is a passage in Sec.4 that Abuseniks and torties have glommed-onto: once a priest is accused of CriSo, the Ordinary or religious superior (if the priest is from an Order) may “remove him from some ministry”. Then: “And they will also be able to transfer him to another [assignment], unless the Ordinary forbids it because he has already accepted the denunciation and begun the investigation phase.
First I note that the English translation itself has the word “assignment” in brackets. I don’t quite fathom why, unless it is a matter of translation. But if you read the prior and subsequent Sections of the Instruction, the clear gist is that the priest may be transferred out of a sacramental assignment and into some non-sacramental assignment. The crime here, we recall, is soliciting some form of mental or actual impurity within the sanctity of the confessional Moment – and the Instruction is clearly willing to empower the Ordinary to take whatever steps necessary to deal with this matter; the purpose of this Section would certainly serve to neutralize any claim by an accused priest that he should not be transferred out of a sacramental-administration assignment without a hearing – rather, the Instruction authorizes the Ordinary to act first and pre-emptively, overriding (on Vatican authority) any prior administrative-procedural claims of the accused priest as to having input into any transfer.
This is clearly not a smoking-gun – as we are proffered in the Abusenik scare vision – that the Vatican has authorized accused sex-abusive priests to be transferred. First, the Instruction is not dealing with ‘sex abuse’ but with the very specific matter of priests who have used the confessional Moment to incite “impurity” (and how many sex-abuse claims, as outré as some of them may be in their burnished state, actually claim CriSo?). Second, the ‘transfer’ – for this specific type of accused cleric – is not out of the jurisdiction of the canonical inquiry (actually and nicely, termed an ‘Inquisition’) but rather out of the sacramental ministry – until the juridical process has been completed (and as we have seen, Rome wants that done with the utmost alacrity and seriousness).
Perpetual silence is enjoined upon all the staffers (who must be be clerics) in this type of case (Sec.11).
But while there are the gravest ecclesiastical penalties for any staffer who breaks the oath of secrecy, yet for those who denounce the priest and the witnesses – while they too must take the oath of secrecy – no penalty of any kind attaches (Sec.13).
Anyone among “the faithful” may initiate a ‘denunciation’ for this crime (Sec.17).
And anyone among the Catholic faithful who has knowledge of such a crime and does not denounce the priest within a month is subject to excommunication (Sec. 18).
Anonymous denunciations, however, must be rejected (Sec. 20).
The obligation to denounce lies upon any who know of the crime, and lasts until the death of the alleged perpetrator (Sec.21).
Once accepted by the Ordinary, a denunciation must be acted upon as promptly and efficiently as possible, and in this the Ordinary “is bound most gravely” (Sec. 27).
Thus you can see that the 1962 Instruction a) does not deal with ‘sex abuse’ in the sense the term is used today but rather deals specifically with the grave canonical transgression of using a Sacrament as the occasion for it. And that b) the Instruction clearly reveals i) the Vatican’s intention to have such a case dealt with forcefully and quickly within canonical legal procedure, ii) that “secrecy” for this particular (and rare) crime applies with penalties only to the ecclesiastics involved in the tribunal process, iii) that accusers in this particular (and rare) crime are not placed under any burden of secrecy beyond their personal oath.
I think we can see here why Abuseniks don’t often, as a rule, like to examine texts (or have their own ‘texts’ examined). Regrettably, the same seems to be true for far too much of the media.
I don’t have too much trouble with “the world” ‘knowing’ what the Church has done; I do like the idea of this site enabling the world to see what Abuseniks do and what the Stampede and Anderson Strategies have done.
Further bits about “our rapes” and so on – especially in light of recent analysis – can stay right up there where they were put.
Then, on the 6th at 1205PM, JR once again – as so very very often – attempts to manipulate us into accepting as proven the fact of “rape” and then claims – thus rather redundantly – that if one has been genuinely raped then “one does not posture or pose as raped”. How very true that is. Presuming that the actual fact of the “rape” has been established. And we are back to square one, yet again.
I have no idea who all these “you”’s are in that next paragraph.
I am still amazed by JR’s easy reversion to lecturing about morals and the moral thing to do. But I can live with that.
On the 6th at 1211 JR apparently hasn’t comprehended from his reading that my reference to “lynch mob” was a general and conceptual one.
I am amazed to learn, however, that there have been jurisdictions in the U.S. where “SOL never existed”. Where might those jurisdictions be? Or have I merely been victimized by insufficiently clear expression of a thought?
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Observer/documents/2003/08/16/Criminales.pdf
At 212PM on the 6th “Dennis” advises us that “like usual” he doth “search the web and the read the opinions and thoughts of others on a particular subject that is addressed here”. And that “like usual” – in conducting some serious assessment of the Vatican-UN matter – he has gone “once again” to the Catholic League site, wherein he has found an article by Bill Donahue, which “without any suprises” “tried to defend the Catholic Church and the Vatican of the actions brought to light by the United Nations”.
Whether this panel in Geneva has actually “brought to light” anything at all that hasn’t already been floating around for years and decades, is a question that apparently has not occurred to “Dennis”. But who can blame him since not much of the media ‘reporting’ has done much along those lines either?
But rather than address any of the issues that are on the table on this site now in regard to the panel’s Report, he is going to conduct an analysis of the CL article.
But then, it’s not an analysis of the article, but instead there is a merely a focus on Donahue’s statement about AIDS/HIV. Donahue’s point – as he wrote in the article – is that “if everyone followed the Church’s teachings on sexuality, we would not have this problem in the first place”. I think Donahue would have been on more solid ground if he had written ‘if everyone had followed …” because, at least for this country, things might have gone much better some decades ago had individuals not become involved overseas with other individuals who themselves had somehow picked up this plague from congress with various local fauna. But that’s not what happened, and now the plague has mutated and morphed such that all sorts of individuals have become infected, through all sorts of modes of transmission.
Whether a certain amount of ‘recklessness’ was exhibited by various persons at and since that moment decades ago, and whether such ‘recklessness’ created awe-full consequences for others, are questions for the readership to contemplate and draw such conclusions as they will.
“Dennis” has – rather neatly – glommed onto this point in Donahue’s piece, neatly avoiding the many other points Donahue made about the panel’s Report. And – in his favorite theatrical mode – “Dennis” recites a list of names and situations which are accurately characterized, as far as that goes. But it does nothing to address – with whatever thoughts “Dennis” may have – the original questions and issues in the whole monstrous matter.
But “Dennis” has, I think, caught Donahue in a bit of an expressional error and that’s OK as far as it goes.
And we can be thankful that “Dennis” will graciously spare us a scream-y and histrionic performance “that would call [Donahue] every bad word in the world” (really, the whole whole wide wide world?).
But then but then but then, his rocket – as so very often – veers off course. Having neatly avoided both Donahue’s and this site’s material on the panel Report, he now has to play with his blocks to construct a challenge for this site in regard to Donahue’s article: if this site does not tell him that it does not hold Donahue’s position then this site will incur the following penalty – “Dennis” will assume that this site’s position in regard to Donahue’s statement is “YES” [exaggerated formatting not omitted].
Oh my. And notice that the whole bit will, by amazing coincidence, distract from consideration of the panel Report and even from Donahue’s discussion of the Report.
Which discussion is somewhat revealing. Donahue refers to the Report being 15 pages long – which indicates that he either has a copy of it (if so, he didn’t put up a hyperlink to it) or has taken the number from somewhere else, or perhaps ‘15’ is a typo. But John Allen, Jr. specifically mentioned that “Item 55”, which makes me think that unless the font were really really small, a mere 15 pages wouldn’t be enough.
