Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.

[Animavore]

I've no doubt they will. I have uncles who believed all their lives leave and have no problem announcing their lack of respect for the pope. I would not have seen that 20+ years ago.
As I said in another thread, this whole sticking up for the church thing is a purely American phenomenon by American Catholics in competition with other religions afraid of losing members to them. In Catholic countries Catholics are incredibly critical of the church and regardless of posturing by certain people it is not anti-religious and bigoted atheists giving the church the most stick.

[Ronja]

I've no doubt they will. I have uncles who believed all their lives leave and have no problem announcing their lack of respect for the pope. I would not have seen that 20+ years ago.

That sounds healthy and good, in a somewhat sad way, too, because it shows how deep the whole unbelievably ugly fiasco has cut ordinary catholics. I find it very easy to understand why they would feel that their church has failed them to an absolutely unacceptable and unforgivable extent.

As you said earlier, the catholic church, as an organization, made this bed themselves. That they are now trying to pretend that it is not theirs to lie in is both plain stupid and deeply insulting to the victims and their near and dear, and ordinary people, catholics and non-catholics alike, are seeing right through their attempts to blow smoke in our eyes.

As I said in another thread, this whole sticking up for the church thing is a purely American phenomenon by American Catholics in competition with other religions afraid of losing members to them. In Catholic countries Catholics are incredibly critical of the church and regardless of posturing by certain people it is not anti-religious and bigoted atheists giving the church the most stick.

IME any religious organization that is strong in a society will draw more and harsher criticism than a minority church. Some twenty years ago the Evangelic Lutheran Church of Finland (ELCoF) got a real storm of criticism for, yet again, refusing women the pulpit. I was one of the deeply believing xians who then left the ELCoF - not because my faith was unimportant to me, but precisely because it was important. So I think I can relate somewhat to how ordinary decent catholics are feeling now - though it is easy to imagine that the disappointment and hurt must be several orders of magnitude stronger, seeing how much more terrible the issue itself is.

[Animavore]

The general sense of Catholics in this country is one of deep betrayal which runs deeper than the same incidents in a secular organization could ever hope for. People looked up to the church as moral exemplars and the holders of certain "truths". They gave their hearts and souls to them and of course they are angered by the rapings and damage control cover-ups. The level of shame is perfectly fitting for an organization which profits off shame.

[redunderthebed]

\

Quit disagreeing with me and i won't treat you like shit

There is a difference seth between the catholic church and say a sports club or teachers.

Yeah, there is. The incidence of child abuse in sports clubs and schools is orders of magnitude higher than in the Catholic church in the last 10 years, so, fail.

I'm a volunteer with a local mental health organisation i was required before i could become one to get a police check to make sure that i wasn't a pedophile or unfit to be a volunteer in any other way.

Every person who works with or has contact with children in the Catholic church is required to undergo a criminal background check and take a child-protection training course before they are allowed to participate in ANY church activity involving children, so, another fail.

Once i checked out and became a volunteer i was given a manual to read that told me that as in my role i was a mandatory reporter of sexual and or physical abuse that i didn't go to my boss that i went straight to the police. This is law in Australia and serious consequences could happen if i don't follow the law.

Precisely the same rules apply to everyone in the Catholic church, including priests.

Now the catholic church expects its clergy and staff to report it to them and to use canon law to punish them and to not go to the police otherwise they will be punished.

Not true. The Pope has explicitly directed Bishops and clergy to cooperate with civil authority in reporting and prosecuting criminal sexual abuse. I've addressed this misunderstanding (one deliberately created by anti-Catholic bigots) before. Nobody in the Catholic church is immune from criminal prosecution and they are (at least in the US) mandatory reporters, just like sports coaches and teachers. And yet sports coaches and teachers keep right on abusing children and not reporting it, in droves, and when it is reported, they get prosecuted, just like Catholic priests, of whom, in the last decade or more since the substantial changes in policy and procedure in the Catholic church were made, there have been very, very few instances of abuse that have come to light. Virtually all of the complaints of abuse are 40 or more years old, and the church is being given NO credit for the substantive and extensive changes it has made in how it screens, trains and supervises priests and how it protects children that are in its charge.

That is a cover i'm with you that most catholics and clergy are law abiding citizens and i'm not attacking them. What i can't abide with is a system and a hierarchy that covers up abuse and shuttles offending clergy from parish to parish.

Nor can I. But you must realize that virtually all such complaints are DECADES old. This does not excuse the crimes or the complicity, but it is no longer reflective of either church doctrine or practice, and the church is due some acknowledgment of the changes it has made to prevent sex abuse in the last 10 years since the scandal came to light.

