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You may remember the numerous explanations that child sexual abuse in the Catholic church was an old problem, that all the molestation happened in the past, that things were hunky-dory now what with the new safeguards. Surprise! On June 15th, 2015 Ramsey County attorney John Choi filed charges (pdf) against the St. Paul-Minneapolis archdiocese, calling out Archbishop Nienstedt and his deputy in particular. If you don't want to read the PDF, see the Guardian story. The archdiocese had known since the 1990s that the abusing priest, Curtis Wehmeyer, had substance problems, personality problems, and chastity problems; in 2001 they went ahead and ordained him anyway. In January 2004 Wehmeyer got a citation for hanging out in an area used for cruising. Sometime during that year Wehmeyer was spotted leaving the boys' room in St. Joseph's school and was told to stop; the archdiocese was notified and the then- Archbishop Flynn agreed to act as Wehmeyer's "spiritual adviser". In May 2004 Wehmeyer tried to pick up two young-looking men in a Barnes and Noble; a parishioner, P.M., contacted the archdiocese because he was worried that the young men appeared to be the ages of his own sons, then 15 and 17. The then-Archbishop told P.M. that this was just "thrill seeking, playing with fire, and a misunderstanding." The usual story continues, with Wehmeyer being referred for treatment but not getting it, partial information being given to parishes about Wehmeyer, and the Archdiocese shuffling Wehmeyer around. Wehmeyer was assigned to a group called "POMS" (Promoter of Material Standards") monitoring to be watched and evalutated for sexual and substance problems. POMS doesn't actually monitor anything. In 2008, Archbishop Nienstedt takes over. SSDD. In June 2009 the Archbishop appoints Wehmeyer to be pastor of two churches, ignoring a warning from Jennifer Haselberger (see below) about his record. Children get abused, the Archdiocese is told, nothing happens. Lather, rinse, repeat. As always, when the Archdiocese can no longer ignore Wehmeyer's behavior, the archdiocese minimizes it and assure complainers that Wehmeyer has repented now. In June 2012, Jennifer Haselberger, the archdiocese's former chancellor for canonical affairs, gets tired of the coverups and goes to the police. Note the timeline: that's eight years after the Archdiocese was warned, explicitly, about Wehmeyer's inappropriate behavior with children. Once an actual investigation starts, it turns out that several other priests were abusing children in this time period. In June 2015 (see above) the formal indictments go down. June 15th Nienstedt resigns -- the resignation is actually accepted promptly by the Vatican, which is an improvement over previous Vatican reactions -- with the comment "“I leave with a clear conscience knowing that my team and I have put in place solid protocols to ensure the protection of minors and vulnerable adults....” Good to know his conscience is clear. So, presumably, is Wehmeyer's. e: I meant to tag this as "Patriarchy", but somehow I misclicked. Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Jun 15, 2015 |
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Jun 15, 2015 19:15
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Arsenic Lupin posted:You may remember the numerous explanations that child sexual abuse in the Catholic church was an old problem, that all the molestation happened in the past, that things were hunky-dory now what with the new safeguards. Surprise! http://www.rawstory.com/2015/06/ex-pastor-on-probation-for-sex-assault-caught-molesting-another-child-while-wearing-ankle-monitor/ Moving the priests to other parishes not only makes the church look bad but faith in general. I don't go to church anymore, I used to but there is no peace to be found there, just misery.
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Jun 16, 2015 02:01
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How deeply embedded in the Catholic doctrine (catechism?) is celibacy for the clergy? Is there any discussion about shifting positions on the topic like the super-slow roll with women in leadership roles? Maybe allowing married priests could reduce some of the self-selection by confirmed bachelors with intimacy problems. I know that the current pope has been verbally signalling that forbidding and shaming homosexuality isn't a priority for him, although not enough to do anything about it, and of course preying on children should always be deplored. Admittedly, this all probably leads to a much wider conversation than one branch of the Church's lack of accountability and face-saving coverups though. Also I can't help thinking that if canon law was enough to control the pedophilic priests they wouldn't face any kind of legal repercussions for their crimes. Seems kind of messed up from a rule of law standpoint. No matter how softly secular America steps around ecclesiastical issues Minnesota isn't technically supposed to be a theocracy.