Donahue also says that there is “not a single footnote, endnote, or any other mode of attribution” – which certainly is odd for a professional Report, especially one that purports and pretends to major statements about a large issue. Readers may recall the Jay Reports with their numerous graphs, pie charts, explanations of methodology, references, and so forth. But as it stands now – especially without the text of the Report to work-with – it seems the Report is simply a repetition of all the Abusenik talking-points, delivered in the typical Abusenik mode of unsupported claims and assertions delivered as if they were demonstrated fact. (Time-save here: “demonstrated” is a different concept from merely ‘asserted’.)
The HIV/AIDS comment arises in Donahue’s discussion of the fact that on pages 12-13 of the Report “the panel says it wants the Catholic Church to change its teachings on abortion and contraception; it also says the Church needs to do more about HIV/AIDS”.
And I was certainly taken 40 or more years down memory lane to read that the panel also urges “awareness programs” and “systematic training”. It’s not just that those programs have been in place for a decade, but that this putatively earth-shaking professional Report is proffering the techniques so popular in the era of pet-rocks and lava-lamps and bean-bag chairs.
At any rate, Donahue’s article is certainly worth a read. One need only go to the Catholic League site.
[edited by moderator] Canada has no SOL on child rape and civil damage pursuit.
Again, I will put money in the collection basket in Jim and Dennis' names, with a lot of prayer for both men at Mass. This, more than anything, will give them peace of mind. Maybe not right away, but eventually. Much, much more good for them than their visiting sites and making verbal assaults. All, say a prayer for Jim and Dennis.
So it's important enough for you to mention it repeatedly.that you give money to the church but to be owed money by the church is just an impossiblity. I would think the church is whining for money that it might appear in need of it, in the public eye., that is.
2000 + years of money grubbing usually adds up to a pretty big pile.Think of the pile Billy Graham; Oral Roberts; and Jan and Paul Crouch (Trinity Broadcassting) have raised TAX FREE in only the last 50 years. Now think of the empire and pagan religion heir'd corporate catholic church. You tell me who has what..
Julie,
I'm a big tipper.
$5.00 this time is not enough. Be a good catholic and give till it hurts.
The world knows innocent children paid till it hurt by your clergy.
Let me get this "straight' , pardon the pun. An identity hiding psuedo intellectual, who is so "smart" so "well educated" that he uses ad hominems as his only method of defending his outrageous stand on clerical child rape, dares to define "normal" to me? LOL!
Speaking of 'ad hominem' attacks, your comments are, in general, as is this one in particular, absolutely laden and lousy with them.
Someone whose admitted sexuality represents only 2-3% of the human population will never fall within the normal spectrum. That's just a scientific fact, you are a statistical outlier. But, on the other hand, some outliers are very gifted and wonderful humans, so don't be insulted because you reside outside of the norm, it doesn't have to be a bad thing, it is just an unusual occurrence.
What goes around comes around. You started it. I'll finish it.
Well, better late than never in finding your nerve/courage; too bad it was lost for the 40-50 years you sat on your 'claim', such that it was.
From your own admission, you're not a great 'finisher', so, don't bet your Church booty on that likelihood.
http://ncronline.org/blogs/faith-and-justice/un-committee-report-vatican-abuse-missed-opportunity
"When it comes to the historical record, the church deserves to be raked over the coals. It went through at least three stages of responding to abusive priests all of which proved to be DISASTROUS.
I can only picture the catholic church in one way,
Three monkeys wearing a white collar.
HEAR OF NO EVIL, SEE NO EVIL, and definately SPEAK OF NO EVIL.
Unless of course it's about their own victims. then they speak evil non stop.
CONTENTLESS! I'll show you contentless . . .
You already have, LDB, spare us from any more of your torture.
Not surprised to see monkey images used to illustrate a very sophomoric point; just wondering, would these monkeys, in particular, be ancestors of these commenters since they, too, appear to be bigoted? Perhaps, inheriting bigotry genes makes one 'born that way'?
Regarding the 'giving till it hurts' nonsense, get the facts straight - the vast majority of the Catholic Church abuse claims involved sexually-active homosexual adolescent males willingly engaging in and sometimes soliciting sexual activity with homosexual priests – it's called statutory rape in some states and nations. No children were harmed in any of those scenarios (again, these represent the majority of claims against priests) – it was a just a couple of gay guys doing what they've done for millenia, regardless of the location of the sordid behavior.
LOL! LDB You sure showed 'em "contentless". Delphin and Pub have showed the same too often.
Too funny not to share (especially with some of the TMR readership)-
http://www.eyeofthetiber.com/2013/09/26/benedict-writes-letter-to-atheist-atheist-denies-existence-of-letter/
Without wasting my time in opening Delphin's link, and going by the title alone it is most likely a cheap shot to a group of individuals and their beliefs.
Although I have "faith" there is something after death and Delphin most likely believes the same I would like to know what gives Catholics the right to say to a group of growing individuals they are wrong ?
Although I believe there is one God the Father Almighty what gives me the right to jam my beliefs down someones throat and say what they believe is wrong ? Anybody here know what jihad means ?
One of the major reasons why Roman Catholics left their church in 2013 and now worship at my church was they were tired of the catholic church trying to run their lives even when it came to matters outside of the church.
If the Catholic Church concerned themselves with their own major problems and even tried to reheal from those problems, life for a catholic would be better off.
I only hope that Delphin and others like him are not shocked when they close their eyes for the final time and that is it, or if they are met at the pearly gates by 72 virgins.
Like I said before I do have "faith" there is a God who was born and died on the cross, but I also had "faith" the catholic church would do the right thing for all the wrong-doings of their clergy.
I THINK WE COULD ALL AGREE I WAS WRONG THAT TIME.
Nope, I don't agree with even one paragraph in your 8 paragraph diatribe- it is wrong from start to finish. It is just another typical antiCatholic smear- from end to end.
Surprise!
Here you go folks Delphin putting it in writing stating he does not agree with what I said, and what I said was my belief in one God, and I believe that God was born and died on the cross. A simple rule that any good catholic must believe in.
So, what does he truly believe ?
I'm as normal as blueberry pie.
Here's a little present for you http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/06/26/1103368/-The-One-Comic-That-Explains-Just-How-Screwed-America-Is?detail=email#
OK, Dennis. I'll give more.
Perhaps to the surprise of practically nobody, JR has failed to get it “straight” in his comment of the 7th at 952AM. The relevance of (his ever-ready fall-back bleat about) my “identity” which I am “hiding” has little relevance, except perhaps to demonstrate in reverse that the use of one’s actual identity does absolutely nothing to provide, improve, or sustain a high quality of comment. Let his characterization of “pseudo intellectual” [sic] stand, to the extent that he may be considered a reliable judge of anything involved in intellectual substance and process. If he has only noted “ad hominems” in my material then he has a comprehension problem of no small proportions. If he would care to explain with accurately-quoted material of mine and carefully-expressed thoughts of his just what in my “stand” is “outrageous”, that might actually indicate some intellectual activity – and wouldn’t that be nice? Lastly, I actually didn’t define “normal” to him – he should check the text of my comment again.
But as I have said before, the Abusenik mind loves to declaim, declare, and denounce. Thinking … not so much. I really do think it’s a form of therapy – but not really useful for trying to get a better grasp on anything. But then again: what need is there for anybody to try to get a better grasp on anything? All that is required is that we hear and respond with the demanded awwws and oooohs and clucks. Anything else would merely be re-victimizing, insensitive, sociopathic, vicious, violently attack-y, or (fill in the blank).
Thus too ‘LDB’ who returns on the 7th at 446PM with an even more vividly illustrative (if still content-less) one-liner.
But now on to business.
On the 7th at 1211PM “Dennis” gives us a URL (for a National Catholic Reporter article) and then either a snippet from the text of the article (there’s only an initial quotation mark but no concluding mark) and, of course, rather than any analysis we are simply given his chosen declamation (in scream-y caps).