Those who cover it up and let the offends off scot free are just the same if not worse than the offenders not to mention there has being many cases of intimidation and threats against individuals who have spoken up about being abused.

I agree. But then again how can one fairly judge whether such acts actually occurred 40 years down the road? Those who were abused should have reported the abuse long ago, and their delay makes it difficult or impossible to give a fair trial to someone accused of a 40 year old crime. Witnesses are dead, evidence is gone and memories fade or have perhaps been implanted (yes, it does happen) or modified.

All these things if pursued properly and aren't window dressing are way too late for generations of abuse victims. There was and you can't deny a culture of silence and cover up at one stage in time it has not completely made peace with that at all. I suspect that its because those at the top in alot of cases in their old age has skeletons jangling around their closet and they might of being either perpetrators at one time or even worse covered up those who did.

Whilst i agree people do overstep the mark with their criticism of the church with tarring everyone with the same brush. You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater to say that nothing is wrong or it happened a long time ago.

[Seth]

Damned right

Perhaps it's more evident now how seriously I take accusations, even oblique ones, that I support child molesters.

I'll give better than I get, I guarantee that.

I have never said you are a child molester. (in fact, in an earlier thread, I castigated someone who made that sugestion in a throw-away line)

I have never said you actively support or encourage child molesting.

I have said, and will continue to say, that your posts on these topics comprise a consistent defence of a group of pedophiles and their enablers in the hierarchy of the church.

To which you respond with a tirade of personal attacks...

Liar. That's not what you said at all. You're merely trying to backpedal.

Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.

Postby JimC » Sun Dec 18, 2011 12:19 am
Keep on doing that spin for the kiddy fiddlers - maybe they'll hire you as a PR flack, if they're really desperate...

This makes specific reference to child abusers and accuses me of supporting them. That's a lie. You refuse to acknowledge that anyone associated with the Catholic church, no matter how innocent of the crimes of pedophiles, can be distinguished from "kiddy fiddlers."

Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.

Postby JimC » Sun Dec 18, 2011 12:12 am
...
What absolute and complete crap.

Yet another example of your defense of an organisation that is a support network for pedophiles.

Again, you conflate pedophile priests and those in the hierarchy who aided and abetted them with the vast majority of innocent people who did nothing of the kind, and you characterize the entire Catholic church, all one billion 400,000 of them, as a "support network for pedophiles," which is quite obviously not true, and then you accuse me of defending a "support network for pedophiles," which is also a lie and direct insult.

Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.

Postby JimC » Sat Dec 17, 2011 8:48 pm

Seth wrote:

Ian wrote:Seth, this is a Reminder that this post: http://www.rationalia.com/forum/viewtop ... 5#p1070624 contains a personal attack on another member. Please refrain from such attacks in future.

When you tell him to refrain from saying that I support or condone pedophilia, I will.

I said nothing of the kind. I said, and still maintain, that you have been consistently defending pedophiles and their enablers in the church in all your posts on topics like these.

Here you explicitly accuse me of "consistently defending pedophiles and their enablers in the church," which is an outright lie, since I have consistently done exactly the opposite, and have stated with perfect clarity that I do NOT defend pedophiles or their enablers, but that I DO defend the vast, vast majority of Catholics and clerics who are NOT guilty of either child molestation or aiding and abetting.

To wit:

Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.

Postby Seth » Sat Dec 17, 2011 5:19 pm


No, it's not that you comment to the OP, it's HOW you comment to the OP, by tarring more than a billion people with the same bigotry and implying that no member of the 400,000 plus members of the Catholic clergy are innocent of the crimes of a few.

That's the bigotry and mindless hatred that I see at work. It's the inability to use even the smallest amount of reason or rationality to target only those who actually committed crimes rather than insulting "the catlicker church" and everyone associated with it. I take offense at such bigotry and mindless hatred because I know a good many Catholics and priests, none of whom are sexual predators, and none of whom deserve your vilification, including members of my own family.

When you make such vile and hateful statements and apply them indiscriminately, you prove yourself to be a bigot, and all the more so when you refuse to recognize the wrong that you do to people innocent of the behavior that you and I both revile. I point out the prevalence of child sexual abuse in other groups merely as a counterpoint to your insistence that the entire Catholic church and everyone associated with it are corrupt, evil sexual predators or co-conspirators, as a way to point out how your hatred is irrationally focused on this one organization and evidently is far more about your dislike of Catholicism specifically and religion in general than it is about sexual predation on children. If you were really all that concerned about children being sexually abused, you'd apply some of that vitriol around to other culpable groups from time to time and you'd make a point of excoriating sexually predatory pedophiles rather than just "the catlicker church."

