Cowardice. Buck-passing. Blame-shifting. Hiding. Bullshitting.
Refusing to take responsibility.
A report on the child abuse scandal in the US Catholic Church has provoked condemnation for concluding that the permissive society of the 1960s was to blame for the rise in sexual offences by priests.
The investigation commissioned by Catholic bishops said that the peak incidence of sexual abuse by priests in the 1960s and 70s reflected the increased level of other deviant behaviours in American society in the period, including “drug use and crime, as well as social changes, such as an increase in premarital sex and divorce.”
Right, because raping children is exactly the same kind of thing as sex without marriage. That’s high-class episcopal-level moral thinking, is it?
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests dismissed the report as “garbage in, garbage out” because the bishops provid[ed] much of the funding for the report.
But Terry defended the independence of the findings: “This is our report. None of the bishops had any influence on the findings of the study.”
Bollocks. The bishops commissioned it. It’s their responsibility. It’s not “independent” any more than the bishops are.
Comments
30 responses to “Beneath contempt”
Makes you wonder how changes in premarital sex and divorce could have possibly affected the sexual behaviors of supposedly celibate priests.
Also, if their records were detailed enough to see when sexual abuse peaked, the Church can’t say anymore that they didn’t know about the abuse, can they? And they still have to explain why all this documentation was still kept secret after those “deviant” 60s and 70s where over.
More hippie punching… I will point out two things:
First, is how they refuse to accept responsibility for abortion provider killings as they align themselves with radicals of the anti-abortion crowd. When Raeder killed Tiller, you can be damn 100% sure they were quick to point out personal responsibility for actions and the sea of hatred and intolerence they have fostered was in no form, shape or way part of the equation…
Second, it’s not a new problem. It’s a problem that’s gone on for the history of the Catholic Church: http://unreasonablefaith.com/2010/04/24/catholic-church-sex-scandals/
We should all like totally be respectful to the Catholic Church. It’s pro science!
Except not really. And it is one of the most corrupt, homophobic and backwards organisations around.
@Deen
You will find they are perfectly capable of pretending they had no idea children were beingabused and taken of advantage of. As they’ve just documented they have decades of experience doing just that.
So this explains the world-wide phenomenon of rape and sexual assault by priests that has been going on since who can say when (I believe this was an identified problem centuries ago but can’t be bothered to look it up right now) and continues to be reported? I’m a child of the sixties myself so does that excuse any crime I might ever commit? I don’t think so; it was a great time to be alive and I’m glad I was there for it – and no the drugs didn’t turn me into a raving sexual criminal; you have to go to seminary to learn that (eg the seminary at St Poelten in Austria). These perverts should have been able to deal just like most of the rest of us. Wasn’t it the permissive environment of the 80s & 90s that they were citing as their excuse just a few months back? Before that it was that they didn’t know raping children was a crime. And it’s always been the fault of the children for tempting them by being so attractive…any decent person would put a lot of distance between themself and this obscene corporation. I don’t understand why they have any members left or any non-pervert priests left.
RCC Inc. is never going to accept responsibility for its crimes. It is time, I think, to start to pressure our politicians to have recognition of the RCC contract with Mussolini withdrawn and treat this organization like any other gang of international criminals.
Isn’t this really the exact same thing as the last post, about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sexual assault allegation? In both cases, it is people who have power and authority accused of criminal sexual behavior, and their fellow powerful people circle the wagons and present a defense based on blaming everyone except the person accused of the crime. In both cases, the victims don’t matter. Maybe the abusers don’t even matter. Maybe the only thing that really matters to them is preservation of privilege.
I wonder why they think the deviance of the 60s and 70s seems to only had an effect on the Catholic clergy. This blame-it-on-the-longhairs theory, if true, would also have to be applicable to other religions. Why aren’t Buddhist youths coming forward in droves years later to say their local Buddhist clergy raped them? Shouldn’t these allegations, then, be just as common in reform Judaism, and Unitarianism, and on and on and on? I mean, why do they think the Evil Depravity of the 1960s had such a profound pedophilic effect on Catholic priests but not, say, Hasidic rabbis?