The article takes us to the thoughts of a Jesuit about the U.N. panel Report, and it’s quite an interesting bit of work.
The problem for the author – since this was the NCRep site – was how to stay within the proper parameters for the NCRep stance toward the Church without also vividly avoiding the many problems with the Report.
The author solves it thus: he immediately acknowledges the profoundly problematic nature of the Report (it is “an editorial screed”).
He then bolsters that by listing three steps that were necessary in order to achieve a proper examination of the (Catholic, presumably) “sexual abuse crisis”: i) review the historical facts of sexual abuse and how it was handled by the Church; ii) examine current policies and procedures and how they are being enforced; iii) make recommendations for improvement.
He then immediately observes that “the report, like many other examinations of the crisis, skips the hard work of step two, which means the recommendations in step three are meaningless”.
Thus he pretty much trashes the Report. That – I think (and more on this below) – covers his responsibility for intellectual integrity.
But it now leaves him with his obligation to the overall organizational stance of the NCRep. And has he not just set himself quite a task, given what he’s done with the Report?
He solves his problem thus: he will focus on the past.
He takes most of the rest of this article to rehearse – with all their undemonstrated presumptions – all the ‘historical’ bits that (had he not noticed) came to be unquestioningly accepted in such a way as to constitute the basis of those “many other examinations of the crisis” that he has just trashed. That’s not only the way it is but also the way it has to be … when casting the Stampede in a good light: sooner or later you’re going to have to start twisting stuff around – logic, coherence, demonstration.
And so here we go.
“When it comes to the historical record the church [small-‘c’ here, but it’s NCRep and he’s a Jesuit] deserves to be raked over the coals”. And then he comes up with three more “stages” that now will be the basis of his criticism of the Church’s historical handling of the Abuse Matter.
First, there was “denial” – meaning that “the victims were not believed”. And in this bit we see a key Victimist (and consequently Abusenik) trope (which also worked so well for the Anderson Strategies): if I say I am a victim, then you are a) obligated to believe the story (even if the story doesn’t make sense even on its own terms or if there’s no evidence for it or both) and b) you must not try to question the story because that would merely ‘re-victimize’ the story-teller. (And perhaps he could have added, would prove that the questioner was pseudo-intellectual, un-empathic, sociopathic, or (fill in the blank)).
He then seeks to establish this ‘ground’ for his construction by simply asserting that “we now know that the overwhelming majority of the accusations were true”. We do? We “know” that? How? It is precisely here that I have been saying that this vital presumption – which must be demonstrated effectively and sufficiently – cannot simply be ‘taken care of’ with mere assertion, but rather must be assessed and examined very closely and carefully in order for it to be established as believable, probable, or true. Otherwise a whole lot of people are going to be going off in a certain direction with no actual grounds for that choice of course. And that way lies Stampede.
Second, the Church erred by dealing with the (allegated) transgressions as “sexual sin” (rather than as a crime). This point doesn’t actually establish the deliberate institutional guilt of the Church, and actually serves to open up the clear possibility that the hierarchs were dealing with the (allegated) transgressions in the way most familiar to them. And – I would add, especially in the light of what I have said in earlier comments on this thread – it also goes a long way to explaining some of the still-unexplained silence of so many other non-clerical adults who did not (and, from the Dallas housing complex episode with ‘B’, still do not) contact the police.
The present era emphasizes the ‘crime’ rather than the ‘sin’, but that was not the way it was culturally construed in earlier times (even as MADD noted 30 years ago about drunk-driving: it was always a law on the books, but nobody in the public or in authority really construed it as primarily a crime).
Third, the Church “dealt with abuse as a psychological problem that could be cured”. Does he mean to imply that “abuse” (as opposed to the more therapeutically-resistant formal clinical diagnostic entity of ‘pedophilia’) cannot be “cured” or resolved through some form of therapeutic intervention and process?
Surely, the attempt to get therapeutic assessment and treatment – such as could be managed with this or that individual – was not of itself evil. And compared to an even earlier age’s preferred method (i.e. tell him to stifle himself and not to do it again), the choice for therapeutic intervention was rather enlightened indeed. And it was culturally quite in tune with the times.
And, indeed, this author then goes on quickly to acknowledge that “many priests, in fact, stopped abusing” – which again is an interesting assertion but how does he know?
But he quickly – and not inaccurately – then points out that “no one could say with certainty which priests were safe and which were not”. And in that regard he notes that while “a 10 percent recidivism rate” (which is itself a number that needs demonstration) is fine for the criminal-justice system, yet “it was not good enough if children were placed at risk” where “zero-tolerance was the only safe option”. In this he echoes the temper of these times, although in a broken-world actual or absolute ‘zero’ is going to be an impossible number to achieve in the prevention of anything. But it is, as I say, the temper of these times.
Then – apparently leaving unsaid some thoughts or they were edited-out by the NCRep staff – he immediately goes on: “at the same time the church was responding badly to priests, it was also responding badly to the victims”.
And here he sees that as happening in three ways:
First, the Church saw “the victims as a financial problem”; it was because they feared “huge financial losses” that the bishops [small-‘b’] then “listened to lawyers and insurance companies”. From as early as the Doyle report in 1985 (the text of which was probably informally read even if it wasn’t formally considered in open session) it was clear that – given many factors opening up in the culture – allegations of victimization were going to be far more easier to lodge than at any prior time in American legal history. Doyle and his tortie associate realized that and I imagine that many others in the tortie trade were also sensing the twitching in their professional whiskers in that regard. Nor would the Insurers have been ignorant of the changes in the national cultural climate and even the legal changes.
And this would have been a crucial factor even against the otherwise substantive objection that there would probably be serious evidentiary problems in any lawsuits: the way the national climate and culture was going, evidence wasn’t going to a primary concern. And Anderson was already working on his Strategic package.
Nor could anybody ‘on the Church side’ have failed to realize that if anybody who cared to lodge an allegation and a claim might now pretty much have a guaranteed shot at getting some monies, then the Church was going to become a piñata no matter what.
So while there is a kernel of accuracy to this “financial problem” observation, I think it requires a deeper look into what motivated those who were now faced with all these prospective – indeed probable – challenges. They saw (and accurately, as we have seen) just what could happen as all these Stampede-supporting elements congealed – and Anderson was working on precisely that project.
I also point out that once matters had reached this point, no attorney would or could advise “talking to the victim” (as the author puts it) because the probability of a ‘run’ (or Stampede) on the Church was almost guaranteed. I think you can see that the Abusenik preferred vision – that fat-cat and callous Bishops were simply laughing and tossing off the problems callously – was shrewdly concocted precisely to move public-opinion beyond this daunting complexity, and reduce the whole thing to that of Innocent Good being tied to the railroad track by Pure Evil (twirling its dark evil moustache). And as any good legal counsel would have had to advise: as soon as you apologize you’ve pretty much admitted guilt and that’s that.
What was going on here was a conflation of the therapeutic and the legal forums: by lodging an allegation the allegant automatically put matters into the legal forum, and the hierarch now had to consider the daunting possibilities in the legal forum. The brilliance of the Anderson Strategies was to make it seem as if the allegant were merely (‘innocently’, one might say) seeking simple encounter in the therapeutic and interpersonal forums, when actually the dynamics that the allegation itself had set in motion were the formidable range of possibilities in the legal forum.
Readers may consider how they would have handled such a situation – and the precedent to be set by however one responded to that situation. If on the basis of no evidence, a bishop were to have responded in the therapeutic-interpersonal mode, and even written a check, what then – for his own Diocese or for any other Diocese? Especially as the Anderson Strategies kicked in, with their media elements busily working to manipulate public opinion?