And again:

Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.

Postby Seth » Sat Dec 17, 2011 5:09 pm

...

This drew a small number (about 4000 that have been proven) of sexual deviants (including homosexual pedophiles...as distinguished from your ordinary homosexual who does NOT have pedophillic tendencies, just to be sure I'm not being misunderstood as attacking homosexuality generally...which I'm not) who saw the priesthood as an avenue of access to vulnerable youth...and they were correct in this judgment because of both a lack of supervision and a misguided (sometimes criminally misguided) desire to protect the church from scandal, by elements of the church hierarchy.

This allowed sexual predators into positions of trust, which never should have happened, but which was certainly was not INTENTIONAL, as some bigots like to imply, where they were able to abuse children with relative impunity.

...
This does not excuse the acts or the cover ups, but neither do the facts condemn the entire Catholic church and everyone associated with it and brand every priest as a sexual predator.

That's just nonsense and bigotry in action.

And again:

Top

Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.

Postby Seth » Sat Dec 17, 2011 4:16 pm

...

I do not justify ANY such acts, but I do acknowledge the presumption of innocence, rather than the presumption of guilt that atheists commonly hold against Catholic priests, and I acknowledge that statutes of limitation exist for a very good reason, and that not every complaint of priestly abuse is legitimate, particularly given the hundreds of millions of dollars that are at stake. That's a strong motive to fabricate abuse charges against a now-dead priest.
...

That being said, where there is credible and sufficient evidence that has not gone stale and where criminal or civil charges can be filed against those who either perpetrated or were complicit in such abuse or cover-ups and the statute has not run out, then I'm all for prosecution.

I get quite disgusted with the inability or unwillingness of seemingly rational, reasonable people to make a careful distinction between criminals who happen to be Catholic priests and Bishops and ordinary, good people who happen to be Catholics or priests. The hatred, unreason, bigotry and prejudice is positively palpable here, just as it is in most atheist forums, and it's a sad testament to the degree of IRrationality that exists in Atheism.

I simply fail to understand why it's seemingly beyond the capacity of presumably intelligent people to use care when disparaging and insulting people when it comes to Catholicism to make sure that only those who deserve opprobrium and derision are the targets of such rhetoric.

I could go on for pages, but won't bother right now.

You have been deliberately and cruelly insulting and inflammatory merely because I choose to defend the innocent in the Catholic church, and in your mindless, deranged hatred of all things Catholic you are entirely unable to distinguish between those who commit crimes and aid and abet them and those who are innocent of any crime and are just as repulsed by the actions of criminals inside the clergy as you are. So, you see any defense of the Catholic church at all as being support for the crimes of pedophile priests, which is obviously not the case, and which any rational person would understand and accept. But it appear that you (like many other radical religious Atheist anti-Catholic bigots here) are incapable of being rational and reasonable on this subject. You've made up your mind in spite of the facts and have decided that unreason and bigotry are your only response to the defense of innocent people.

Now you want to backpedal and try to lie about what you wrote instead of just apologizing and returning to civilized and rational debate. Fuck that, you're not getting away with it.

[Seth]

amused, for once that's not funny.

God dammit! How many times still until the festering ulcer that is the catlicker church gets cleaned out and cauterized for good? People should be leaving the fold in troves...

Didn't you get the memo? People are leaving the fold in troves. You'll hardly see an Irish person in seminary any more. We have to import our priests from Africa and the Philippines these days. There are dwindling amounts of priests having to look after as much as three parishes.
They done it all to themselves and I have zero sympathy for them.

Sorry for being hasty and thus unclear in what I meant. To clarify:

People in the Netherlands should will likely be leaving the fold in troves real soon now, like people already are leaving in e.g. Ireland.


Note to self: posting when upset makes for poor quality posts.

And if that happens, then I'm fine with that. People have a perfect right to make a personal choice about remaining Catholic. The only thing I'm objecting to is the broad-brush condemnation of innocent Catholics and Catholicism in general rather than the excoriation of the few criminals and their abettors who legitimately deserve opprobrium. Make that distinction and I don't have a problem even with being critical of Catholicism as a theistic religion, because that's fair comment that I can live with and debate. But when you unreasonably condemn EVERYONE in the church and tar them all with the brush of pedophilia, particularly when you refuse to do the same to others who do the same thing, I have a perfect right to object most strongly to such unreason and irrationality.

