Proposition: One reason the bishops responded so poorly

[hedgehog]

to cases of sexual abuse by priests is that all their training was based on significant misunderstanding of normal sexuality. If you're taught that the normal , healthy and holy urges of a married couple are sinful and that women are the gateway to the devil, how could you understand the full impact of pedophilia? No wonder these guys all reacted like a deer in the headlights.

[regnaD kciN]

1. I think that's a bit of a stereotype...

...living a celibate life doesn't mean that you automatically buy into a caricature of Augustine's sexual hangups, pushed to the nth degree.

[AngryOldDem]

2. That's not it at all

It was more like willful ignorance, and not wanting the believe the unbelievable, or think the unthinkable.

When allegations began to come forth about abusive priests, many bishops (upon conferring with their attorneys) consulted psychiatrists who more or less said that with adequate treatment, people with pedophilic tendencies could eventually be returned to normal duties -- duties that often involved being around children, teens, and young adults. That's why you'll hear a lot of bishops say by way of defense that they didn't know the true scope of pedophilia, and that they were given bad advice by experts. The bottom line in all of this for the bishops was, of course, to avoid "scandal" as the Church defines it. Avoiding scandal is also high on the job description of the hierarchy, so it's little wonder that they really didn't have the welfare of kids in the forefront of their minds as they began to see just how deep and wide this scandal was.

Therefore, you had many abusive priests shipped off to "retreats" and "sabatticals" (the true reasons for their abrupt departures from their churches were often masked in euphemism). One place that handled a lot of these guys was the Servants of the Paraclete organization out in New Mexico (now closed, I believe). There was another place in Maryland that was founded by Fr. Michael Peterson (also a psychiatrist), one of the co-authors of the Doyle-Mouton-Peterson report that predicted (almost to the letter) back in the early 1980s how this scandal was going to blow up.

There were other places as well, many out of the way and far under the radar. The priests spent varying amounts of time at those sites getting "treatment," then they were pronounced "cured." They often returned to their their old archdioceses or were relocated to new ones.

This is galling for obvious reasons, two of which are that most parishes that got a "reformed" priest were never informed of his history. (And the same is true of bishops who received abusive priests unknowingly from other dioceses.) When the scandal broke in Boston, one pastor found out from a newspaper article that his new associate was involved. In a suburb near me, a priest was assigned to a parish and the pastor there was told after the guy started, and almost as an afterthought: "Oh, and by the way, don't let him near kids." (The church has an adjacent school.) This priest has since been removed from ministry.

The second reason is the blatant disregard for the safety of parishioners, and their right to know just who they are getting when their archdiocese plays priest roulette, which occurs pretty often. It's a matter of accountability and honesty.

If you want a good overall view of this, read Jason Berry's "Lead Us Not Into Temptation." For that matter, any of Berry's numerous writings on this issue are illuminating, as are articles by Fr. Tom Doyle.

[Princess Turandot]

3. I agree with you, Angry Old Dem,..and I think the CYA aspect..

is also part of why there were larger concentrations of hidden reports from certain archdioceses, whose Bishops may have been a bit more inclined to keep these things secret than others.

I don't think that the Catholic Church teaches that heterosexual sex between married couples is a 'sin' and that women are evil temptations, GD discussions not withstanding. No one ever told me that as a female I was evil and had to avoid being a temptation to men. The 'sin' they teach relates more to who is having sex with whom than the act its self. (that's a debate not really relevant to this discussion.) I think the signifigant 'sin' involved from the Church's viewpoint back then, where people who believed this were sincere, was the sin of not keeping one's vow of celibacy. I do not know however, whether any of the priests sent to those centers were sent for having been caught have sex with adult women.

One of the more interesting discussions that I have heard about the priest sex scandals is that many many seminarians are recruited at a very young age, or begin thinking abt the priesthood at an age, where they have not experienced sex or have come to terms with what celibacy actually means. (I'm not talking abt the NAMBLA guy or the other long term offenders.)The most sincere priest whom I've ever known is a family friend of my parents, who was engaged to be married and then jilted by his fiancee. He entered the seminary when he was in his late 20's and knew exactly what life he was agreeing to live. Many of the victims of the sex scandals, if not the majority of them were young teenagers, I think, not 8 year olds. (The term pedophilia did get overused in this discussion.) A priest molesting a 15 year old boy, while breaking the same vows and violating the same trust and the law, probably does not have the same mind set as someone who sexually molests an 8 year old. Some of those may very well have been the result of someone realizing their sexuality after they already signed the wrong contract.

