Questions for a priest.

[Seth]

Quite a few priests have been convicted and gaoled for sexual abuse of minors in the past few years. Almost all of the crimes they were found guilty of took place two or more decades ago. The church institutions have resisted attempts to bring the accused among their ranks to court every step of the way and by any means at their disposal, but eventually had to release internal documentation that not only proved the priests' guilt but also that the church institutions were actively impeding efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice.

And how would such documentation "prove"guilt?

By being conclusive enough for the accused to plead guilty rather than fight the accusation and by the church institutions having no choice but to admit that they have systematically shielded them from being prosecuted for their crimes by any means they could.

And is that the case in this situation? Is it the case in all situations? And what about self-incrimination? What about coerced confessions? The documents do not "prove" guilt under your suggestion, they merely imply guilt such that an admission is made. Without the admission, the documents prove nothing.

[Hermit]

What about coerced confessions?

The inquisitions have not taken hold in Australia. Nor has blackmail or any other extra-judicial means of coercion.

The documents do not "prove" guilt under your suggestion

The persons charged with the crimes and their protectors disagree with your assessment. That is why they did not attempt to contest the charges.

[mistermack]

I'm not sure about the timeline on these convictions.
The article I linked is dated 2004, and uses the word "allegedly" for the allegations about the 80s.

But it makes clear that the priest got two years prison for sex offences against boys which occurred after 1986. and he came out of prison in 1992.
So that conviction was for recent offences, not thirty-year-old ones. So the evidence was fresh, and the complaints were not made decades after the events.
So there is very little doubt that this guy was a serial abuser.

The conviction that Jim refers to appears to be recent, and for offences committed years earlier, in Tasmania. What's probably happened is that the prosecuting authorities had to take the earlier allegations far more seriously, following the uproar over the sustained program of protecting pedophiles by the Vatican. The evidence was probably always there, but sat on and dismissed by the authorities, as it was by the church.

That's one part of historic clergy abuse that doesn't apply to other types.
The protection that they got from the church, police, and prosecuting authorities.

[Seth]

What about coerced confessions?

The inquisitions have not taken hold in Australia. Nor has blackmail or any other extra-judicial means of coercion.

And you know that how, exactly?

The documents do not "prove" guilt under your suggestion

The persons charged with the crimes and their protectors disagree with your assessment. That is why they did not attempt to contest the charges.

Maybe he just had shitty lawyers.

Anyway, without seeing the actual evidence it's impossible to come to a rational conclusion about his guilt or innocence, so one does have to place some trust in the criminal justice system. My point being that it's always appropriate to question the administration of justice and I still don't believe it is either just or good public policy for the justice system to try to adjudicated decades-old cases sans forensic evidence.

[Hermit]

Maybe he just had shitty lawyers.

Oh, great - the "No true Lawyer" argument. The Catholic Church and all its subsidiaries in Australia and all its subsidiaries, such as the Salesian Order brotherhood, has always had the money to engage the best lawyers available in the country. The accused will always enter a no guilty plea whenever they think they have a slightly better chance of being found not guilty than the chance of survival of a snowflake's chance in hell, and of course that is their right. It turns out that despite the best legal brains straining to find one on behalf of the accused and their minders not even that much chance could be found. Frank Klep is not the only priest among the Salesian priesthood who lodged a guilty plea because there was no prospect of winning a not guilty plea. David Ropson was another.

Overall, even after you subtract the number of Catholic clergy who have been charged with the rape of minors, lodged a not guilty plea and found not guilty as well as those who have been charged with the rape of minors, lodged a not guilty plea and found guilty, that leaves a boat load of Catholic priests, brothers and chaplains who saw no way of denying their guilt and lodged a guilty plea. Are you seriously arguing that they did not fuck underage boys and girls in their charge?

[Seth]

Maybe he just had shitty lawyers.

Oh, great - the "No true Lawyer" argument.

You ever met a lawyer? Most of them are not only shitty, but are shit-heel vultures who will take advantage of your troubles to make a buck. I'm with Shakespeare when it comes to lawyers. Hang them all.

The Catholic Church and all its subsidiaries in Australia and all its subsidiaries, such as the Salesian Order brotherhood, has always had the money to engage the best lawyers available in the country.

Ipse dixit quod erat demonstrandum

The accused will always enter a no guilty plea whenever they think they have a slightly better chance of being found not guilty than the chance of survival of a snowflake's chance in hell, and of course that is their right. It turns out that despite the best legal brains straining to find one on behalf of the accused and their minders not even that much chance could be found. Frank Klep is not the only priest among the Salesian priesthood who lodged a guilty plea because there was no prospect of winning a not guilty plea. David Ropson was another.