The Bishops’ second mistake was to see any allegation as a “scandal”. Because – the author says – the “bad news” would have “dribbled out” into the Diocese and around the country anyway. “Dribbled-out”? The Anderson Strategies were precisely designed to ensure that there was no “dribble” but rather a steady and powerful stream of ‘stories’. And any legal counsel – even if not many individual Bishops – would have been acutely aware of those possibilities congealing out in the culture as well.
And third – according to the author – was to see the whole mess as merely a “power struggle” in which the Church was the target of “the secular liberal media”. This assessment of his is, I would say, seriously deficient. As I have often discussed in comments on this site, a) the media were only elements in the Anderson Strategies and willingly and eagerly so and b) the core elements ‘on the other side’ here were not primarily the media but the various secularizing interests and ‘liberal’ interests (as that term has mutated now over the past 40 or 50 years) in government and among secular-minded elites and other ‘interests’.
The author also then opines that “the sensible thing” for any Bishop to do would have been ”to resign”. I can’t see the sense of this at all. Resign in the face of undemonstrated allegations? Resign so that another Bishop would have to come in and … do what? Unless – perhaps – this author somehow has knowledge that getting Bishops to resign was somehow the objective of various ‘interests’ in the first place? If not, then there is no constructive or practical sense to be made of any Bishop simply resigning in the face of an allegation about a priest in his Diocese.
Having concluded his assessment on this score, the author then goes on to say that “the U.N. committee report ignores what the Vatican had done to improve things”. And he lists the hardly un-impressive list of changes which have been made.
He works up to urging “more transparency” in the Church. I would simply point out what we have seen even on this site when we seek to achieve such “transparency” in regard to various allegations, claims, and ‘stories’. And we have federal judge Schiltz’s observation that the ‘secrecy’ agreements in so many of the allegation lawsuits were demanded by the torties. Not much transparency there at all.
Now as it turns out this is the first article I have seen that actually provides a hyperlink to the actual text of the U.N. panel’s Report. I have reviewed the Report document itself and will be posting on that later today.
If you are not hiding your identity, who is? Is god hiding who you are? Nope last time I looked it was you. And the reason is?
I can hardly wait zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz! Denial denial Denial. So obvious. so boring! ZZZzZ!
What's incredable is after attacking the victims who post here, you've got nothing to say. You've got nothing but poor put upon you, an invented attack that so far has cost you next to nothing; but your too easily lost reputation.. Get off the pity pot dear. You fool no one but yourselves.
Those of us who aren't bigoted Kool Aid drinkers of the corrupt media's spin of the minor abuse issue are appreciative of Publion's analyses of the crud that is published on the matter. S/he brings fresh new thoughtful perspective to much of the junk history, science, philosophy, politics, law and culture the bigots are churning out.
No one 'attacks' victims or anyone here at TMR (not necessarily one in the same). Challenging your views and rejecting your bigotry are not attacks, they are positions of opposition. But, it is of great interest to note that your position is that if someone opposes your views they are attacking you – so, how did that distorted world view play out when you were an immature, hormonal teenager dealing with his sexuality issues in a culture that strictly opposed just about everything he represented?
Whether or not your personal claim of abuse happened is actually immaterial to the debate and dialogue that TMR, but speaking of pity pots, yours is big enough to swallow you up. Is it possible for you to engage in any dialogue on any matter without tainting it with your own personal issues and biases?
'Victims' have no more swing or sway here than anyone else. If it's your claimed victimhood (and your sexuality) that will continue to dominate your views in your comments, go to victim and gay advocacy/help (psych) sites. Here, you're just another voice in the wilderness with no special dispensation (or entitlement) because of who, or what, you say that you are. Only the truth matters here.
I have reviewed the text of the U.N. panel’s Report. The URL for it is at the bottom of this comment, for readers wishing to examine it.
A couple of pre-notes: first, this text is dated for general distribution on the 31st of January. And yet no media outlets hyper-linked to it until almost a week later (although they went on and on about it in their articles), and the text did not appear in a way available to the public for several days after the press release and media blitz.
Second, the text of the Report actually is only 15 pages long. But it manages to squeeze quite a bit into those pages, as we shall see.
The paragraph-points are numbered consecutively (1 through 67) and I shall use that numeration to identify the source-text in the Report.
Para. 1 notes that this is “the second periodic report of the Holy See” under the Convention (I had mistakenly referred to it in a previous comment as the Charter). But the date of that report of the Holy See was 16 January 2013, at the panel’s 1852nd meeting and states that the panel adopted this Report at its 1875th meeting on 31 January 2014. Perhaps it’s a typo, but there’s an entire year’s difference there.
Para. 2 notes that due to the “considerable delay” in the Holy See’s submission of its (apparently required – see more below) report, the panel was delayed in reviewing the Holy See’s compliance “for 14 years”. And nothing further. In that entire period, the panel did not take any further action? Or has it been only very recently that the panel suddenly decided that the Holy See actually constituted a “State Signatory” and “State Party” subject to the reporting requirements? (See more below on this point.)
Para. 8 demonstrates how the panel has resolved (to its own satisfaction, at least) the status of the Holy See/Vatican City state in terms of being a “State Party” to the Convention: while, the Report acknowledges, the Holy See has a “dual nature” as both the Vatican City State and a “sovereign subject of international law” (which doesn’t actually cover the question posed by the Convention itself, as I noted in a prior comment), and while the Report acknowledges that “bishops and major superiors of religious institutes do not act as delegates or representatives of the Roman Pontiff”, yet the panel notes that “subordinates in Catholic religious orders are bound by obedience to the Pope in accordance with Canons 331 and 590”.
(Canon 331 establishes that the Petrine Office “abides in the Bishop of the Church of Rome … who is the Pastor of the universal Church here on earth” – but that immediately raises the question as to the nature of this ‘power’ as Peter’s successor and as “Pastor”, and thus what sort of ‘power’ it is which the papal Office possesses as “supreme, full, universal and immediate ordinary power in the Church”. And Canon 580 seems a stretch indeed – its text in its entirety reads “The aggregation of one consecrated institute of religious life to another is reserved to the competent authority of the aggregating institute, always safeguarding the canonical autonomy of the other institute” – go figure.)
Now all of this is a stretch indeed, and it occurs here in the vital question of whether there is or ever was a reporting obligation incumbent upon the Vatican at all in this matter. Because the Report is trying to make the case that since (some) “subordinates in Catholic religious orders” are indeed (individually) “bound by obedience to the Pope” then somehow – the Report would like us to think – that means that the Pope does indeed command the equivalent of a national-allegiance and thus the Vatican is eligible for classification as a “State Signatory” or “State Party”, because this ‘allegiance’ (which actually applies to only a relatively very few clerics) somehow makes the Vatican the equivalent of their ‘government’ and thus – so this chock-a-block legal interpretation goes in the Report – the Vatican is indeed a ‘government’ with sovereign (and thus government-type) authority on all its members. And thus, as a ‘government’, the Vatican falls under the reporting obligation as outlined in the Convention as “the supreme power of the Catholic Church through individuals and institutions placed under its authority”.
You might be able to make a case that on these terms the Vatican is the ‘government’ for those individuals around the world under a vow of holy obedience (called, for example, in the Jesuits ‘the Fourth Vow’) to the Pope, but you can’t move – on these terms – to then claim that every cleric and every institution in the universal Catholic Church is under the ‘governmental’ authority of the Vatican. So this legal-construction fails on its own terms.
Additionally, that “ordinary” power in Canon 331 has a complicated definition all its own. And the Church does not have the governmental power to put somebody in prison the way a government can nor to tell somebody to jump off a bridge or out of an airplane or to put themselves in harm’s way (they can do that in a government’s military). So the type of “power” – even in its fullness – that an Ordinary possesses is not at all the same as the power a government possesses, even if it is a constitutionally-limited government.