[Ronja]

... when you unreasonably condemn EVERYONE in the church and tar them all with the brush of pedophilia, particularly when you refuse to do the same to others who do the same thing, I have a perfect right to object most strongly to such unreason and irrationality.

You talkin' to me?

[Seth]

I've no doubt they will. I have uncles who believed all their lives leave and have no problem announcing their lack of respect for the pope. I would not have seen that 20+ years ago.
As I said in another thread, this whole sticking up for the church thing is a purely American phenomenon by American Catholics in competition with other religions afraid of losing members to them. In Catholic countries Catholics are incredibly critical of the church and regardless of posturing by certain people it is not anti-religious and bigoted atheists giving the church the most stick.

It's anti-religious and bigoted to excoriate "the church" as if all one billion Catholics and 400,000 priests are equally responsible for the crimes of the few. You can legitimately take excoriation of the church hierarchy who were actually involved in coverups of pedophile priests all the way to the Pope if you can make the case that they did so knowingly and deliberately and I'll support you, but there are 400,000 priests in the organization, and to claim or imply that each and every one of them is culpable is just pure bigotry and irrational anti-religious hatred.

So make the case, but use some reason and direct your anger at those who are responsible, not those who are innocent. "The church" is just a convenient Atheist label used to tar everyone with the same brush because the Catholic church is not one monolithic, centrally-led organization like General Electric. The Pope is not the CEO of the Catholic church and he does not exercise direct control over the Bishops. He's the spiritual leader, and the Archibishops of the various nations have wide latitude to operate their diocese and archdiocese as they see fit. The American Conference of Catholic Bishops has been a thorn in the side of the Vatican for more than a century in that regard.

Are there individuals in the church going right to the top at the Vatican who knew about and abetted the sexual deviancy of priests? Certainly there are, but that doesn't mean the whole organization is corrupt, it means that in an organization with a billion members and 400,000 individual leaders there are a small number of criminals and their accomplices who need to be rooted out and prosecuted for their crimes.

As an Atheist, you may choose to criticize any religion for being a theistic religion of course, but to conflate the small number of actual criminals and accomplices with the vast majority of good, caring, loving people who just want to practice their religion peaceably and then try to use that fallacy to generally condemn Catholics is neither reasonable nor rational, it's just bigotry and mindless hatred.

Just consider the fact that there is child abuse going on, and being covered up in other religions, and how little comment there is on that, as evidence of the degree of prejudice and bigotry being shown towards Catholicism.

[Seth]

... when you unreasonably condemn EVERYONE in the church and tar them all with the brush of pedophilia, particularly when you refuse to do the same to others who do the same thing, I have a perfect right to object most strongly to such unreason and irrationality.

You talkin' to me?

You betcha I am.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Without the consent and permission of the parents this would not go on.

[Ronja]

And where did I ever accuse ALL catholics of pedophilia? Links, please!

[amused]

As an Atheist, you may choose to criticize any religion for being a theistic religion of course, but to conflate the small number of actual criminals and accomplices with the vast majority of good, caring, loving people who just want to practice their religion peaceably and then try to use that fallacy to generally condemn Catholics is neither reasonable nor rational, it's just bigotry and mindless hatred.

Except that is not what is going on here. The attempt to undermine religion in general is what is happening. The pedophiles in the church provide a target rich environment, so to speak. Nobody is saying that most Catholics are pedophiles.

It's an accident of history that any particular church exists at any given time. Tearing down a randomly created power structure, if you dislike it, is a valid thing to attempt if such is important to you.

[Seth]

[quote="redunderthebed"

All these things if pursued properly and aren't window dressing are way too late for generations of abuse victims.[/quote]

Indeed. That's why one must report crimes right away.

There was and you can't deny a culture of silence and cover up at one stage in time it has not completely made peace with that at all.

I do agree with you in that regard, but it is also true that the Catholic church is doing what it can to rectify those wrongs and has distributed hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to victims. But it is also equally true that the Church has a right to defend itself against spurious or false claims of abuse and to demand evidence of wrongdoing before compensating an alleged victim. And that's what's happening. There are lawsuits and settlements and the facts are becoming known, with the prudent cooperation of the church. Such things take time, and there is still resistance in some diocese, particularly from older priests and Bishops who still cling to the notion that it's more important to protect the reputation of the church than it is to come clean and repent.

I make no excuses for past or present wrongdoing, I merely suggest that insufficient credit is being given to the great strides made by the church in the last decade both to compensate victims and reform the church and its practices to make sure such things do not happen in the future.

