"Church Report Cites Social Tumult in Priest ScandalsIf the Catholic Church wants to know why Catholics are leaving it need only look at this sort of nonsense. The report wants to say that the real problem wasn't in the church. Oh no, it was in the sexually liberal external society. Our priest weren't trained well enough. The church hierarchy didn't pay enough attention to the victims.
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: May 17, 2011
A five-year study commissioned by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops to provide a definitive answer to what caused the church’s sexual abuse crisis has concluded that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality were to blame.
Instead, the report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s.
Known occurrences of sexual abuse of minors by priests rose sharply during those decades, the report found, and the problem grew worse when the church’s hierarchy responded by showing more care for the perpetrators than the victims."
Common Sense thinks there is a far far more likely explanation. First a patently corrupt hierarchy actively participated in a coverup of clearly illegal, never mind immoral, actions by its priest. The Catholic church denied the crime. Second, in many cases even after knowing of this action the corrupt hierarchy simply shuffled criminal priest around. Left them free to abuse other children. Third, a religious faith persist in asking it's clerics to deny one of the most fundamental of human drives. When you ask many thousands of men to do something contrary to their nature you can depend on many of them failing. Fourth, caught in this illegal and immoral activity the church did and continues to do whatever it can to avoid and minimize ethical responsibility and legal liability for its actions and those of its employees. And finally, after being dragged kicking and screaming to face the issue, the church spends five years to create a stunningly ineffectual excuse for itself.
Ethical standards derived from religious faith or elsewhere matter. That's just common sense. When a faith purporting to represent not just an ethical standard but the will of God engages in such illegal, immoral, and clearly unethical activity Common Sense thinks it no longer deserves respect.
xxx
No comments:
Post a Comment