The Report’s clunky-construction of legal theorizing is quite a stretch. But it was essential to somehow cover this base before the Report could get down to its agenda.
However, if it fails – and from what I can see in the text of this Report it does – then the rest of the exercise is moot.
But a careful adherence to law and ‘words’ has never stopped the Abuseniks or their Stampede and – by amazing coincidence – it’s not going to stop the panel from going on with the show.
Para. 9 expresses the Committee’s regrets that “most of the recommendations” from its 1995 list “have not been fully addressed”. Again, why has it taken 19 years for the panel/Committee to get around to this putative delinquency? And if those “recommendations” included changing the Church’s theology, philosophy and law on such matters as abortion, family-planning, homosexuality and other such topics as it mentions in this Report, then who can be surprised and what did they expect?
Para. 10 gives us a neat example of both the type of agenda the panel is working on and just how coded-phraseology works in this universe of discourse: it wants to see implementation of its recommendations in all those matters “related to non-discrimination, children’s right to express their views and family matters” [italics mine].
“Non-discrimination” may well include the question of legitimacy or illegitimacy, or even the matter of sexual-orientation (and praxis?). “Children’s right to express their views” is stunningly vague and one wonders in what circumstances this is meant to apply: should they have driver-licenses if they want them or should they be allowed to vote in public elections? “Family matters” can cover single-motherhood, adoption, non-biological ‘parenting’ arrangements, abortion, family-planning, sex education (perhaps only in terms of children having ‘safe sex’ rather than anything so ‘judgmental’ as not-having-sex). You see how this type of game is played.
Para. 13 expresses the panel’s regrets that the Church – while it has made some changes – has not yet changed “its internal laws, including Canon Law”. The panel is going here for something akin to demanding the re-making of the Church along the lines of demands that are so very similar to general secularist or ‘liberal’ (as the term has mutated now) menus for change.
Para. 16 expresses the panel’s wish that the Church create some sort of uber-commission that will have total and complete authority for all matters pertaining to children (along the lines, I imagine, of what the panel wants to see done about children generally and about the Church’s theology, philosophy, praxis and law).
Para. 18 (a) and (b) instructs the Church to do so by both studying the budgetary requirements for such a commission and to do an “impact assessment”, which is nothing more but textbook management praxis – but it adds some filler and makes it sound like the panel is being realistic and down-to-earth.
Para. 19 acknowledges the setting-up of a Vatican Special Office for implementation of international agreements and a Commission (in December of 2013) that “will be empowered to receive children’s complaints on sexual abuse”. But it wants to also wants to see some sort of uber-commission that will monitor the implementation and respect-for “children’s rights” (which as you will see if you read the Report turns out to be a lengthy and hard-to-fulfill list indeed; apparently the U.N. experts have put together a menu of such “rights” that – as I inferred above – would make it difficult to deny a child’s demand for a driver-license or to vote or – for all anybody knows – get a credit-card and to fly a plane.)
Para. 20 continues along these lines, seeking an “independent” oversight “mechanism” (do they really mean a machine, here?) which will deal with all these matters of “children’s rights” in a “child-sensitive” manner and “with due respect for the rights and privacy of victims”. I note that here we see again some tell-tale paw-prints: if one is going to publicly declare oneself a “victim”, how can one’s utter and total “privacy” be preserved if one has gone to the public forum in order to lodge a claim? And in the matter of lodging such a claim, just what “rights” apply? And how do “children” do all this lodging and how exactly does any “mechanism” actually encounter and engage these children?
Para. 21 expresses the panel’s regrets and desires that the text of the Convention be published and disseminated in their native languages to all children under the Church’s purview. (Perhaps like American workplaces now have many official placards of various types near the water-cooler.)
Para. 25 – under the rubric of “Non-discrimination” – wants the term “illegitimate” stricken from Canon law and is displeased with even the current Pope’s comments on homosexuality, since – the panel says – the very fact of such thinking and speaking “contribute[s] to the social stigmatization of and violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender adolescents and children raised by same-sex couples”. That there might be deep reasons for the Church’s position, that there might be better (if un-congenial to the elites) solutions, or that there might be far more deleterious consequences flowing from implementing this agenda … the panel seems not to have considered. And Para. 26 simply repeats all that in different words.
Para. 27 breaks even more difficult ground: it wants “gender based discrimination” dealt-with. And – revealing some of its guiding theory here – the panel does not accept the primacy of the Church’s acknowledged concerns for “complementarity” and “equality in dignity” as being sufficient and acceptable. Rather – following the legal and political agitations seen throughout the West’s recent culture-wars – the panel wants the Church to instead embrace the idea of “equality in law and practice”. This comes down to the old 1960s radical identity-politics approach: forget figuring out how to explain it or justify it – just do it and call out the government power and change the laws now. Readers may draw upon their own thoughts and consider this proposal.
Para. 28 continues along that line, demanding that the Church adopt a “rights-based approach” to “address the discrimination” that “might challenge the equality” in the relationship-between and education-of “girls and boys”. It also wants the Holy See to “take active measures to remove all gender-stereotyping” from all Catholic school textbooks.
It may have occurred to readers here that we are well into this document and haven’t really heard the panel say much about the Abuse Matter.
So far, what we have seen is a far more comprehensive criticism of the Church from the point of view of the currently-regnant secular-elitist stance; the panel up to this point provides a reliably comprehensive menu of much of what the secular-elitist stance has wanted to see happen in the Church for half a century now. And – in a tactic that we have so often seen in the Abusenik Stampede – it is using “the children” or “the rights of children” as the front for imposing (if it can) its agenda.
In my next comment I will get into the material in the Report that deals more specifically with the Abuse Matter.
http://tbinternet.ohchr.org/Treaties/CRC/Shared%20Documents/VAT/CRC_C_VAT_CO_2_16302_E.pdf
Continuing with the U.N. panel’s Report.
Para. 29 expresses the panel’s concern that “in dealing with allegations of child sexual abuse” the Church has “placed the preservation of the reputation of the Church and the protection of the perpetrators above children’s best interests”, adding without supporting reference “as observed by several national commissions of inquiry”. But I have mentioned the problems with establishing the veracity of such allegations, especially under the conditions of the Stampede (a reality which the panel seems not to have taken-into account). At any rate, the panel carries-on as if the Dallas Charter as subsequently enhanced did not exist.
But then the Report moves away from the Abuse Matter. Para. 31 the panel tells us that it “is concerned that the Holy See restrictively interprets children’s rights to express their views in all matters affecting them, as well as their freedom of expression, association, and religion”. This is a confounding comment and it makes one wonder if any of the panel members are parents. How does one – as a parent or as an organization or as a religion – actually and practically fulfill any of these “rights”? (One possible explanation: the panel knows all too well that “children” aren’t going to be doing any lodging and any talking in any of this, but rather that Correctly-trained adults (with whatever agendas) will actually be surfing these the waves created by these “rights”.)
And this entire gambit is reinforced in Para. 32: the Holy See is ‘reminded’ that “the right of children to freely express their views constitutes one of the most essential elements of children’s dignity” and ensuring the fulfillment of this “right” “leaves no leeway for the discretion of the States parties” [sic].
Again, how – given the lack of development of the pre-adult brain in “children” – can this possibly be done by any government or organization? (Of course, Catholic readers will also note that in the panel’s view of things, the dignity of children has nothing to do nor any basis-in their having been created in the Image of God nor because of the possession of a soul; yet the only other basis – the physical and material brain itself – is hardly well-developed for quite some time in the young human, and even then requires the help of adults to form the character and the habits of the young human.) This Paragraph’s four subsections give advice on how the panel thinks parents and organizations can “freely express their views”, in the family or organizational setting.