One thing that has bothered me abt the coverage of the sex scandals is that it failed to omit how many children are sexually abused annually in the US; the reports of Catholic priests doing so by no means are the majority of that figure. School districts have been known to send a teacher or two on their way rather than risk broad exposure. The other thing is that you know there were parents along the way eager to take $$ rather than report the event to the police. If nothing else, maybe all of this had the one positive effect of more people taking the molestation of children or other defenseless people far more seriously than they did 50 years ago. After all, it's only been much more recently that people have started to accept that the rape of a adult woman can be a crime.

[AngryOldDem]

5. Some other points

First, you're right in that pedophilia is a term that is often overused -- it's become convenient in any discussion of the scandal, and I'm probably as guilty of it as anyone else.

You are also correct in that a lot of this abuse stemmed from sexual confusion and immaturity on the part of the priests. That is no excuse, of course, but it is a fact.

One of the "good" things that has come from this mess -- at least in my archdiocese -- is a total revamping of the seminary admissions process. If you look broadly at the majority of priests who have either been accused or found guilty of sexual misconduct here, most were ordained in the 1950s and 1960s to early '70s -- some as early as the 1940s. Back then, it was common for boys to go directly to a seminary high school in their early teens, when sexual identity is confused at best, and then straight to seminary proper when they got to be 17 or 18. That no longer occurs here. Men are encouraged to finish college (including grad school, if they so choose) and then go through a long discernment process that includes many psychological and physical screenings and interviews before they are admitted to studies. Most have had long careers -- I personally know two priests who were engineers in their "former" lives who quit to enter the priesthood when they were in their 30s and 40s. Another who was ordained two years ago is a longtime widower with children.

The profiles of the newly ordained show that most are in their late 20s. This is a much more healthier pool of men, I think, than what you saw 25 or 30 years ago. The admissions process itself is much more rigorous, but I've still heard some criticisms that in some ways it is still too lenient. But it IS better -- give the archdiocese some credit for that. (If I have a criticism, it is that the newly ordained seem to be more conservative from year to year, but that's neither here nor there.)

What gets me most upset about the scandal is that the Church was not upfront in dealing with it when it was laid out pretty clearly in 1984 that they had a time bomb on their hands (the Doyle-Mouton-Peterson report is eerie to read, because it foresaw EVERYTHING that has since come to pass -- almost right down to the monetary cost). This was also an abuse of trust and faith, which shows in the fact that even the bishops seemed to doubt the advice they had gotten from the experts that sexually abusive priests could be reformed. Why, then, did most act in such secrecy about these men? Why did they not do the right thing and immediately report these allegations to the authorities, who could check them out through due process? (The answer: The law did not compel them to, unlike doctors, teachers, day care workers, etc.)

As for the victims and their parents -- the ones I know are not driven by money. Some have suffered in silence -- one woman for more than 50 years. Most just want what is due them for years of psychological treatment, which can run into the tens of thousands. Plus, many did not want to report Father to the police -- especially 20 or 30 years ago -- out of a (misguided) trust in Church leadership and its assurances that such matters could most effectively be managed by the Church itself. Again -- another abuse of trust. And I don't think a school system or any other organization would be able to carry on such blatant deception about its members as the Church has been able to do for so long. Part of that is because of reporting laws (mentioned above).

Memory fails, but I think in toto less than 1% of priests have been accused of abuse. A miniscule number, but damaging nevertheless.

[Princess Turandot]

6. You may have misunderstood by reference to money..

I was not speaking of current cases. I do believe though that there were probably parents who did take money years ago; it may been offered as part of a cover-up, not demanded by the parents. And you're right, there was always the issue of wanting to be respectful.

