A couple hundred would be a good start
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It might be wiser to call a lawyer than the police (who, incidentally, are disproportionately Catholic in my area). Police and prison guards abuse their spouses and children at a higher rate than any other demographic.
I just can’t see it happening.
I suspect that are fears that changing such a long standing requirement might mean a loss of credibility or to some, a concession to the secular world. I’m also considering the effect this would have on something like birth control. Something like 98% of Catholics have used it, but the church is still firmly against it. Could they still maintain their hard stances if clergy members had to deal with the rythym method or the physical and financial costs of large families?
Edited to add: It would be a good thing it it they changed both stances, because it would allow for healthier attitudes around sex for catholics. I just know that big institutions, especially religious ones, are invested in the appearance of authority, and that changes like this are unlikely, and even resisted by members.
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I can’t tell if this is a case of someone who knows how to work the publicity machine trying to get away with minimal compliance, or if this is someone who is trying hard to turn an oil tanker around without breaking it on the rocks.
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Also, the cardinals and bishops need to prosecuted for aiding and abetting .
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And somehow the fixes seem horribly wrong.
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I think you misspelled “horsewhipped, tarred, feathered, ridden out on a rail and hung slowly”, but yeah.
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I don’t disagree.
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Just a series of questions from someone outside of the Catholic faith, so don’t bother trying to have me excommunicated…
Aren’t the Pope and God supposed to be tight?
Don’t the Pope and all of the Catholic clergy “believe” in God?
If both of those are “true” (although what really is “true” anymore?), then what makes “cleaning house” at all difficult?
Why can’t the Pope send personal word to the clergy stating that God has told him they will face Devine punishment if they don’t stop diddling children?
Could it be because God doesn’t really care what His priests do to children, and hasn’t directed the Pope to stop it?
Or that the Pope doesn’t really speak for God?
Or that God doesn’t actually exist?
Is it possible the Catholic religion is really just a mammoth, mind-controling, political influencing, money making scam that has been running for centuries?
Can child molestation by a member of clergy be reclassified as an act of God?
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I don’t know what’s so great about him. I seriously don’t. He’s still anti-gay, anti-contraception, anti-abortion, and pro-lying to children and overall a death cultist. He’s just the best of a lot of rotten apples. But still crap.
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There is one way, and one way only, that the Pope can credibly clean house. The church must turn over all available evidence against every abuser it knows about to every appropriate law enforcement jurisdiction all over the world. Then it must identify, to the very best of its ability, every single victim and make individual restitution to each and every one, even if it bankrupts the church.
Anything short of that is not acceptable.
For extra credit, the church can admit publicly, in as many venues as possible, that it has no moral authority and never did.
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It is, but as with enablers in power who initially publicly doubt victims’ credibility and throw support behind accused abusers outside of the Catholic Church (see the reaction to the entire #MeToo movement for recent examples), his initial bias is the kind of thing that discourage victims from coming forward in the first place. I don’t think he should be beyond reproach for that just because he’s the spiritual leader of a vast religious community.
Atheist here, but for the answer see my response below. In short, non-Catholics tend to have an extremely unrealistic view of the Pope’s actual power over the Catholic Church.
I’m sorry, but Papal infallibility doesn’t quite work like that. In practice the Pope has very much less than the absolute power that your comment assumes. And as your own comments imply, practical reality is what counts.
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Well, sure, everything’s relative, right? He mostly just had to not be a Nazi to be an improvement on the last guy, he didn’t really need to pull stunts like smuggling Muslim military deserters out of concentration camps to look good.
I figure since he sits in the cat bird seat, he must have some sway. Also, I would assume that the majority of the people running the Catholic church aren’t atheists…
So if they believe in God, why do they think preying on children will fly with their God?
I feel like not fucking your underage parishioners should be something you wouldn’t have to be told.
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I don’t think anyone here has argued otherwise.
I’m sure most Catholics don’t. Their Church though isn’t a democracy or a dictatorship. It’s an oligarchy organized around 2,000 years of superstitious dogma. Personally, I would leave the Church if I were them, but then I would never join it in the first place even if I believed in Abraham’s god.
My point is that the Pope should have issued this apology and more a long time ago, and substantive reform within his power is even more required. But the view of the Pope as the unlimited ruler of the Catholic Church is factually incorrect, however much anyone might wish it were so.