Para. 33 – rightly enough – expresses concern for the illicitly-conceived children of priests and their welfare. I’m sure that there are instances of this, but can the numbers of such children actually be large? The panel also pooh-poohs any “confidentiality agreements” by which the mothers of such children can receive financial support – yet, as we have seen in the Stampede, if word got out that one could walk up to the door and claim one’s child is the child of a priest without any need for having one’s “dignity” or “privacy” invaded by checking the story … what consequences might then be set in train? Still, if the paternity can be proved, then the panel’s recommendation here is sound.
But in Para. 34, the panel wants the Church to “assess” how many of such children (Para. 33) there are. Just how to make that “assessment” without violating other “rights” is a problem of practicality that the panel sails over with confident aplomb. It also wants any “confidentiality” be done away-with, but that apparently only works one-way.
Under the rubric of “the right to identity” the panel in Para.35 “is concerned” about the Church’s long practice of “baby-boxes”, where parents of newborns can anonymously leave the child at an orphanage (rather than let the child die or suffer the privations accruing from an unwanted existence). The panel’s “concern” apparently doesn’t take the alternative prospects for the child’s future into consideration.
The panel continues the thought in Para. 36: the Church, the panel feels, should “cooperate in studies to determine the root causes of anonymous abandonment of babies”. And what of the future of infants put in such a position while well-remunerated ‘experts’ are conducting such ‘studies’? This Report reveals in so many places the work and mentality of what the Russians used to call ‘apparatchiks’. So charmingly Soviet, this panel.
Under the rubric of “violence and torture toward children” the panel (Para. 37) wants the Magdalene Laundries case looked-into. Because, the panel says, such “girls” were forced to work “in slavery like [sic] conditions” (slavery as in child-slavery, just for that extra metaphorical oomph). The various subsections of this paragraph reveal nothing more than how little the panel is current on investigations into the alleged ‘slavery’. Para. 38 continues this demonstration.
Para. 39 informs the Holy See and the world that the panel has absolutely zero-tolerance for any form of “corporal punishment”, and no matter how “light” it might be.
And in Para. 40 it wants the Holy See to amend Canon Law to prohibit corporal punishment anywhere and everywhere, “including within the family” (and how the Holy See might accomplish this without being accused of being even more oppressive and intrusive in its religious requirements is anybody’s guess). But naturally, this demand reflects the secular-elites’ opposition to “the family”, which in this country has been proceeding along ever since a confluence of radical feminists and victimists made “the family” into the world’s and history’s largest on-going crime-scene. The panel also wants the Vatican to make sure that in Catholic schools only “an interpretation of Scripture as not condoning corporal punishment” is “reflected in all Church teaching and other activities and incorporated into all theological training and education”. Give that some thought.
In Para. 41 the panel is not pleased with the Church’s position that civil authorities should be called into family-settings “only in cases where a proven abuse has been committed in order not to interfere with the rights and duties of parents”. This position of the Church, of course, interferes with the entire thrust of the domestic-violence lobbies here in this country over the past several decades. The panel is also upset that the Holy See “has still not adopted a comprehensive strategy to prevent abuse and neglect in the home”. Has any country in the world managed to do so? Is such a “strategy” even possible, no matter how “comprehensive” its intentions?
In Para. 42 the panel nails down its thoughts and intentions: “the prerogatives of the parents should in no way undermine children’s right to be protected from abuse and neglect”. This makes the government the primary authority in the raising (and educating) of children, which echoes actual totalitarian social theory of both Right and Left.
In the sub-sections of this Paragraph, we see recommendations as to wide-reaching social and cultural policies and changes that are clearly relevant to actual governments’ authority, but not to the nature or purpose of the Church as a religious organization. None of them are applicable to a religion or religious organization. And one wonders if any actual government on the planet has managed to come into compliance with any of them.
And now, at Para. 43, we finally come to specific issues pertaining to sexual-abuse.
The panel carefully connects instances of abuse to “members of the Catholic churches who operate under the authority of the Holy See”, with clerics having been involved in the sexual abuse of tens of thousands of children worldwide”. No supportive documentation or demonstration of reasoning is provided for the panel’s embrace of this assertion or this presumption. Nor is there any indication of any awareness of the problems of distinguishing and establishing genuine victims from those otherwise classifiable.
Then, continuing quickly, the Paragraph rehearses some familiar tropes: that the Holy See “has not acknowledged the extent of the crimes committed, has not taken the necessary measures to address cases of child sexual abuse and to protect children, and has adopted policies and practices which have led to the continuation of the abuse and the impunity of the perpetrators”. We have dealt at length with each of these general points in comments on this site, and as I said in a prior comment on this thread, this bit from the Report indicates either a deliberateness or ignorance on the part of the panel, that it would put up such out-of-date material as if it were contemporary and current.
In the subsections of this Paragraph, the panel simply digs itself deeper into the hole: in (a) it speaks of the “transfer” of “well-known child sexual abusers from parish to parish” – although i) we have seen that in most cases that did not happen; and ii) that “well-known” is far too vague but does slyly avoid the problem of characterizing such priests as “un-proven” abusers; and that iii) the instances of this ‘transferring’ (when not simply a transferring out of any ministry near children) are not contemporary. Indeed, one wonders if the panel simply hasn’t dusted off material it wanted to use in 1996.
In (b) it claims that the “Holy See established full jurisdiction over child sexual abuse cases in 1962”, although we have seen even on this current thread that the 1962 Instruction did nothing of the sort.
In (c) the panel accuses the Church of merely treating instances of abuse as “grave moral delicts” rather than as crimes, a matter – again – which has been discussed even on this thread. Further that this approach allowed many who committed or concealed the abuse to “escape judicial proceedings”, although we have seen on this site that there were far more factors involved, and far more questions raised by such realities as the non-reporting by other adults who knew or should have known – none of which substantive issues seem to have detained the panel’s conclusions in any way.
In (d) – continuing it’s the derangement introduced in its errors about the 1962 Instruction mentioned in (b) – the panel blames a “code of silence imposed on all members of the clergy under pain of excommunication”, which – the panel claims – was apparently the sole and only reason why “cases of child sexual abuse have hardly ever been reported to law enforcement authorities”. If Jeff Anderson and SNAP had been asked to write this Report I doubt they could have done a better job of presenting the Stampede’s favored (and highly-strategized) tropes. However, in its only reference to any supporting material or documentation, the panel here makes reference (copy not accessible with the text) to a 2001 letter from a Cardinal in Rome to a French Bishop that putatively indicates the Cardinal’s approval of the Bishop for “refusing to denounce child abusers” – but without any knowledge of the case(s) I am not about to trust the panel here, given its performance in this Report. At any rate, it is one Cardinal and one Bishop and whatever prompted whatever was in that letter. Has the panel – with all its resources – nothing more substantial?
In (e) the panel notes an “official letter” dating back to 1997 to Irish hierarchs in regard to not-reporting to law enforcement, which is not contemporary and may well indeed be superseded by policy changes in the past 17 years (which is most certainly the case in the U.S.). Has the panel nothing better than this? If not, why not?
In Para. 44 the panel strongly supports the Church’s determination to “establish the truth of what happened in the past”. But I seriously wonder if this confidence on the part of the panel extends only to discoveries that will reinforce its chosen presumptions, and not to any discoveries that would be un-congenial to those presumptions. And how does the panel imagine this historical investigation to be conducted without examining the stories and allegations and claims? And does the panel realize what happens when you try to do that?
Within this Paragraph’s subsections we are proffered the following rather familiar talking-points and proposals:
In (a): the Commission erected by the Pope in December 2013 should independently investigate all cases of child sexual abuse. In an unimpressive vagueness, the panel does not specify whether that “all” actually means past and present or whether it simply means present cases. I cannot imagine how one would go about actually investigating “all” cases if that includes past cases (we’ve already seen what happens when you try). Further, in a trope taken straight from American vicitmist praxis, the panel wants to see “victims” (no explanation as to whether genuine or otherwise or how to determine same) sitting on panels . Thus, perhaps, SNAP or maybe any Abusenik you might care to think of – now there’s a thought.