Before I was even born I think, a nun hit my brother on the side of his head when he was 7 or 8, for 'talking back' to her. She almost punctured his ear drum. My father went to school the next morning, opened the door of the classroom, and in front of the kids, told her to step out of the room. When she did, my father told her that habit or not, if she touched his kid again for any reason, he or someone else would beat the crap out of her. (But then again, we were from NYC's Lower East Side.)I don't recall if they spoke to the principal; my mother may have but schools were pretty lax abt corporal punishment in those days. The nun never touched my brother again; she actually started leaving him little gifts.(Most bizarrely,we later found out she was related to us thru marriage.)

When I was in Catholic grade school, we had quite a few elderly nuns who clearly had no patience for dealing with young children. They had likely entered the convent during the Depression. My mother grew up in a coal mining town in Western PA, and said that there were quite a few girls her age who joined orders for room, board & education, not vocations. They were no doubt some of the nuns we had teaching at my school.

[DemBones DemBones]

7. Speaking of "the NAMBLA guy," a journalist who read his entire file

says that what the media told us about Paul Shanley was NOT borne out in his diocesan file, including the claim that he was in NAMBLA.

She says everything the media kept repeating about Shanley was from a Power Point presentation made by the lawyer representing four childhood friends who alleged "recovered memories" of being abused by Shanley; the lawyer claimed it all came from his file but she found that was not true. The inference is that no other journalist actually read Shanley's file or they'd have known what was in there and what wasn't.

Everyone should read JoAnn Wypijewski's article, which was in Legal Affairs last fall and reprinted here:

http://www.counterpunch.org/jw01292005.html

[Princess Turandot]

10. Sorry..

when a priest makes a statement quoted in the article such as the below, he's worthless as a priest, whatever he was caught or convicted of.


"In a January 2002 letter to friends, he explained that "it was never with a child but with a highly sexualized adolescent, never with an 'innocent,' and was so non-traumatic then that some of the victims returned."

That's the NAMBLA rap, whether he was a founding member or not.
He is the last person that anyone should be defending. A priest should not be a pederast, for the same reason that a pediatrician should not be. Puberty makes adolescents 'sexualized'; it does not make them adults. It's why we have crimes on the books called statutory rape. I have no idea whether or not Shanley was guilty of the specific acts he was accused of via 'repressed memories', but he clearly took advantage of the power imbalance between himself and children he involved himself with."They came back for more." So do most abused spouses and children.

[DemBones DemBones]

13. I'm not defending Shanley, nor do I think the journalist is.

But I believe she demonstrated that Shanley was not exactly what the media portrayed him to be. NAMBLA supports men having sex with young boys; they have a sort of motto that "eight is too late" (to begin having sex.) The media saying he was a member of NAMBLA associates him with that motto, which is something he may well disagree with.

I don't condone his having sex with willing partners who were minors but that's not what he was imprisoned for. He'll spend the rest of his life in prison based on allegations that were based on "recovered memories." The details about the allegations make the case seem highly questionable at best. The allegations portray Fr. Shanley repeatedly removing a boy from CCD classes, over a period of several years, starting when the boy was six years old. And three other men, all childhood friends of the man whose case was brought to court, make the same claims. If the abuse actually happened, that means Fr. Shanley was pulling boys out of CCD on a regular basis, something you'd think the CCD teachers would remember. But they don't. And if he was pulling them out of class to rape them, molest them, whatever, you'd think a teacher would have noticed something strange about the boys' behavior after they returned to class.

Remember the cases in the seventies when preschool teachers in several different parts of the US were accused of sexually abusing their students, including participating in ritualistic Satanic practices? I believe they were all eventually exonerated; the children had been questioned in ways that encouraged them to make up stories and to support each other's false "memories." Parents were hysterical and that contributed, too, because they'd talk to their children about what they feared might be happening in the school and implant ideas in their minds. Not to mention that kids can imagine awful things on their own.

[Princess Turandot]

17. And I'm not referring to the court case..

I'm somewhat ambivalent abt repressed memory cases, although I do believe they exist. The only problemmatic thing abt Shanley's criminal trial was that they started out with several witnesses, but used only one. I personally do not know what that means: whether the prosecution thought the others made poor witnesses or if they ultimately did not believe them.