Unless they plead guilty to protect the Church, at the Pope's request. Such things have been known to happen.

Overall, even after you subtract the number of Catholic clergy who have been charged with the rape of minors,

And how many is that, pray tell? Do you actually have a number, or are you pulling this oblique insult out of your ass?

lodged a not guilty plea and found not guilty as well as those who have been charged with the rape of minors,

You mean those priests who were wrongfully accused and are innocent?

lodged a not guilty plea and found guilty,

..."of course that is their right" said some internet pundit quite recently...

that leaves a boat load of Catholic priests, brothers and chaplains who saw no way of denying their guilt and lodged a guilty plea.

How big a boat? The Queen Mary or a dinghy?

Are you seriously arguing that they did not fuck underage boys and girls in their charge?

Depends on who you mean by "they." The estimates I've heard, based on the church's own exhaustive examination of accusations, is that some 4400 priests have been found guilty within the church of impropriety with parishioners and have been defrocked or otherwise sanctioned as a result of Vatican investigations. To put that in context however, one must first understand that this amounts to less than ONE PERCENT of all Catholic priests, who number more than 400,000 worldwide. The sexual assault crime rate among Joe Average Citizen is much higher than one percent in my understanding. Hell, the rate of sexual abuse of public schoolchildren by public school teachers is at least a thousand times greater on a per-year basis than the incidence of priest abuse, particularly in the last decade. Estimates of the number of US school children sexually assaulted by teachers runs upwards of 9.6 percent of students EACH AND EVERY YEAR. Given that there are some 50 million children in school in 2015, this means that some 4.8 million schoolchildren are sexually abused each and every year.

And you're obsessing about some 4400 cases of sexual abuse by priests over the last 30 to 50 years? Get your priorities straight.

One of the arguments I've heard from my Catholic friends is that after Vatican II, the rules for vetting seminary candidates were largely done away with in order to get more seminarians educated and ordained as priests because the Pope at the time wanted the church to be more "inclusive." What evidently happened was that a large number of pedophiles or latent pedophiles took advantage of the lax vetting and scrutiny of priest candidates specifically in order to gain access to young people. The Church was most certainly remiss in allowing this to happen, and yes, there was a degree of concealment and evasion by Bishops and Archbishops in particular areas of both the US and other parts of the world that has been attributed by some as being a grossly misguided attempt to protect the reputation of the Church.

So, to say that there are some "pedophile priests" out there is an accurate statement, and to say that there has been some corruption and cover-up of priest sex abuse is also accurate. However, one must keep in mind the magnitude of the problem and the size of the Church, which is comprised of more than a billion parishioners and more than 400,000 priests spread out all over the world, when trying to tie the wrongdoing of one percent of priests to the general accusation that the entire Church is evil and corrupt.

I do not defend or excuse either actual abuse or the covering up of such abuse, but I do recognize that like any large organization, and there are NO organizations larger than the Catholic church on this planet, and due to it's actual structure (which I doubt you actually understand), it is irrational bigotry to condemn those who are not guilty of crimes merely because they are associated with the Church.

In the context of the instant issue, my concern is not even with the magnitude or specifics of abuse by priests, it's about the neutral and dispassionate dispensation and administration of justice for everyone that is being undermined and damaged by the willingness of prosecutors and others to accept decades-old claims of sexual abuse by priests. Such crimes may well have happened and the claims may be true, but as I've said time and again, it is simply not possible to obtain a just verdict based on decades-old circumstantial claims sans forensic evidence. It is sad that any such victims may never obtain justice against their abusers, and those who knowingly concealed such crimes, but the Catholic Church is not legally responsible for every act of every one of the 400,000 priests that are ordained by the Church, nor is it, as a whole responsible for the actions of those Bishops and Archbishops who knowingly concealed and facilitated such crimes. Only the individuals who committed those criminal acts are responsible for them.

The Pope is not like the CEO of a company. He does not directly control priests or for that matter even Bishops and Archbishops. They may be ordained by the Vatican, but legally and organizationally the American Catholic Church is its own entity with it's own rules and practices that only generally conform to what the Pope says. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has been a liberal thorn in the side of the Vatican for decades, which until Vatican II was staunchly conservative and "catholic" it it's beliefs and policies (go look up what "catholic" means sometime) and which has consistently objected to the quite liberal course taken by the American church, one consequence of which was the ordination of a relatively small number of actual pedophiles who took advantage of the laxity of the hierarchy to worm their way into power and control over children in parishes all over the US.