In (b): immediately remove all suspected child-abusers from ministry and notify the police. Apparently the 3×5 for this one hasn’t been updated in a dozen years.
In (c): “Ensure a transparent sharing of all archives”. To whom and for what purpose? And does the panel have anything to say on the complications attendant upon its proposal? Or on the secrecy agreements in lawsuits that were demanded by the torties – might we have some transparency there? (Time-saver: not if such a move would reveal substantive and un-congenial aspects about the stories and allegants, now having banked the monies thereby obtained.)
In (d): “Amend Canon Law in order for child sexual abuse to be considered as crimes and not as ‘delicts against the moral’ and repeal all provisions which may impose an obligation of silence on the victims and on all those that become aware of such crimes”. But in the first place, Canon Law is not designed to prosecute crimes which are classifiable in the civil-criminal laws of various governments; it is designed to deal with the religious violations or the religious aspects of violations. The Canon Law cannot classify something as a crime if the Vatican does not have the authority to impose criminal punishments. And in the second place, the 1962 secrecy clauses – discussed in prior comments on this thread – were not designed to apply to child sexual-abuse cases generally. (And what might the panel have to say about secrecy strictures demanded by the torties?)
In (e): ensure mandatory reporting to law enforcement by the Church. Has the panel not heard of the Dallas Charter developments? And what of the ever-more curious problem of non-clerical adults not-reporting?
In (f): “Ensure that” all clerics and Church-workers of any kind are made aware of their “reporting requirements” and of the fact – declares the panel – that “in case of conflict, these obligations prevail over Canon Law provisions”. This requirement is based on a vision of a reality long-past and the panel is once again apparently not aware of how the Church’s requirements are now structured.
In Para. 46 (b) I point out this bit: “Develop a comprehensive national strategy for … “ Clearly, whoever wrote this Report was thinking of a national government and cutting-and-pasting under that rubric.
Para. 53 urges the “deinstitutionalization” of all children placed in Catholic institutions “and for the reunification with their families, where possible”. The orphans, the abandoned, the anonymously abandoned, the unwell or permanently-challenged? Behind this proposal, I think, lies the lurid Cartoon that the Church is holding innumerable children in pens, hiding them from the world and in defiance of the wishes of their families and loved-ones. Children under the age of three should not be placed in institutions at all, but – one wonders and asks – where shall such children go?
Para. 55 wants the Church to “review its position on abortion”.
Paras. 56 and 57 take up what the panel wants to see the Church do in regard to adolescents, HIV/AIDS, and sexual training that – but of course – includes intensive training in how to enjoy sex safely but not anything about how to master one’s deployment of that human urge or why one might consider it well-advised to do so. Readers may consider these Paragraphs as they will.
The concluding Paragraphs concern themselves with various details; the Vatican’s next Report is due in 2017 (presuming, of course, among other possible things that the panel’s rather iffy interpretation of the Vatican’s reporting responsibility isn’t overridden by higher UN authority in the meantime).
Well, that’s my take on the Report. I think the NCRep article we got (courtesy of “Dennis”) actually gives much food for thought, and I am very grateful for the lead to a hyperlink that has finally yielded the text of the Report.
You are hiding. What's the need? Obviously there's something about you and Dufus that you don't want known. Like who you are for one and what you do for a living for another. Why the need to hide? The two who insult the most here don't want it known who they are. They pretend to be truth tellers but they won't even say who they are. They libel and slander and hide. Does that sound like they are on the side of the angels in this debate?
Do you question the results or analyses of any entity- say, a computer output or a numerical model output, a multiauthored scientific study?
"What difference does it make", who we are, other than your inability to be able to launch into a diatribe of personal assassination based upon 'who we are'? Respond to our words, theories, analyses, concepts and statements and worry less about who or what we are.
We are the loyal opposition, deal with it.
Hey I never said any these clowns were twirling moustaches. My perp was one of the nicest guys you'd ever meet, very popular but he still raped me. I think maybe the bosses didn't know who was telling the truth, us or the perps. The problem is they erred on the side of perp priests and left us underage children to sink or sink. They tried to fix the abusers and give them a new clean shot at their careers all the while ignoring the raped children.
THAT IS WHY YOU ARE WRONG. THAT IS WHY YOU ARE NOT WELL LIKED.
Who says we're not 'well liked' – you? Who are you, aside from a mere 2.5% of the worlds population?
Who are you and your silly and/or blighted and misguided cohorts in atheist, pagan, Islamic and animalistic Asia, Africa, eastern Europe [incl. all nations of the mideast] and South and Central America, as well as most non-coastal states in the US? Who are you anywhere but the Christian, industrial, capitalistic, western nations, which comprise a minority, worldwide? How long would you and your demands survive in any of these non-Christian nations were it not for our morals, ethics, philosophy and laws that protect your sorry asses? Ask Russia, they'll gladly tell you.
Children were not raped in the Church; but, homosexual priests did play 'tiddly-winks' with completely willing [and hormonal] adolescent homosexual teenagers- which is a crime in many states and nations. NAMBLA, a fairly recently politically amputated appendage of the LGBT community, seems to have nailed the dynamics of those typical man-boy homosexual relationships quite accurately- go visit their site for their very truthful and revealing summary on the topic. They don't hide who or what they are, they are honest, if nothing else.
That you've been accomodated, and oftimes instigated, in your antiCatholic pursuits to execute your leftist political and idealogical agenda doesn't change the fact that you are wrong. Every witch hunt is eventually revealed for what it is – history will 'out' your dishonesty. Your names will be associated with the wrong side of this persecution, have no doubt. Perhaps your desires for generational reparation will be visited upon your own descendents.
Beware the vicious dog you've created- sooner or later, it will bite its own master.
I for one have that rolled up newspaper in hand to smack that dog in the nose. If that does not work I always have the option of putting it down.
The secret is having the dedication to work with the animal to turn into a family pet.
Delphin,
As much as you believe no children were raped in the catholic church.
I believe you are dealing with some sort of internal struggle. I would bet my life on it.
It is a lie to say that I believe no children were raped in the Catholic Church. Reread any of my statements on the Church abuse matter in context.
http://www.myfoxphilly.com/story/24666569/a-philadelphia-students-identity-not-protected-after-sexual-assault
A mistake or a new low within the archdiocese of Philadelphia.
When will this archdiocese and Chaput realize no matter how minor or how major something they do is, they will always be under the watchful eye of who you ask. Their very own catholics.
I guess I'm poking that so-called vicious dog.
And though gay people may be a smaller percentage of the population; we are supported by more and more decent heterosexual people. People,who do the one thing you can not. The one thing you are incapable of; and that is, EMPATHIZE.
Look up the word and memorize the definition.
Empathize? With what, sinful actions? I am not compelled to empathize with any sinners, I am called to inform them of their sins and counsel them and/or provide an informed and living example according to God's Commandments and His Word according to the New Covenant.
Catholics are certainly also compelled to forgive and care for all humanity, which is why our Church is the greatest caretaker of the poor, the lost, the sick, the elderly, the widowed, children, the addicted, and especially HIV-AIDS infected/inflicted beings. No other entity on the planet has done more for these people than Catholics.
What have your peeps done for any of them?
YES! Empathize with sinful actions, Who are you to judge? Stone thrower!
You can't even stop criminal actions because you relate to the perps so much. You support them but not their victims. Don't pretend you do. You don't have one church created program in place to help victims. Not one. Where's the great charitable church?
The phrase "played tiddly-winks" says volumes. The horror of our rapes called "played tiddly-winks". This is why the world judges you, wrong. Because you are.