My sense of the article was that the writer was defending him, but I did read it quickly. "Times were different then". I had the impression that she was trying to imply that he was somehow ministering to confused gay adolescents, but maybe I misunderstood that.

That being said, I think Shanley is a piece of excrement.He's not worth defending by anyone exempt his paid attorney.It hardly matters whether he is a pedophile or pederast.

[AngryOldDem]

23. Could have fooled me

Here's part of the Boston Globe's coverage on Shanley.

http://www.boston.com/globe/spotlight/abuse/shanley/

And it is possible to do what Shanley was alleged to have done with the CCD kid and get away with it. The former pastor of the church I now attend -- who is now in jail for sexual misconduct, by the way -- did such things regularly to altar boys. Pulled them out of class, kept them after the school Mass, etc. There was always a "good reason" for this, which went pretty much unquestioned because the kids were with Father. With the tacit threat that your job could be on the line if you asked questions, nobody did. Suspicions were always there, of course, but you can't act on suspicions. And what bigger authority figure is there in a Catholic school kid's life than the parish priest?

And, I hope you didn't mean this the way it sounded:
>>I don't condone his having sex with willing partners who were minors but that's not what he was imprisoned for.>>

"Willing partners who were minors"???

[Tinoire]

4. Do you really believe that's what they're taught?

sinful and a gateway to the devil? Methinks you watched "Carrie" once too often ;)

This has been a problem with Rabbis, Preachers and Ministers of other faiths also and was just as covered up.

[DemBones DemBones]

8. Absolutely! The media drove the "pedophile priests" scandal and

drove it hard. So far, they've shown no interest in exploring the problem of pedophilia in other religious faiths, much less in the entire population .

A small percentage of rabbis and ministers, usually married men with children of their own, are pedophiles. Among Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, it's a small percentage of the elders or other lay leaders. Jews, Protestants, Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses also have a history of covering up for pedophiles in their religious communities. Pedophiles in other lines of work are also often married men and fathers, so the idea that allowing priests to marry would end the problem shows a lack of understanding of who pedophiles are.

It seems that deviant Catholic priests are ephebophiles (sexually attracted to adolescent boys) more often than true pedophiles, but in any case, it's still a small percentage of the total number of priests. As I think we all know, there are also some priests who are sexually active with adult partners as well as some who remain true to their vows of celibacy and chastity. If priests were allowed to marry, I doubt that the percentages would change much, considering that a certain number of men are unfaithful to their wives, not to mention that a lot of priests are gay, anyway.

The best protection against pedophiles has to come from parents; I don't see that ever changing since pedophilia has been around forever. Parents have to teach each of their children not to let people touch them inappropriately and parents have to avoid giving adults or older kids the opportunity to be alone with any of their children.

[AngryOldDem]

22. Whenever I see that argument

It seems to be the old excuse of, "See? Everybody else is doing it, why're you picking on us?" And I know many victims of clerical sex abuse, and some of their parents, who would take exception to your description of this being a media-driven scandal. The Boston Globe did Catholicism a huge favor, in my opinion, by bringing this institutional rot to the light of day. Now maybe it can be discussed and possible solutions addressed.

True -- sex abuse of kids is everywhere, unfortunately. But shouldn't the Church take the moral high road and do everything it can to eradicate that cancer from its own ranks? It could have done that as late as the 1980s, but did not. That's why there is such a hemmorhage of trust and credibility right now.

And I don't care if the true number of abusive priests is 1 or 1 million. One is too many.

[hedgehog]

19. Look at the reply above about how the current crop of bishops

was trained back in the 40's, 50's and into the early 60's. They were hauled off into seminary way too young and isolated from all contact with the laity male or female throughout their formative years. Females were just temptations to be avoided. Sex was so enticing that it must always be fought. Very few of them had any idea that as Father Greeley notes, for many married couples, exhaustion from raising a family and earning a living makes it hard to maintain a sexual life. We have friends who were talked into entering their young boys (10 & 12)into a foreign seminary "with special ties to the Holy Father" in the mid 90's. Those boys would come home for visits and admonish their female cousins to wear skirts, not pants and to wear long sleeves. Short sleeves were "too tempting to males." That's the kind of attitude drilled into many of our bishops.The amazing thing is that so many preists and bishops were able to ignore the distortions and work their way through to authentic Catholic teachings.

