The person teaching us the difference between right and wrong
The bishop, who has maintained his innocence, will be charged and face trial by a special prosecutor on accusations of rape and intimidation, the police investigating the case said. But the church acknowledged the nun’s accusations only after five of her fellow nuns mutinied and publicly rallied to her side to draw attention to her yearlong quest for justice, despite what they described as heavy pressure to remain silent.
“We used to see the fathers of the church as equivalent to God, but not anymore,” said Darly, her voice shaking with emotion. “How can I tell my son about this, that the person teaching us the difference between right and wrong gave him his First Communion after committing such a terrible sin?”
The church is an institution that divides humanity into two halves for the purpose of making one half subordinate to the other. If you do that, there is going to be abuse. It can be the Mafia or the church, it makes no difference; telling people that these other people over here are your inferiors is an invitation to abuse the putative inferiors. That’s how humans work. An institution that not only does that but makes it sacred and holy and mandated by an all-powerful god who belongs to the superior caste is making it all but mandatory. Of course priests rape women; priests have been trained to look down on women, under instruction from Mister God Himself.
“The church is losing its moral authority,” Father Vattoly said. “We are losing the faith of the people. The church will become a place without people if this continues. Just like in Europe, the young will no longer come here.”
Good. Find a better source of moral authority, one that doesn’t carve people up into superior and inferior.
One can only hope.
As Stephen Fry put it, if the Church can’t be expected to be any more moral than humans generally, “then what are you for?”
Yes, the church is made of people, and people have moments of human weakness. That might explain an individual priest breaking his vows and abusing his power. But it doesn’t explain the higher-ups who create the structures that allow this to happen, and then stand by and do nothing — or the barest minimum action — when abuse occurs. That’s not a moment of human weakness, that’s a calculated decision to side with evil, from the people who claim to be spiritual guides.
I don’t really consider rape a moment of human weakness though. Marital infidelity, say, yes, but rape, no. There’s a difference between giving into a temptation one ought to resist and violently penetrating the body of an unwilling subordinate.
Religion is powerful at undoing itself.
Not powerful enough. At undoing itself. I remember a conference of US Bishops that took place in the 80″s or 90’s, 20+ years ago when the game of playing musical parishes with rapey priests was being freshly taken seriously. It was incredibly obvious to me, as an outsider, that the abominable crime of child rape was made many-fold worse by the policy of covering up and moving around. Who was in charge of the covering up and moving around? Who was in charge of letting the culprits have multiple new places in which to commit further crimes? It was the bishops, archbishops, and cardinals. The ONLY thing to come out of the Bishops Conference was a “no tolerance” policy on pedophile priests. But nothing changed. NOTHING. The big heads should have toppled, and it should have happened decades ago. We are almost no further along now than we were then. They still abuse, they still cover up, they still move around, they still lie, they still obfuscate, they still harbor criminals, they actively aid and abet and protect criminals, they do not cooperate with civil authorities and God forbid they should ever report their miscreants to the police. They aren’t nearly enough effective at undoing themselves.
But, their entire ‘redemption’ industry makes them incapable of grasping that that is what they were actually doing.
You see, you’re looking at this from the wrong angle. What the everloving Catholic Church did was to give those brave priests – men who had fought against but eventually succumbed to the seductions and temptations being forced on them by those slutty nuns and even-sluttier children – new opportunities to resist temptations.
The priests were obviously the real victims here, sinned against rather than sinners, yet here we all are begrudging them even the hope of an opportunity to prove their worth and obey their vows of chastity this time…..next time…..the time after that….
Damn! Off to sterilise my thoughts now. Thinking in Religious is a disease.
It’s not just the Catholics.
Much more at the link. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that religion doesn’t make one a good person.
What a Maroon, that brings up an interesting memory. I used to have long discussions with one of my profs in my doctoral program. He had as deep seated a distrust for religion as I do, and we shared many grand hours griping. The thing is, he grew up in Wisconsin, and most of his hatred was directed toward Catholics; he saw Southern Baptists as benign (though he had been teaching in Texas for 30 years; I have come to realize that college profs are often the worst people to tell you what a town or area is like, because they tend to be sequestered most of the time in a sterile environment – sterile meaning not much interaction with the general public). I, on the other hand, grew up in Oklahoma, and found the Southern Baptists much more worrisome. Since I have moved to Nebraska, I have much more concern about Lutherans and Catholics than I did in my Oklahoma-Texas day, where neither of those denominations have much power, and are often denigrated by the locals as “not Christian”.