So, when you say "the Catholic Church" you're actually talking about hundreds of largely independent organizations run by their own Archbishops that may or may not be "obedient" to the Pope and the Vatican in this or that respect.

If you want to piss and moan about child sexual abuse, I suggest you refocus your ire on public school teachers rather than priests. Your obsession with priests indicates a severe anti-Catholic bias that's not really based in reality. It suggests you're (mis)using the extremely limited incidence of sex abuse by priests long ago as a stalking horse for your radical religious Atheist anti-Catholic zealotry while you conveniently and utterly ignore the forest of sequoias poking you right in the eyeball.

That makes your faux concern with priest abuse somewhat less than interesting or pertinent to child welfare and safety.

[Hermit]

And you're obsessing about some 4400 cases of sexual abuse by priests over the last 30 to 50 years? Get your priorities straight.

Obsessing? Me? Now where did those goal posts go. I'm sure they were somewhere around where you said:

Wonder all you like. I defend justice, and justice cannot be dispensed 30 years after the fact without a shred of forensic evidence. Now, if he admitted his guilt, that's another thing entirely, presuming that it was not a coerced confession, which also happens with alarming frequency all over the planet.

and I replied that

written documentation of guilt exists that not only convinced most of the accused that there was no point in lodging a not guilty plea to the charges brought against them, but also that the various church institutions were forced to admit having systematically bribed, blackmailed hindered in any way they could.

In short, I was not discussing the extent of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, and much less am I obsessing about it. I was merely pointing out that clergy, and not just the individual JimC mentioned, have in fact admitted guilt.

[Animavore]

[Svartalf]

[klr]

Oddly enough, I was at a Sunday dinner a few weeks ago which had a priest in attendance.

However, it would have been impolite to broach theological matters while chowing down, especially as he is related to one of my sisters-in-law.

[Seth]

And you're obsessing about some 4400 cases of sexual abuse by priests over the last 30 to 50 years? Get your priorities straight.

Obsessing? Me? Now where did those goal posts go. I'm sure they were somewhere around where you said:

Wonder all you like. I defend justice, and justice cannot be dispensed 30 years after the fact without a shred of forensic evidence. Now, if he admitted his guilt, that's another thing entirely, presuming that it was not a coerced confession, which also happens with alarming frequency all over the planet.

and I replied that

written documentation of guilt exists that not only convinced most of the accused that there was no point in lodging a not guilty plea to the charges brought against them, but also that the various church institutions were forced to admit having systematically bribed, blackmailed hindered in any way they could.

In short, I was not discussing the extent of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, and much less am I obsessing about it. I was merely pointing out that clergy, and not just the individual JimC mentioned, have in fact admitted guilt.

No, what you actually wrote was;

Overall, even after you subtract the number of Catholic clergy who have been charged with the rape of minors, lodged a not guilty plea and found not guilty as well as those who have been charged with the rape of minors, lodged a not guilty plea and found guilty, that leaves a boat load of Catholic priests, brothers and chaplains who saw no way of denying their guilt and lodged a guilty plea. Are you seriously arguing that they did not fuck underage boys and girls in their charge?

Sounds like anti-Catholic obsession to me, in the face of 4.8 million schoolchildren raped by public school teachers. Haven't heard a word of condemnation for them, or for the Marxist administrators and teachers unions that shelter them and do pretty much exactly the same thing you accuse the church of doing, which is moving "problem teachers" around from school to school and concealing evidence of sexual misconduct...about 4.798 million times more often every year than all of the identified Catholic priest offenders discovered in the last 50 years.

Motes and planks, my friend, motes and planks.

[Seth]

Oddly enough, I was at a Sunday dinner a few weeks ago which had a priest in attendance.

However, it would have been impolite to broach theological matters while chowing down, especially as he is related to one of my sisters-in-law.

But it's okay to insult him behind his back? You suck as an ethical example. If you are too cowardly to say it to his face, then you ought to just shut the fuck up entirely.

[Animavore]

Oddly enough, I was at a Sunday dinner a few weeks ago which had a priest in attendance.

However, it would have been impolite to broach theological matters while chowing down, especially as he is related to one of my sisters-in-law.

Heh. My sister-in-law is also related to a priest. Cool, hippy-looking dude with long hair. Only a young lad too. Rare these days. Only, what, 3-6 ordained a year now.
I've never had a chance to speak to him.