“drug use and crime, as well as social changes, such as an increase in premarital sex and divorce.”
Crime? Crime?! Seriously? I would have thought that the church would have learned it’s lesson with the ‘Hitler was an atheist’ speech and stop saying blatant, factually untrue things when talking to the public…. Although I can see how they can confuse those blatantly untrue things with the other blatantly untrue things they hold dear. But Crime?
Damn, I read it wrong. I thought they were saying that the 60s started a crime spree that continued rising to today. Forget my last comment, it just means crime is literally the only thing that was higher in the 60’s than today.
Isn’t society becoming more permissive?
By the logic of the report we should be seeing more incidents within the church – i think they are also claiming that everything is fixed now.
I found myself re-reading those sentences. No, it doesn’t say that. Does it? Re-read.
A priest abusing an 11-year-old child is not a paedophile, according to this report? Thus they can cite the “less the 5%” thing?
There should be another “Really?!?!” SNL sketch about this. (Don’t get me wrong, I think SNL is just as unfunny as the next guy, but the “Really?” skits are worthwhile.)
I’m about halfway through reading it. It’s extremely problematic, to say the very least. Perhaps the most disturbing thing is their arbitrary definition of “pedophilia” as sexual abuse of victims that were ten years old or younger at the time, despite the fact that the DSM sets the cutoff age at thirteen. Defining it as “ten years old or younger” lets them make claims like the “less than 5%” thing (as quoted by Steve above) and this:
…whereas if they had stuck to the DSM‘s definition, most of the abusers could legitimately be called “pedophiles”, and those 5% and 22% figures would be much higher. That’s an incredibly sneaky, self-serving, and dishonest trick to pull, and I imagine that, unfortunately, many (or most) media outlets will report these percentages without explaining that the authors of the report decided to make up their own definition of what a “pedophile” is.
@Miranda
out of curiosity , what is DSM?
Deepak- sorry about that. It’s the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
Tangentially related to Miranda’s point: my personal favorite response to this has been the claim that the priests aren’t really child-rapists or pedophiles, but are merely ephebophiles, i.e. those who lust after young teenage males, who apparently don’t REALLY count as ‘children.’
This claim has turned up in the oddest places. Church apologists obviously cling to it. But there’s also the odd leftist of the postmodern or just plain patriarchal variety who likes to seize the opportunity to talk about how the age of consent is just an arbitrary artifact of our puritanical culture, and in a better world we’d all be free to screw 14-year-old boys.
In response to Ophelia’s original post: so basically it’s the feminists’ and liberals’ fault that the priests raped children? Nice. Not only does personal responsibility get sliced and diced in this apologia, but moral absolutism is julienned as well: this is a morally relativist excuse, based on what was going on in society at the time. So much for the Church as an arbiter of timeless morals, then.
There is a reason that papers submitted to reputable scientific journals must identify the sources of funding for the research being reported, as well as any other significant sources of funding for the authors. That reason is that there is a clear and unambiguous evidence that the conclusions found in scientific papers have a tendency to conform with the conclusions that those providing the funding would like to see.
It is not even that the authors of such papers are deliberately ensuring that they produce a conclusion those funding the research would be happy with. It is more subtle, and more insidious than that. Nor does it mean that the results are invalid. It just requires those reading the papers are aware of any potential bias.
Yes, call it the No True Pedophile defense. Bill Donahue makes sure to point out this narrower definition of “pedophile” every single time he makes a TV appearance to discuss the issue. Stop saying these priests were pedophiles—he bellows, as if some grave injustice has been committed—they’re not pedophiles!.
I say good. Let’s chuck “pedophile” altogether and stick with “child rapist.”
So, priests who are called by god almighty himself to serve the church and preach Jesus’ message are somehow not responsible for their actions? Cannot be declared culpable in raping a child because Betty Friedan burned her bra?
I don’t give a rat’s ass what you call it, or whether the DSM defines pedophelia differently from the church, BTW.
The only definition that matters is the legal one. These children were below the age of consent. In other words, their abusers committed crimes that included statutory rape, sodomy, gross sexual imposition, sexual battery, and probably a bunch of others I’m too lazy to look up right now.