[AngryOldDem]

24. The bottom line still is,

though, that the bishops were given assurances by experts that pedophilia was treatable and that with time and the proper care, priests so accused could be returned to service.

Your argument about sexual confusion points more toward the priests themselves than with their bosses. You were dealing with a lot of men who had no business being near a seminary, let alone in one. With priestly numbers declining beginning in the 1970s, many archdioceses had an open door policy because they were more concerned about getting priests in the parishes rather than with the quality and the moral integrity and maturity of the men they were training. We've all paid a high price for that shortsightedness.

[hedgehog]

26. Wow - that is so not what I said

The term "sexual confusion" generally is code for latent homosexual. My point is that the bishops of today were discouraged from any contact with women and never given any modern understanding of human sexuality. (A lot of seminarians were raised in healthy families and were able to ignore the nonsense. That's why a lot of priests very quietly never say a word against contraception. Unfortunately in Rome's eyes that also disqualifies them from being bishops.)Regardless, it seems that the Vatican for years has been more concerned that the bishops support the power structure than anything else.

[AngryOldDem]

31. We're talking past each other

To my mind, the bishops' personal attitudes toward sex and women is immaterial. The main issue that brought this mess about was the **continuing** ordination to the priesthood of men who were psychologically unfit for the role. Part of this stemmed from the era when most of these men were ordained ('60s and '70s, with rapid social change and experimentation) and from the priest shortage that led many archdioceses to open their seminary doors to anyone who expressed an interest, rather than seriously looking at other possible solutions to the shortage.

The seminary is not the place to go to figure out one's own sexuality, nor is it a place to hide from unpleasant personal issues, or a place to go until one's life is in order. (I would say that this description probably fit most of the accused men who went through the seminary in the '40s and '50s.) Seminary indicates a willingness to seriously follow in Christ's ministry, which implies a full and unwavering acceptance of all that entails.

And, yes, protecting the Church from scandal is Job One for any member of the hierarchy. That's why it went on for so long and has become so unmanageable today. I often think "what might have been" had the powers that be came clean back in the '80s and did a major house-cleaning and public penance for their sins. One hell of a lot of money and bad PR would have been saved.

To many bishops, sadly, keeping the Church's "image" clean is above mitigating and rectifying the severe personal damage done to kids and their parents by abusive priests, and the tarnishing of the Church's integrity both with its members, and with the public in general.

[Xithras]

9. The problem, IMO, was one of forgiveness.

In the Church, once you repent and ask forgiveness for your sins, they are absolved and you are sin-free (as close as humans can get anyway). No crime, not rape, murder, or pedophilia, is exampt from this.

The problem was that, according to traditional Church doctrine, a person cannot be punished for a sin they have been forgiven for. When someone repents, it is not our place to question the validity of their repentance or whether or not they really meant it.

If a church pedophile repented and asked for forgiveness, he's spiritually equal to any other priest in the church. If they had kept that priest away from children after that, they would have effectively been questioning the validity of his repentance and doubting one of the churches oldest and most sacred practices...a doubt that itself would have been sinful. According to church doctrine, only God knows whether a repentance is genuine, so it's not the place of man to question it.

Essentially, these priests used the churches own system against itself. They molested these boys and when caught simply repented their sins...knowing that the church couldn't refuse their repentance and couldn't hold a repented sin against them.

I never understood why this was never discussed by the media when they were covering the scandal. I guess they just found the idea of Catholic absolution too hard to comprehend.

[Princess Turandot]

11. I heard this discussed by the media..

mostly in the context of why men as educated as the Church hierarchy would fail to realize in the late 20th Century that people who commit sexual violations will do it again and again. The notion of sin & repentence & forgiveness can only go so far and frankly, in these cases, while interesting as a defense, is incredibly embarassing to Catholicism.

Priests accused of molesting children are now being reported to the police by their archdiocese. Has the notion of repentence & forgiveness changed? I don't think so. What's changed is the understanding that the only repentence involved by these men is that of having been caught. Isn't repentence of the sin supposed to be sincere, rather than a mere recitation of its existence?