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Jun 16, 2015 05:55
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Well being able to confess will do wonders for your conscience if very little for your sense of responsibility for your actions.
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Jun 16, 2015 06:33
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ThaGhettoJew posted:Also I can't help thinking that if canon law was enough to control the pedophilic priests they wouldn't face any kind of legal repercussions for their crimes. Seems kind of messed up from a rule of law standpoint. No matter how softly secular America steps around ecclesiastical issues Minnesota isn't technically supposed to be a theocracy. It's always kind of fascinating (and infuriating) to see that current of thought among the Catholic hierarchy that regards the Church as above the law.
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Jun 16, 2015 06:38
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Maybe DoJ can hit the Vatican like they are hitting FIFA. Don't worry, Rest of the World, America is all grown up and ready to fix your corrupt boyfucker asses.
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Jun 16, 2015 07:02
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Team America World Judiciary System would be interesting certainly.
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Jun 16, 2015 07:12
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Pope Guilty posted:It's always kind of fascinating (and infuriating) to see that current of thought among the Catholic hierarchy that regards the Church as above the law. There's ample precedent of course. Religious/cultural subsets of larger populations (Jewish ghettos, Mennonite farms, meta-Mormon polygamous fuckacademies etc.) often demand to treat their adherents with their own special laws and other autonomies as long as they keep out of the way and pay their taxes. I'm sure there's a fistful of Law & Order episodes based on that alone. OwlFancier posted:Team America World Judiciary System would be interesting certainly. Then we'd have to agree to be subject to our own laws when other countries call us out on it, and we all know that ain't gonna happen. ThaGhettoJew fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Jun 16, 2015 |
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Jun 16, 2015 07:37
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ThaGhettoJew posted:How deeply embedded in the Catholic doctrine (catechism?) is celibacy for the clergy? Is there any discussion about shifting positions on the topic like the super-slow roll with women in leadership roles? Maybe allowing married priests could reduce some of the self-selection by confirmed bachelors with intimacy problems. Seeing as there are plenty of married priests already, not very. The ideal of a celibate priest started to evolve quite early in the Church (the first councils demanding priestly celibacy took place in the early 4th century), but for a long time there was also a strong tradition of married priests - St Peter, the first pope himself, was married after all! The Second Lateran Council of 1139 eventually enacted legislation that definitely made celibacy obligatory for all clergy - both for theological reasons (greater devotion to God, following the example of Jesus) and practical ones (preventing the formation of priestly dynasties, ensuring that after a priest's death, his possessions would be inherited by the Church and not his children). Even today the Pope can easily issue dispenses from celibacy for every priest he wanted to - mostly this is the case for Protestant or Orthodox priests who were married and later on converted to Catholicism; what's more, priests in the Eastern Catholic Churches never were subject to a celibacy law at all. So it's not doctrine, but canon law, and could be easily lifted at any time. I'm not too sure about celibacy and the self-selection following it being the cause for the abuse of children by priests, though. The John-Jay study of 2005 came to the conclusion that the most cases of abuse occurred during the 60s and 70s and have been continuously on the decrease since then, while the obligation to celibacy remained. German studies have shown that 0,1% of all cases of children abuse were perpetrated by celibate men. As Catholic priests constitute 0.05% of all German men between 20 and 80, but do not represent the totality of celibate men in Germany, it seems that celibaby can't be linked to a more frequent occurence of abuse cases. Some have also stated that the referral to celibacy is a popular defence tactic for the accused - buying into the celibacy->abuse explanation (even though it lacks empirical affirmation) then would mean indirectly supporting the culprit and his excuses. To me, the problem isn't celibacy, but that the Church for the longest time (and apparently in some dioceses even now) tried to downplay the problem and to keep accused priests out of the spotlight by shuffling them from parish to parish, shaming accusers into silence etc. This has gotten better by a great deal during the last 20 years or so, but it is still a significant problem that absolutely needs to be adressed. In