Rum wrote:Seth wrote:
That's ridiculous. Did you read the ACTUAL papal address that I quoted (fully and accurately)? In what way does he add a "defense?" He's pointing out that the entire culture, all of society, is just as depraved as the worst Catholic priest and that it's all wrong...and not just "worse" but inherently and absolutely immoral and wrong for children to be sexualized in the way society has been doing for a long, long time.
You've got to read the whole thing in context to understand what he's saying, which is not what you think it is.
Don't you think that's a bit ingenuous? The RC church set itself up historically as an example and held the moral high ground.
Did it? Well, perhaps it did. But the fact is that of some 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, only around 4000 have been implicated in sex scandals, virtually all of which took place decades ago. That's a drop in the bucket compared to public school teachers, who, it is estimated, sexually abuse somewhere around five million children
every single year.
An organization, any organization, is not defined by those who abuse their positions or trust, but that's exactly what Catholic-bashers are trying to do; tar every Catholic and every priest with the same broad brush based on the heinous actions of a small number of the approximately one billion Catholics worldwide.
Just as public schools, and public school teachers ought not all be branded as "pedophiles" for the malfeasance of a few teachers and administrators (who are just as guilty of shuffling known molesters around the system to protect the reputation of the unions and school districts as the Catholic church is), all Catholics are not pedophile supporters, nor are all priests pedophiles.
Of course the priests were just men suppressing their urges in whatever way worked (or didn't) for them but they were held in high esteem and trust within their communities and many of them were thought of as near saints by their parishioners in countries like Ireland, which is a tradition I know well.
And they serve a useful societal purpose in that regard, as religion is an important part of many people's lives.
In reality, though we many never know, it seems likely to me that the priesthood may well contain more than the usual proportion of child molesters than an given sample of the general public.
Nonsense. As I pointed out, there are about 4000 verified cases of molestation so far, out of a priest population of more than 400,000, which comes to 1 percent. I challenge you to investigate the number of pedophiles in a "given sample" of the general public and get back to us. Of course the problem is in defining an accurate comparison sample and then figuring out which of them are pedophiles.
However, if we look at it the other way, and compare public school victims with Catholic victims, we see some 4000 victims over a period of 40 or 50 years who were allegedly molested by Catholic priests. Now compare that to the approximately 5 million children molested PER YEAR over the same period.
You'll find that the Catholic scandal pales in comparison to our "trusted" public school teachers.
This is not to minimize the harm done by pedophile priests at all, it's merely to point out that using the spotlight fallacy to condemn all Catholics and all Catholic priests is a particularly weak argument used by Catholic-bashers.
The reasons? 1. Men who may have been sexually attracted to children and knew it was immoral may have sought shelter from their sexuality in the 'sexless' church and failed to do so and
Indeed. But that only points to their inability to control their carnal desires, and to a defect in how the church screened applicants for the priesthood after Vatican II loosened the requirements to qualify, which defect has been eliminated today.
2. Those with a desire to prey on children knew the priesthood was a good route to getting more easily inside their pants.
And this appears to be true. It's worth noting as well that most of the "pedophiles" were not actually sexually attracted to children, they were actually homosexuals who were attracted to young men (teenagers, who are only nominally "children" when it comes to defining the term "pedophile" accurately) and came to the priesthood as a way to gain access to teenage boys. This is not to say that there were not true pedophiles who sought out pre-pubescent children of both sexes, or simple sex maniacs who used the position of trust to sexually abuse both teenage and adult women.
But the fact remains that as these things go, sexually abusing Catholic priests are in the relative minority when it comes to adult sex abuse of children of either sex. As the Pope points out in his 2010 message, all of society, worldwide, seems to be mired in the sexualization and sexual exploitation of children as demonstrated by sex trafficking of young women and men, child and teenage pornography and graphic sexualization of young persons in advertising, media, movies and television.
I think you are quite wrong in your assertion that the percentage of sexually-deviant priests in the Catholic church is higher than in the general population. The existence and scope of internet porn alone appears to debunk that claim.
It seems as though it's just a convenient fault common to all groups (the existence of pedophiles and predatory homosexuals) that's being spotlighted against Catholics as a part of a general attack on Catholicism and theism.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