[Xithras]

12. I have to disagree...something fundamental HAS changed.

The entire concept of forgiveness is supposed to be that it's absolute...that it's a deal between man and God, and that we have no place in questioning it.

By these Archdiocese now turning in child molesters while protecting the traditional view of confession in regards to murderers and rapists, they are essentially saying that they have judged one type of sin to be unforgiveable and worse than another type of sin. This flies in the face of traditional church teaching that all sins are equal and that only God has the right to sit in judgement of our sins. They have created a conflict in their own theology.

The sanctity and anonymity of confession and absolution is either absolute or it's worthless. If it's absolute, then the church is violating the will of God by breaking the vow of silence and turning these priests in. If it's not absolute, then the impact on everything from the role of the Church in determining God's will to the validity of paying penitence before the taking of the Eucharist are called into question, and need to be reviewed.

I'm not saying that sending pedophiles to prison is a bad thing, but I think the Catholic Church has created a potentially huge theological problem that they haven't yet begun to address. It will be interesting to see how this eventually plays out.

[DemBones DemBones]

14. I agree that it is theologically problematic.

And I think it very possible that a priest might confess and be sincerely repentant, firmly resolved never to touch a boy again. I would think that some would be like that (though they might well give in to temptation again) while others were just gaming the system. It is a disorder, after all, and leads to disordered behavior.

[regnaD kciN]

15. Yes, there might be some that are sincerely repentant...

...but, even if the Church decides they should have been fully forgiven, that does not justify shifting them to other positions where they would have continued contact with minors.

I mean, if I'm a business owner, and an employee comes to me and tearfully confesses that he embezzled money from my business, I might, as a practicing Christian, decide to forgive him (i.e. not turn him in, fire him, or even make him pay the money back if he doesn't have it anymore). OTOH, I'm certainly not going to keep him in a position where he'll be handling money, or give him the combination to the company safe.

[Princess Turandot]

18. I believe that confession without repentence is meaningless..

and a very convenient thing to use to cover up the Church's sex scandals. Do I think some of the bishops believed these men to be repentant? Sure. Do I think many of these men where unrepentant? Absolutely.

The Catholic Church finally decided to stop sending organized crime members off to the next life with any Catholic rites when John Gotti died. (They had buried many of his predecessors looking the other way about the lives they lead.) I'd like to think that was not just public relations but rather a belief that if he by some minute chance was actually sorry for the multiple murders he had engineered, that he and God would work it out.

I'm not speaking of the sanctity of confession or forgiveness. I'm speaking of repentence. That's part of the deal as well. 'Bless me, Father, for I have sinned'. If you rape a child today, confess, then rape one tomorrow, that makes a mockery of the sacrament of reconciliation and the Church has finally realized that.

[Maeve]

21. I have to disagree with this, doctrinally

The problem was that, according to traditional Church doctrine, a person cannot be punished for a sin they have been forgiven for. When someone repents, it is not our place to question the validity of their repentance or whether or not they really meant it.

You still have to make up for the consequences of the crime; the sacrament only remits the eternal punishment, not the temporal (yeah, Baltimore Catechism talk, but that was my first double-check resource! Question #277 --"Why does God require a temporal punishment as a satisfaction dor sin?" "To teach us the great evil of sin and to prevent us from falling again." And in the note to #275--"Thus Adam, Moses, Aaron and King David were forgiven their sins but were nevertheless punished.")

More of a problem was that the bishops and other priests thought they knew more about how to "prevent another fall" than they did--pride, in other words. They were foolish enough to leave the alcoholic alone behind the bar over and over again--leaving them in "a near occasion of sin".

[AngryOldDem]

25. Is this the "seal of confession" aspect?

Which was suggested as a possible means to avoid liability by making a mockery of the sacrament? Another dodge was putting admissions of "sins" into sealed documents and shipping them off to Rome, thus making them off limits in legal proceedings.

The idea that sexual abuse has no further penalty than a penance does not sit well with me. This is why anyone who ever knew of such abuse had a moral and legal obligation to report it to the authorities, no matter what canon law or tradition taught. At the very least, the church had no duty or right to reassign these men to new parishes where the cycle of abuse continued.

