redunderthebed wrote:Seth wrote:\
Quit disagreeing with me and i won't treat you like shit
There is a difference seth between the catholic church and say a sports club or teachers.
Yeah, there is. The incidence of child abuse in sports clubs and schools is orders of magnitude higher than in the Catholic church in the last 10 years, so, fail.
I'm a volunteer with a local mental health organisation i was required before i could become one to get a police check to make sure that i wasn't a pedophile or unfit to be a volunteer in any other way.
Every person who works with or has contact with children in the Catholic church is required to undergo a criminal background check and take a child-protection training course before they are allowed to participate in ANY church activity involving children, so, another fail.
Once i checked out and became a volunteer i was given a manual to read that told me that as in my role i was a mandatory reporter of sexual and or physical abuse that i didn't go to my boss that i went straight to the police. This is law in Australia and serious consequences could happen if i don't follow the law.
Precisely the same rules apply to everyone in the Catholic church, including priests.
Now the catholic church expects its clergy and staff to report it to them and to use canon law to punish them and to not go to the police otherwise they will be punished.
Not true. The Pope has explicitly directed Bishops and clergy to cooperate with civil authority in reporting and prosecuting criminal sexual abuse. I've addressed this misunderstanding (one deliberately created by anti-Catholic bigots) before. Nobody in the Catholic church is immune from criminal prosecution and they are (at least in the US) mandatory reporters, just like sports coaches and teachers. And yet sports coaches and teachers keep right on abusing children and not reporting it, in droves, and when it is reported, they get prosecuted, just like Catholic priests, of whom, in the last decade or more since the substantial changes in policy and procedure in the Catholic church were made, there have been very, very few instances of abuse that have come to light. Virtually all of the complaints of abuse are 40 or more years old, and the church is being given NO credit for the substantive and extensive changes it has made in how it screens, trains and supervises priests and how it protects children that are in its charge.
That is a cover i'm with you that most catholics and clergy are law abiding citizens and i'm not attacking them. What i can't abide with is a system and a hierarchy that covers up abuse and shuttles offending clergy from parish to parish.
Nor can I. But you must realize that virtually all such complaints are DECADES old. This does not excuse the crimes or the complicity, but it is no longer reflective of either church doctrine or practice, and the church is due some acknowledgment of the changes it has made to prevent sex abuse in the last 10 years since the scandal came to light.
Those who cover it up and let the offends off scot free are just the same if not worse than the offenders not to mention there has being many cases of intimidation and threats against individuals who have spoken up about being abused.
I agree. But then again how can one fairly judge whether such acts actually occurred 40 years down the road? Those who were abused should have reported the abuse long ago, and their delay makes it difficult or impossible to give a fair trial to someone accused of a 40 year old crime. Witnesses are dead, evidence is gone and memories fade or have perhaps been implanted (yes, it does happen) or modified.
I do not justify ANY such acts, but I do acknowledge the presumption of innocence, rather than the presumption of guilt that atheists commonly hold against Catholic priests, and I acknowledge that statutes of limitation exist for a very good reason, and that not every complaint of priestly abuse is legitimate, particularly given the hundreds of millions of dollars that are at stake. That's a strong motive to fabricate abuse charges against a now-dead priest.
I'm afraid that I'm of the opinion that if you fail to report ANY crime for 40 years, you don't really have much of a case or deserve much sympathy. If you're a crime victim, then it's up to you to suck it up and report it, particularly when it involves someone abusing children, because by not doing so, regardless of the reason, you are allowing the perpetrator to go right on abusing other children. It's not good public policy to allow people to sit on a criminal complaint for a lifetime and then expect to be given the full support of the criminal justice system. It delays justice, denies justice (for both the victim and the accused) and it allows true criminals to victimize others because one person failed in their duty to prosecute the wrong done to them.
That being said, where there is credible and sufficient evidence that has not gone stale and where criminal or civil charges can be filed against those who either perpetrated or were complicit in such abuse or cover-ups and the statute has not run out, then I'm all for prosecution.
But to generally excoriate and disparage the one billion Catholics and 400,000 non-offending priests and tar them with the same brush is nothing more than mindless hatred, irrational bigotry, and delusional unreason and is unworthy of anyone who claims to be "rational" about anything. It's an attitude that's every bit as bad as the very worst of judgmental, bigoted and hateful theists, and the intensity with which some pursue this vendetta is every bit as much a religious belief as any bible-thumping evangelical.
I get quite disgusted with the inability or unwillingness of seemingly rational, reasonable people to make a careful distinction between criminals who happen to be Catholic priests and Bishops and ordinary, good people who happen to be Catholics or priests. The hatred, unreason, bigotry and prejudice is positively palpable here, just as it is in most atheist forums, and it's a sad testament to the degree of IRrationality that exists in Atheism.
I simply fail to understand why it's seemingly beyond the capacity of presumably intelligent people to use care when disparaging and insulting people when it comes to Catholicism to make sure that only those who deserve opprobrium and derision are the targets of such rhetoric.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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. And then when they come back, they can 