Young (post-pubescent, adolescent) homosexual males, who in most parts of the world are legally categorized as adults, willingly engaging in homosexual liaisons with homosexual clergy (or any other profession) is, to put it euphemistically, playing tiddly winks.
In many of those same parts of the world homosexuality is outlawed and punishable by death. I think referring to it as tiddly winks possibly saves some homosexual lives around the world.
While Catholics may not approve of fornication, no faithful Catholic ever proposed a death penalty upon fornicators.
Your church needs to take care of the people it's raped before playing Lady Bountiful.
Yeah, so many homosexual adolescents found their statutory 'rape' experiences with their 'offenders' so horrendous that they decided to pursue it's sole purpose and function as their chosen and preferred lifestyle. Isn't that what all violent rape victims do, seek out that very same experience, time after time, decade after decade- as a lifestyle?
Typically, when one finds an event so horrendous that they claim it ruined their life, they avoid any repeat of that same experience like the plague. In those cases involving adolescent (not children) homosexuals, recreating that very same experience has been made their life's central theme and reason for being – the prime definition of who and what they are. How dare you equate the statutory (a highly variable matter of age of consent) non-violent crime between willing homosexuals with the act of violent rape against defenseless children and women.
You insult all true victims of rape; the violent, physically and emotionally destructive rape that women and children suffer at the hands of monstrous offenders. Shame on you for hijacking the very concept of this violent crime (another redefinition?) to pursue your persecution of the Catholic Church solely for her teaching against homosexuality.
I'd like to see the reception of your 'rape' claim by actual victims, within the setting of actual rape treatment, counselling and healing centers – where the bodies and minds of women and children are scarred and deformed - ruined permanently.
Who and what won't you sacrifice for your own selfish gains?
You are fooling no one here.
Loyal to child rapists and their enablers? In opposition to your own raped catholic children? Yes, you, most definitely, are.
Delphin explains sexuality. Yawn. This should be so not interesting. Almost as uninteresting as having fake celibates explaining what imaginary sky gods think about what's "appropriate" sexually. While, all the while, they hide and enable real child rapists.
Is anyone [sane, fair-minded, unbigoted] surprised that the NYT editorial board rejected a child abuse victims' (real child, 7 years old) editorial against one of their favorite Hollywood leftists (Allen), and, then published the accused abusers rebuttal?
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2014/02/07/NY-Times-Op-Ed-Dept-Passed-on-Publishing-Dylan-Farrow-s-Letter
No media bias here, right-o.
Tiddly-winks is as similar to rape as. Religions are to common sense.
Be careful now, your side kick is 'religious'. I don't hear him attacking atheism-communism, your 'religion'.
Tsk, tsk, such disrespect for your loyal friend.
Atheism comprises only 2% of the worlds population. Looks like your an outlier, again – are you red-headed or an albino, too? It's 'interesting' having outliers dictate what is 'normal' and 'reasonable' for the rest of us, you know, the other 98% of humanity.
A minority voice could only ever be heard among or above the masses in a Christianized culture. You should thank God that you were born in the USA, and not one of your beloved irreligious death slums. We might have to nickname you "Alpo"-
You assasinate Dennis and I and anybody else who holds you responsibile for your horrible behavior. But you fear your chickens coming home to roost?
Don't be ridiculous, faithful Catholics fear nothing of this world.
You two 'assassinate' yourselves with your lies. Keep up the 'good' work- your god, the father of lies approves of your actions.
Pardon me? Telling African catholics that condom usage actually spreads the HIV virus is moral how?
Telling African Catholics that practicing monogamy in marriage and celibacy/abstinence outside of marriage is correct [moral, ethical] Catholic guidance. Telling African Catholics that using a condom is 'safe' with a failure rate of 12-14% (at best) is playing Russian Roulette with innocent lives. And, for what – to sustain bad [unhealthy, immoral] behavior?
Africans have choices; they can choose to follow Catholic teaching, stay with their animist traditions or follow Islam. They probably looked to western civilization's incredible advances to decide to follow Jesus Christ's teachings. Good Choice!
Delphin,
You not only said children were not raped in the church but in your wording of your last comment you blame the victims for their attack.
Is everyone reading the same comment by Delphin on 2/8/14 at 7:31pm as I am.
I passed my computer around for people to read the third paragraph first sentence and it seems they are all getting the same meaning as I did.
Maybe the words are changing by the time he hits the post comment tab, TMR approves of the comment, they post it, hits my router, and can been seen on my computer screen.
There maybe no football games on today, but Delphin will entertain us with his comedy act.
My statements on children vs. minor [adolsecent] abuse by priests is extensive. Since you and your brood have nothing better to do on a Sunday, you could review several months of my comments that clearly distinquish between the majority of abuse claims involving adolecent males with a very minor percentage involving children – those facts are established, I never challenged them. Since that is a theme I've often repeated, it may not have seemed crucial to the intent of the comment you cite to repeat it again.
If you are interested in the truth about my position, you can start with my comments on 2/8@1pm, 2/2@1:21pm, 1/26@11:56pm, 1/22@2:20pm, 1/21@10:20pm, 1/17@9:05pm, to start.
You come at every comment with which you disagree as small-minded and illiterate. You are a liar and distorter of the first order. But, I guess that makes you good at 'something' there, little guy.
Let me reiterate for those of you with learning disorders, I place partial blame on homosexual adolescents that potentially/possibly/likely solicited sex from homsexual priests. I never would blame a child for such an despicable act by a perpetrator. Did you get it right this time, Sparky?
Pass this one around the neighborhood, too.
What an 'interesting' life you've got there.
I can't forget Mia Farrow on the stand in the court room with her rosary beads in hand. Moses her son says Woody didn't do it. The court and the police and a son, Moses who is a therapist said Woody didn't do it. My opinion is that I have none.
And the son called Ronan, who Woody's supported as a birth parent, looks just like Frank Sinatra. Ronan, who Mia says just may be Francis Albert's kid. The fact that Farrow's case comes out at the time that the catholic corporate church is being held responsibile, a bit, by the U.N. for it's child abuse. And up pops a famous catholic's "false" or "true' accusation against the king of liberal N.Y.. How convienient.
Did some good father, rattle Mia's rosary?
I thought the 'golden rule' of abuse claimants was that you always just believed them, they get the benefit of the doubt? I didn't think it mattered who the claimant was or who was the perp- which must be the rule for the Catholic Church, only. Again, a double standard.
~~Matthew 10:28
Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
Delphin,
Is this not a belief a catholic should carry in this world for life everlasting ?
Afraid = filled with fear. Filled with regret or concern.
[edited by moderator]
There are 366 passages in the bible that tell us to 'be not afraid' or a variation, thereof. It is a major theme for the Catholic faith, which regards both scripture and tradition. I dont know about your denominations' interpretations, and, since you are one among thousands with their own unauthoritative versions and interpretations of the bible, I am really not concerned by or with them. So far as I am concerned, you're all seperate little herds of lost sheep.
Is your entire world taken out of context? We already know that when you disagree with a tenet or established law you tend to respond by making up your own- out of thin air, with no authority, rational or justification- besides your own selfish world view (including all of your biases).
Incidentally, the word 'fear' has a different meaning, biblically, than it does in secular culture (I threw that bit-o-good-news to you out of sheer generosity, it's a freebie- your welcome).
You must get lost a lot. I hope that you are microchipped.
Rather than have abandoned it, willingly, it is far more likely that you simply flunked out of Catholicism.
http://www.catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=2592
http://catholicism.about.com/od/beliefsteachings/p/Fear_of_the_Lord.htm
Typical bigoted distortions of Catholicism designed to justify your persecution.
Going on for so many oh-so-boring and uncreative years, already. You guys need a new script.