God's work, for sure.
Far be it for me to get all high and mighty about religious people, being a-religious myself, but the ongoing Catholic priest child-abuse scandal is just too much to take.
The Dallas Morning News is working on an investigation that has found that orders of priests (e.g. Franciscans) sometimes shipped known abusers overseas without notifying the receiving diocese of the priest's background, even though internal diocese records reflected known instances of child abuse. Not only has the Catholic' preisthoods' tradition of keeping its own house in order privately become a contempt for the well being of their flock, but it now turns out they can't be trusted to be straight with each other. A more pious man than I might draw from this lessons about the fallibility of humans and the imperfections inherent in human ethical and moral codes, but I just see a bunch of people letting terrible things go unpunished and then foisting the problem off on someone else.
It's big, it's ugly, and it needs to stop. NPR (yes, yes. Shut up.) coverage here.
Mr. EGERTON: One of the examples we'll be looking at in the first day of our coverage involves a priest named Frank Klep(ph), who had a long career working with the Salesians in youth institutions in Melbourne, Australia, and was repeatedly accused of sexual abuse. In the 1980s, the order moved him to Rome for a bit, a little cooling-off period, and then on to New York, and they wanted Frank Klep removed from duty with children, and in one sense he was. And he went back to Australia and he went right back to working, as the Salesians do, with poor and needy children. People began to go to the police at that point. Frank Klep was criminally convicted, got some community service time, went back to work again.INSKEEP: As a priest?
Mr. EGERTON: As a priest all along. He is still a priest and he has admitted to us and to one of his victims that he did these things. Finally a new criminal i! nvestigation began later on in the 1990s, and his order moved him to Samoa and told his accusers that he was no longer in ministry, that he was in a very remote area, that he had no contact with children. And so we set out to simply test that claim. And we went to Samoa and the first day that we were there, my colleague went to church and saw children running up to Frank Klep after Mass, calling him by his first name. And he was pulling candy out of his pockets and handing it out to all the little kids. We later found that he was in very active ministry and sometimes tutors children alone in his bedroom.
INSKEEP: You found him there and talked to him, and he confessed to what he had done?
Mr. EGERTON: In one case he did. He denied all the others. He said that he didn't feel he was a threat to children any longer, that he had overcome whatever problems he had had in the past and didn't see that it was really a problem to be working with children.
! INSKEEP: Is Frank Klep the only Salesian priest you found with a rec ord like this?
Mr. EGERTON: No, no, not at all. Other cases that we'll discuss include a guy who started in Peru and has worked in at least six countries in the Western Hemisphere. He was sent to the archdiocese of Chicago with a specific letter of reference. We have the document saying that he has never showed any behavior that would give rise to concern about children's safety, and yet we have other documents from the Salesians showing that their own priests in a church disciplinary panel specifically said that he should never be allowed to work around children.
INSKEEP: Were there American priests who were shipped overseas?
Mr. EGERTON: Absolutely. Frequently, what we've seen are priests who worked for a long time in America but remained citizens of another country. They came here and, when trouble arose, there was an easy escape hatch, and that was to go back to their native lands.
INSKEEP: You've already told us of one case where someone outside the United States got in trouble and was shipped to the United States for a while.
Mr. EGERTON: That's right. It...
INSKEEP: Did that happen more than once?
Mr. EGE! RTON: Oh, yes, absolutely. Yeah, we found some folks who are still here, still here.
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§ 7 Comments
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It's indicative of what the
It's indicative of what the "real" scandal is - not that abuse happens, but that the church administration has willfully covered it up. Defrock the priest and have done with it, covering up for them makes it appear that the higher ups have empathy for that behavior.
... or at the very least are
... or at the very least are indifferent to the damage they cause.
I do know for a fact that when the Catholic church punishes someone-- when the Vatican gets involved-- the smackdown is severe. One flaw in the CC's code of secrecy is that nobody ever gets a whiff of the brimstone wafting off the letters of reprimand that come to priests in trouble. I'm positive the same goes for any priest involved in any way in the abuse scandals.
The other flaw is this: at some point, it seems that harsh words from the Vatican don't seem to have a whole lot of effect on stopping behavior. Sticks and stones, etc etc.
The piece de resistance is
The piece de resistance is this:
Trenchant analysis just doesn't get any crisper than that.
Hm... as a non-practicing
Hm... as a non-practicing Catholic (no really, I hardly go to Mass, and I never finished catchism), I don't know. I'm all for defrocking priests, and at the same time, I'm all for forgiveness and redemption... Of course, this is the church that believes in mortal sins. So these bastards should have been defrocked long ago and left to rot in hell. What bugs me is why church leadership thought it was any good to move these guys around. Is it because some of these priests were popular and defrocking them and uncovering them for what they were would have meant alienating their flock from what is already a dwindling parish? I don't know. I can't say. Just some thoughts.
The cover up is really the
The cover up is really the heart of the scandal, and the problem. If the Catholics regularly punished, defrocked and excommunicated offenders - and tehn reported them to the police - we would likely see a smaller number of offenses - since creeps would not think that the priesthood was a happy fun playground for their perversion.
The pervasive coverups - worldwide, not just in the US, makes any protestation from the vatican that they are working to control the problem, or that it is the isolated acts of a few bad apples completely uncredible.
In other denominations, there are occasional problems with child abuse. But they are viewed as abbarations rather than, "Oh jeez, another one." This really is a Catholic problem, and one that they are a long way from solving. Allowing marriage for priests throughout the church, rather than in isolated segments (like the Byzantine rite catholics) might help solve the problem by opening up a larger pool of potential priests.
Interesting, that comment on
Interesting, that comment on marriage. Way back, decades ago, when I was still practicing any sort of religion, it was Byzantine Catholicism, and our priest was married. It didn't seem odd at all, and he seemed to be a more "normal guy" than some of the nitwits we'd experienced in the Latin rite.
But it's not just Byzantium - there are other places, even within the Latin rite, where celibacy isn't required. Africa is one of these, if memory serves.
Celibacy, in essence a denial of humanity, is a strange thing to expect from a supposed spiritual leader. Perverse, one might add. And, aside from the absurdity of expecting meaningful pre-marital counseling from a guy who can't, uh, swing the bat from either side of the plate, the lack of universality for this limitation calls into question just what sort of game has been going on in Rome.
No wonder so many of them end up bent.
You guys are missing the boat
You guys are missing the boat on celibacy and how it got into the RC church. Imagine you are one of these Italianate priests with bastard sons to provide for... What do you do? Why set them up with their own diocese of course!!!
That's the only reason why the RC church instituted the practice. Too much nepotism going on in the hierarchy. I suspect if the church let up on it now, it would be OK. Otherwise the argument for it being a rigor and a discipline is pretty stupid.
You guys realize there are a few types of child molesters out there. Some fall into the category of sick freaks that do this all the time. Some fall into the category of what's called an 'opportunistic molester.' The latter category isn't necessarily fixated on children, so much as the opportunity is there and they do it. (perhaps these are the same ppl who screw around with animals too... I don't know.) These guys tend to prey on slightly older children, i.e. adolescents... But if they do it a lot, enough times, they can become compulsive and move into the former category.
okay. I've grossed myself out.
To cheer myself up, I will all ask you guys to read The Radioactive Boy Scout and discuss it amongst yourselves. Scary and very interesting for your pointy-headed science geek and national security types.