That hundreds of Catholics don’t tolerate or support sexual predators in the priesthood is … underwhelming.
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technically, there is a difference between rape and sexual assault. But having established that “they aren’t rapists, based on the known evidence”, one does open oneself up to the distinct possibility that, “new evidence does, in fact establish that, some of them were, in fact rapists.”
In a court of law (provided, of course, that new evidence does not come to light), this sort of argument may make a substantive difference. There, the defendants may hope to mitigate their guilt.
But in the court of public opinion, “slightly less than totally evil”, is still quite a ways off from “a force for good”-- which is usually the reputation that a church wants.
He’s chosen that hill to die on?
Cool.
There’s one just outside of Jerusalem where he can go and make that literal. Maybe he can buy a potter’s field first. According to Jesus a millstone and the depths of the sea are also an option.
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Couple o’ thou years of practice, you get good at something, y’know?
This is why I left the RCC and became an Episcopal. We accept women, and really dig those LGBTs.
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The lunatic fringe may be making those statements, but the organization has spent decades enforcing those ideas in their policies regardless of what individual members feel at all.
Bill Donohue’s argument sounds like the kind of thing someone who’s intimately familiar with “not raping” little boys would say in their own defense. Just sayin’.
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Sadly pedophilia is well distributed. There are more pedophiles attracted to certain professions (such as law enforcement, school administration and the catholic priesthood) because they’ll be protected by those employers, but they’re everywhere.
That being said, we Unitarians take steps to prevent abuse, we don’t protect abusers from prosecution, and we consider it incumbent upon us to act to help abuse victims (including the families of abusers, who are also victims). I have spent some hours rewiring and painting in the home of an abused family after the breadwinner father went to prison.
It occurs to me that I should point out this is based on my own personal experience with the UU congregations in my area, and UUs are locally governed not top-down authoritarian, but I do not think my local churches are unusual in this regard. A pedophile would not find a UU church to be a safe base of operations, s/he’d almost certainly be caught and prosecuted.
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Well yeah, and if I remember right, and no altar boys (and/or girls) ripe for the plucking either.
Well, local democratic control means all UU congregations are somewhat different… usually a UU Fellowship has no minister, a UU Society has a minister with few or no administrative powers, and a UU Church has a minister with a strong leadership role, but anomalies abound.
I can imagine that in the churchiest of UU churches you might find an altar guild with child members, but I’ve never seen it, and I’d expect the two-deep principle would be applied to the leadership.
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Buddhists and Hindus get themselves into that kind of trouble as well.
There’s another thing that all of these scandals have in common besides religon…
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Yup a feeling of entitlement by religious figures and their organization that they are above the law. A complete contempt for criminal justice and civil liabilities.
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Pssst…I think they means the Mens.
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Ooo! Ooo! Teach, pick me! I know! It’s POWER!
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All of the above- specifically, patriarchal power with weak accountibilty structures.
Even Buddism, an ostensibly “equal” belief system isn’t free of it.
Edited to add a second link for additional context:
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