[Cuban_Liberal]

16. Human sexuality was poorly understood, in general

Despite Freud, Kinsey and the U. of C. studies (among others), human sexual behavior remained poorly-understood; this applied not only to the Church's episcopal structure, but to the public in general. I make this statement as someone who has personaly conducted investigations into cases of juvenile sexual abuse as recently as last year.

Our former bishop, Bishop Ryan, was one of those who 'shuffled' priests from parish to parish, sent them to 'retreats, etc.; I've had the opportunity to speak to other officers who had the opportunity to interview Bishop Ryan, and they all had the distinct impression that not only did he not condone sexual misconduct, but that he sincerely (naively) believed that his actions were the correct ones. In addition to his actions regarding the priests, he did pay for counseling and treatment for the victims who came forward. Most of my fellow officers disagree with what he did, but they believe that his approach to dealing with the problem arose from a seriously flawed understanding of the nature of sexual predators, rather than from any actual desire to 'cover up' their behavior.

In John Paul's defense, I would note that he immediately removed Bishop Ryan after the late Cardinal Bernadin provided him with information regarding the state of affairs (no pun intended) in the Springfield diocese, and appointed a younger and far better-educated bishop in his place; our new bishop, Bishop Lucas, immediately put into place a program which referred all allegations of sexual abuse/misconduct to the proper civil authorities (the ISP and the Illinois' AG's office).

In closing, I believe that most often the actions taken by various bishops and cardinals simply reflected a poor understanding of human sexuality, particularly pedophilia; there was, of course, a desire to save the Church from the taint of 'scandal', something one would expect (though no neccessarily excuse) from a Church leader.

:hi:

[hedgehog]

20. Short version- so many of these guys were taught in the 40's and

50's that all sex is bad and sex is tolerated only for procreation; is it any wonder they had no understanding of the fact that sexual abuse by priests was an entirely different problem?

[hedgehog]

27. For those who blame the problem on celibacy ,

I would say that celibacy per se is not the problem. It's the attitude towards sex making celibacy a requirement that is the problem. This attitude says that married men are reluctantly permitted sex if they must have children, but only a priest unsullied by carnal contact is allowed to consecrate the host. Forget about women having any role. That's an extremely simplified description, but I believe an accurate one. It's something that has hung around the edges of Christianity for a long time.

[Cuban_Liberal]

28. Actually, the Church's position on sex within marriage is not that narrow

The Church recognizes--- and has recognized for some time--- that sex between a husband and wife has another, perfectly legitimate purpose; sexual relations between a husband and wife can also be an expression of marital love.

[hedgehog]

29. Agreed - that is the actual position - but you wouldn't know it if

you listened to the voices claiming to speak with authority. This is what lies behind all the codes calling this cardinal or that one conservative and liberal; what is the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church and who determines it? The fear that many of us have this week is that a group holding repessive views will try to turn the Church in that direction.

[Padraig18]

30. I harbor the same fears

I deeply want a more progressive Church, and not entirely for selfish reasons. For example, I believe the time has come for the Church to take a more 'worldly' view regarding the transmission of HIV and the use of condoms; further, it needs to revisit the entire question of birth control, because I cannot believe that a present-day Christ would tell poor people to simply not have sex, e.g.. The Church must once again examine the role of women in the Church, and the question of a celibate priesthood; in my short life, I have known sisters who were, in my eyes, far better qualified, educated and 'godly' than any of several priests.

I'll stop now, before I agitate too much...

;)

[AngryOldDem]

32. Me three

I agree with both you and Hedgehog that the choice of the next Pope will be a turning point for the Church. And I also agree that it is time that the Church revisit some of its stances, especially as they concern many modern-day issues.

The condom issue brings to mind a letter to the editor that I wrote to my archdiocesan newspaper in response to an editorial it ran concerning condoms and AIDS, especially as it concerned Africa. I took pains to document my letter to the nth degree, and in the end it was more like an article than a letter. In it, I said that it is irresponsible to deny people the means to protect their health, especially on a continent so poverty-striken as Africa. To my surprise, the paper ran it whole. In the next couple of weeks, however, I got slammed by many "good" Catholics for my opinion, one of whom said that if all those people were dying, then God must have a good reason for it.

<<Sigh>>