The Providence Journal (Rhode Island) has a timely editorial that looks at the failings of the report written by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that basically tried to blame the Church's world wide sex abuse scandal on the "permissiveness" 1960's and 1970's. Left out, of course were details of how the Vatican coordinated a world wide plan to obstruct justice to "protect the Church" even as the lives of thousands and thousands of children and youths were written off as expendable. Likewise, the report ignores the huge number of abuse cases that occurred BEFORE the 1960's and 1970's. As I noted before, the only true positive aspect of the report was that it showed that as the number of gay priests increased, the instances of abuse decreased and thereby cut anti-gay blowhards like William Donohue off at the knees. Here are some column highlights:*
The report written by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops about sexual abuse by priests has left many people mystified. The report attributed an apparent increase in abuse (or at least in reported abuse) of young people, primarily males, to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s.
*
It basically skirted the complex roles of priestly celibacy and sexual identity. And the report didn’t delve into the transfer, to try to evade public scandal, that some bishops engineered for priests suspected and/or accused of serial sexual abuse.
*
Indeed, the document writers seemed to go out of their way to protect bishops anxious to get this public-relations nightmare off their backs.
*
[L]et’s face it, this was a serious management problem. Some bishops were just not supervising and disciplining their people properly and some were in effect abetting serious violations of criminal law.
*
There are some interesting data in this report, but we’ll need to await a more impartial one than this to fully understand what led to the church’s disastrous sex scandals.
1 comment:
Well said. Great cartoon.
Its amazing how cold and heartless the Catholic church and the congregation have proven to be, and you can really see it in the way that they treat the victims of their own child rape.
The report was incomplete because it was written with a Catholic bias, possibly because they paid for half of the report. Here's a detail that the report tried to hide:
They said that only 22% of cases were pedophilia. However, the number was over 70%. How did they achieve this?
THEY CHANGED THE DEFINITION OF THE WORD PEDOPHILIA so that it only included children under 10 years old instead of children under 13 years old, which is the value that the American Psychiatric Association uses.
They thought this would stop people from using the phrase "pedophile priests", so they did what the Catholic church does - they tried to cover up the truth.
The Catholic church has destroyed a great religion.
Post a Comment