Have a look at the list of news stories below (from just the last few months) and see if you are actually able to tell fact from fiction and decide which 2 are fakes planted by me:
- Connecticut is considering a bill that would remove the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse cases. The Catholic Church is opposed to this and has told this to their parishioners, highlighting how much this would cost them.
- Baltimore has passed an ordinance requiring area crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) to post accurate information about the services they provide — namely that they do not provide abortion and contraception services. The Baltimore Archdiocese is suing the city of Baltimore about this, they want to continue to run CPCs without this disclosure.
- Washington DC recently legalised gay marriage and Catholic Charities threatened to pull their entire homeless shelters funding program because they thought it meant they would have to provide their employees with same sex benefits. They copped a lot of flak and have just settled on a more ‘reasonable’ solution: funding and programs will continue but to make sure no same sex partner gets medical benefits they are no longer providing benefits to any partners of their employees, same-sex or opposite-sex.
- A Spanish bishop had this to say about the recent child rape scandals: “There are 13 year old adolescents who are under age and who are perfectly in agreement with, and what’s more wanting it, and if you are careless they will even provoke you”.
- Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa (Pope Benedict XVI’s personal preacher) said in the Vatican’s public Good Friday sermon at St Peter’s, that “a Jewish friend” told him the accusations leveled at the church for their handling of child rape reminded him of the “more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”
A lot of the Church’s defenders are arguing about the substance of the accusations: is there or is there not a smoking gun against the Pope that he covered up child rape and shuffled molesters between parishes? Is the recent so-called smoking gun real evidence of a coverup or indefference or is it merely the media’s misinterpretation of canon law?
I think these are all red herrings. Regardless of what has actually happened, it is the Church’s current reaction that is probably doing them the most damage in the eyes of the public, especially their own members. Whether or not the Catholic church has had a higher percentage of child rape and coverups than other religious organisations (or secular institutions), it is only their current casual dismissal and pretense at victimisation that’s showing the current Church’s leadership in its true colours.
Similarly, for the incidents above, the Catholic church is now dismantling itself brick by brick. It’s now toeing a line that’s so extreme that for the average Catholic, crying infallibility may not do. And if millions of followers see their church without the presumption of inspired holiness (because of the incessant wingnuttery) then it’s all downhill from here.
Chris Hallquist, in a post worth reading, thinks this is the turning point for the end of the Church. I agree at least in part and so make a falsifiable prediction that there will be a sharp drop in numbers of both laiety and priests for at least a few years. (I’m being less brave and leaving the option for a later bounceback.) And in case you were wondering which of the 5 stories were false, of course they were in fact all true.
4 comments ↓
Well, I agree with the point you made here – the whole mess the Catholic Church has got itself into doesn’t come from the fact that there were more abuse cases than anywhere else or that Catholic clergy formation serves the devil, producing perverts who hurt children on a scale yet unheard of. Anyone reasonable wouldn’t accept such a simplified vision and believe that we deal here with a system designed to work like that. Of course, one could wonder whether celibacy or in fact any other method or practice cultivated in the Church can affect peoples personality, sexual preferences and their ability to deal with these issues with dignity, in a mature and thoughtful way. I myself suppose it is partially true that priests trained in the Catholic Church may have certain problems with their psychosexual and emotional development – things pushed into the subconscious tend to reappear and affect one’s behavior more often then not. But it’s a topic for another discussion. Here it is important to put one thing clearly – it is about how the Church responds – or, in fact, doesn’t – to the cases that appear, whether often, more often than somewhere else or just incidentally. And it’s this very mechanism that counts, nothing else. Regardless of what allegations or charges we can produce or come across, it’s an unquestionable fact that official procedures introduced by the Church in early 60s – by John XXIII to be precise – do instruct to try to prevent the victims from revealing abuse cases and protect clergy, dealing with everything withing the Church. And this document hasn’t been changed since it was issued. I suppose that’s the most important thing the pope ought to do, instead of mourning over the alleged war that the media waged on the Church.
And, well, I’d be really careful in predicting the exact impact this is going to have on the members of the Church and the society. We’ve got used to accepting the most implausible, weird explanations and policies and have been in a mysterious way agreeing on what the Church does or doesn’t do for centuries. In fact it may well be so that this whole case will be remembered as yet another attempt to destroy the Church. These people have incredible abilities to create traditions out of innovations, truths out of lies and dogmas out of absurds. Just look at the universal jurisdiction of the pope…
Celibacy is obviously one of the problems. Force people to behave in a manner opposing to their natural functions and they will become monsters. This is precisely what happens to priests.
Another problem is, of course, the fact that the Catholic Church (and any religion for that matter) is based on hot air.
I’m just waiting for the great Catholic Church going out of business sale!
I think it all comes down to money. The church doesn’t want to pay out money for abuse claims. Nuff said.
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