By law, these children CANNOT provide consent. By law, their abusers are guilty of felony abuse.
If you want to tease out the threads of whether the act was one of pedophilia or ephebophilia, well, go right ahead.
Either way, it’s a felony. Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Do not get transferred to another parish to do it all over again. And again. And again. Do not get protected by your bosses and your boss’ boss, and on up the line to the head of the Inquisition himself (at the time, that would have been John Ratzinger, who currently goes by an alias — just like Vito Corleone called himself The Godfather).
Their statistical skulldrugery is vile and disgusting. The instituition sickens me and their actions are beneath contempt.
The ultimate proof that their “religion” is pure BS is that they obviously don’t believe all that stuff themselves. If they truly believed it they’d be terrified of being punished by their own doG for all these sins and so would not commit them. But in their arrogance and pride, i of 7 deadly sins BTW,they went ahead anyway. Father Henry Hargreaves SJ anyone?
As for what is or is not a pedophile, they are all still felony rapists and sex-criminals whatever the ages of their victims – even if the victims were adults (as some were). And don’t the criminal conspiracy and organized crime statutes apply here?
@ sailor1031
If they truly believed it they’d be terrified of being punished by their own doG for all these sins and so would not commit them.
But if they pray for forgiveness pretty please with sugar on top then Jesus makes it all better for them….until they re-offend. Then repeat the above as needed.
Who is the patron saint for child rapists anyhow? They’ve got a saint for everything else.
The number of incidents? How the hell do we know that? What we know is that the number of incidents of which the Church became aware is highest for people who were abused by priests during that period. It ain’t the same thing by any means. It takes years for many victims of abuse to come forward; that would include many abused after 1985.
My first thought on reading that is She’s talking about Stonewall. You know, those deviants. But it could be that increased deviance is actually decreased willingness of victims and their families to defer to the bishops’ demands that they keep quiet.
Ken-
Yes, and yet, frustratingly enough, the report reiterates, again and again and again, that these incidents were almost entirely limited to a very specific window of time, and that the drop-off after 1985 is completely consistent across all dioceses in the country, regardless of geographical location or the size of the diocese, etc. Part of their support for this assertion is that
Or, in other words, the rate of new reports of abuse has declined since 2002 (and keep in mind that all of this information comes from “census” forms sent to every diocese, so there’s no way to know if it’s reliable or not), which proves that the abuse definitely ceased after 1985. Or something. It’s a face-palmingly awful and ridiculously weak argument, yet they assert it on just about every page.
@Miranda
thanks.
It is amazing how blind the Catholic priests are to the problem. Last week I attended a Roman Catholic mass and they seemed to have a guest German priest who said that if you read the newspapers you will think that all the Priests do is have sex scandals – no one mentions the *good* that they accomplish. It is unbelievable – anyone with any conscience or integrity wouldn’t brush off the allegations like this.
Curious, that the number of abuse reports drops in 2002, not long after Ratzinger’s “De delictis gravioribus” which pretty much put the kibosh on reporting abuse. One couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the other, whatsoever…
Before I lost my NPR station yesterday morning (I was driving out of range) a reporter said something about the report authors not being able to find the same peak of child abuse for other professionals, like teachers. In other words, that the deviance in society only affected the priests. If so, isn’t that an own-goal for blameshifting?
I listen to Catholic radio in my car (EWTN). They rarely discuss the “child sex crisis” – it’s never called “scandal”, rarely called “abuse,” and there is never a scintilla of concern or call to prayer for the victims, just the poor priests who aren’t abusers.
The other day I heard a priest propagandize that since the church has undergone such massive scrutiny and fixed everything so thoroughly, today the Catholic church is by far the safest place your child can be!
(Another good one was a priest/host being really excited and impressed by a caller who suggested that the killing of Osama bin Laden could be chalked up as miracle of Pope John Paul II, because it occurred on Divine Mercy Sunday, for some reason I can’t fathom.)
I’ll never understand Stephen Colbert’s being a Catholic, but this
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/387035/may-19-2011/clergy-matic-ecclesi-action-center-3-16
was good.
Envy.
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