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I’m not talking about most Catholics though, I’m talking about the clergy. The ones passing along the will and teachings of their God.
I feel (and I know what I feel =/= what is real) they should hold themselves to a higher standard. Unless they really don’t believe in their God, or they really do believe that every time they rape a child it will be forgiven.
They obviously don’t hold themselves to that higher standard or this wouldn’t have been going on for so many years that it’s a core point of many comedians’ jokes about their Catholic upbringing.
I agree completely.
My point is that if their system works as they’ve advertised, house cleaning shouldn’t be a difficult task. Provided that all of them believe as they should. Which they obviously don’t. So it obviously doesn’t.
But, again, not my religion, not my Pope.
I’m coming at this from a place of ignorance; next to no direct interaction with the Catholic church, just picking up bits and pieces from the edges and from our culture.
To me, he’s just the guy they put in charge. Not the unlimited ruler commanding unquestioned obedience, but certainly the ruler. I feel his placement had far more to do with church politics than it had to do with God’s will.
I’m also such a pessimist when it comes to most religion that I think above a certain level of the hierarchy they all know it’s the longest running confidence game in history.
“Stick to the doctrine and keep passing out the crackers and wine, and the coffers will stay full. You say the people are starting to become intolerant of rapist priests?
Fall back and puntApologize and vow.”
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I don’t disagree at all. We humans are notorious for our hypocrisy and when you add in the fallacy of a call to an authority that doesn’t exist and can’t be questioned, well, that’s why I’m no fan of organized supernatural belief of any kind, while at the same time recognizing that it’s a basic drive in human nature that’s here to stay. I think it’s perfectly legit to call out the institutional hypocrisy of the Church.
In other words, cognitive dissonance.
I’m confident their deity doesn’t exist, so I’d say that’s a given.
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I’ve read a lot about this recently from a variety of angles, including practicing Catholics. It sounds like a lot of members have lost faith in the institution over this. Ireland, for example saw a dramatic drop in Catholic membership in a similar reckoning of wide spread institutional abuse.
Once, more than 90 percent of Irish people attended church each week. Now it’s only about 30 percent. That’s lower than in the U.S. One major reason is the avalanche of sex abuse scandals that rocked the Catholic Church in Ireland in the '90s.
I think a lot of Catholics are considering the depravity of some clergy and the possibilty that it can’t be fixed.
This case is, in many ways, a microcosm of the entire wicked business: the abuse, the cover-up, the continued abuse, the conspiracy of silence. But more deeply for this Catholic: the cynicism. The giggling priests — by their very actions — could not possibly believe in the Gospels. They were merely using the Gospels to commit unspeakable crimes. The upper ranks, by their indifference and cover-up, are also deeply suspect. There is simply no way to square a belief in the Gospels and enabling, promoting, and covering up the rape of children. All of these men come off as cynics, incapable of summoning the overwhelming sense of outrage any nonbeliever, or any decent human being, would feel in the face of this kind of accusation; all protecting their own ranks, all far more committed to good public relations than saving children. There is simply something deeply wrong with these people
I’ll add one final thought. I can’t help asking myself: How long has this been going on? More to the point, how would we ever have known about it until the modern era? The authority of priests was near-total in the past, especially in Catholic countries or Catholic communities. Any child complaint would have resulted in the disciplining of the child, not the priest. Concern for children was historically minimal, compared with today, and most countries have never had the kind of journalism that is able to go up against the church and prevail. And once you can see the proof of principle — a Cardinal who got away with molesting a child and abusing countless grown men for decades — you can barely imagine what happened in decades or centuries past. I have wakeful nightmares about this. Is it all a giant, cynical scam, as my old friend Hitch would insist, night after night, over drinks?
And that is why this past week has been so shattering again for many Catholics. We may still believe in Jesus. But precisely because of that, we can no longer believe in the church. No one is untouched. Even Pope John Paul II personally advanced and championed one of the worst abusers in the church, the Legionaries of Christ’s Marcial Maciel Degollado, because of the money he brought in, and the rigid ideology he upheld. And they made John Paul a saint! This is no time to shore up the institution. It’s time to open it up and cleanse it. We could start with Cardinal Wuerl.
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You are 100% correct and I needed to do my research before posting. I concede the point. Lesson learned! 
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Peace indeed!
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