I suspect that its because those at the top in alot of cases in their old age has skeletons jangling around their closet and they might of being either perpetrators at one time or even worse covered up those who did.

That's very likely. And it's likely that justice will never be done to abusers or for their victims simply because of the age of the complaints. That's very unfortunate, but it still doesn't mean that the entire organization is corrupt.

Whilst i agree people do overstep the mark with their criticism of the church with tarring everyone with the same brush. You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater to say that nothing is wrong or it happened a long time ago.

Except I have never said any such thing. I have been consistently careful to acknowledge and excoriate wrongdoing by priests and others in the church, and I have never, ever denied that child abuse occurred within the church. This does not mean however that I have not also pointed out the difficulty of trying to prosecute, or even find the truth, in complaints of sexual abuse that occurred 40 or more years ago.

Regardless of the accusations made, I must still hold firmly to the principle of the presumption of innocence that this nation is founded on, and insist that before anyone can be accused of a crime, there must be probable cause that THAT INDIVIDUAL committed a crime, and before they are judged guilty, they must be provided with a fair trial and an opportunity to face their accusers and examine and rebut the evidence against them.

Believing in the judicial process and the rights of the accused is in no way supporting those who have actually committed crimes or aided and abetted them, it's recognition of the fact that false accusations of 40 year old sexual abuse in an attempt to get a big settlement check from the church are easy to make but hard to prove, and I expect proof beyond a reasonable doubt for criminal accusations, and proof by a preponderance of the evidence for civil claims before I judge any INDIVIDUAL guilty of such charges. I would hope that everyone else would do the same, but what I see around here is mostly a kangaroo court at best, with a "jury" comprised of bigots and haters who have already made up their minds that every priest is guilty of pedophilia, without the slightest shred of evidence towards that judgment.

That is the very definition of "prejudice," and prejudice is not becoming of supposedly "rational" atheists.

[Seth]

As an Atheist, you may choose to criticize any religion for being a theistic religion of course, but to conflate the small number of actual criminals and accomplices with the vast majority of good, caring, loving people who just want to practice their religion peaceably and then try to use that fallacy to generally condemn Catholics is neither reasonable nor rational, it's just bigotry and mindless hatred.

Except that is not what is going on here. The attempt to undermine religion in general is what is happening. The pedophiles in the church provide a target rich environment, so to speak. Nobody is saying that most Catholics are pedophiles.

I disagree. That's exactly what they are saying when they use pejorative terms like "catlicker church" and they fail to distinguish between criminals IN the church and the church itself, which is not criminal in nature. When you say "the Catholic church" you are referring to approximately one billion individual, including some 400,000 of them who are priests. The Pope is not the church. The bishops are not the church. The priests, pedophile or not, are not the church. The Catholic church comprises everyone who chooses to adhere to the tenets of the group and claims membership. Therefore, it's incumbent on critics to be specific in their accusations if they are to be deemed rational and reasonable criticism.

Nobody here refers to the public schools as "pedophile schools" or generally excoriates all teachers, administrators and parents in the way that they do when they insult all Catholics, even though the incidence of child abuse in public schools (at least in the US) is orders of magnitude more severe than anything that happened in the Catholic church. What this means is that the opprobrium heaped on the Catholic church really has little to do with pedophile priests and everything to do with radical religious Atheist anti-Catholic rhetoric and bigotry. As you say, and I agree, the pedophile scandal simply provides a "target rich environment" for haters and bigots. They would find something else to harp on if this scandal wasn't so convenient because they are all liars. They are not "atheists," and they do not simply have "no belief in gods," they are rabid, radical, deeply religious big-"A" Atheist bigots and haters who have their own anti-theist and specifically anti-Catholic dogma that they cling to every bit as tightly and irrationally as the most radical Christian evangelist preacher does, and they vent with all the same fury and spleen at the target of their hatred. They are in fact indistinguishable from the very radical religious bigots they excoriate.

It's an accident of history that any particular church exists at any given time. Tearing down a randomly created power structure, if you dislike it, is a valid thing to attempt if such is important to you.

Sure it is. But so is criticism of the methods and arguments used to do so, which is what I'm doing.

[Audley Strange]

I disagree. That's exactly what they are saying when they use pejorative terms like "catlicker church" and they fail to distinguish between criminals IN the church and the church itself, which is not criminal in nature.

I'd have to disagree with the last part. Since in essence it is a confidence trick. That it predates our legislation should not stop us investigating and charging them as fraudsters, who franchised the operation to maintain power over people as an illegitimate authority.