general, however, painting the Church as a hotbed of sexual abuse of minors is exaggerated or even wrong. I'm not aware of any large-scale studies that try to find out how prevalent sexual abuse is in the RCC compared to other churches or to schools, boy scouts etc. The little data that exists seems to show that the RCC doesn't stick out in that regard, though. From 1950-2002, 10,667 possibly cases of abuse by Catholic priests had been reported in contrast to 90-150,000 cases in the US altogether - per year. Even when you believe in a large dark figure (and you totally should), this is still a minuscule percentage. The Christian Science Monitor found in 2002, that “Despite headlines focusing on the priest pedophile problem in the Roman Catholic Church, most American churches being hit with child sexual-abuse allegations are Protestant, and most of the alleged abusers are not clergy or staff, but church volunteers.” Tl, dr: the RCC doesn't have a quantitave problem, but a qualitative one
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Jun 16, 2015 11:26
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System Metternich posted:I'm not too sure about celibacy and the self-selection following it being the cause for the abuse of children by priests, though. The John-Jay study of 2005 came to the conclusion that the most cases of abuse occurred during the 60s and 70s and have been continuously on the decrease since then, while the obligation to celibacy remained. German studies have shown that 0,1% of all cases of children abuse were perpetrated by celibate men. As Catholic priests constitute 0.05% of all German men between 20 and 80, but do not represent the totality of celibate men in Germany, it seems that celibaby can't be linked to a more frequent occurence of abuse cases. Some have also stated that the referral to celibacy is a popular defence tactic for the accused - buying into the celibacy->abuse explanation (even though it lacks empirical affirmation) then would mean indirectly supporting the culprit and his excuses. I wasn't trying to suggest that celibacy led to pedophilia or anything like that, just that since the job required people to renounce "normal" sexual behavior that those willing to go into the priesthood as a calling would be more likely to be populated by those who weren't already tied to or interested in adult relationships. I don't think those sexually interested in children are driven that way by sexual abstinence or being gay or whatever but are rather a whole different animal entirely. Whether it stems from psychological damage or sociopathy or some sort of hosed up switch in their brains I don't have an opinion. And on further reflection that the RCC isn't statistically much more tainted by pedos than the general population doesn't surprise me much. Religion calls to a lot of different people for as many different reasons as any other large social group. The problem in this case stems mostly from their singular authority over vulnerable targets and the kids' support groups and afterlives. All that is combined with a general lack of oversight, an institutional desire to not address embarrassing problems, and no real follow-through once the bare minimum of attention is paid so any issues can be quickly forgotten. Got another doctrinal question about the RCC's position on the Confession and presumed Absolution by these priests. As I understand it their confession heals their souls of damage, as long as was contrite and any assigned penitence was done, and thus puts them back on the up and up with the Holy Trinity. Are they then supposed to go to the secular authorities and turn themselves in for any crimes against Earthly law? Are they still subject to it or are they completely cleansed of the crime like it didn't happen? Do serious crimes not require rendering secular justice unto Caesar as well? Maybe it's just up to the guy setting the penance. I suppose that The Church has its own obligation to protect its reputation from outside criticism since they sort of represent Christianity as a whole (other sects notwithstanding). But they seem to be taking a stance on how to handle sexual predators that doesn't jibe well with that of our criminal justice system or the American Psychiatric Association. That last article about the Haselberger accusation had this interesting passage, "The national office of SNAP has called for the seizure of church officials' passports to keep them from traveling to Rome and taking shelter from prosecution at the Vatican." Had they tried that the Church would be under a whole different kind of public pressure.
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Jun 16, 2015 12:17
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Pope Guilty posted:It's always kind of fascinating (and infuriating) to see that current of thought among the Catholic hierarchy that regards the Church as above the law. To be fair, the Catholic Church predates the concept of national sovereignty by more than a thousand years. e: obviously they shouldn't actually be above the law, especially regarding this kind of crime, just to be unambiguous Peel fucked around with this message at 12:38 on Jun 16, 2015 |
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Jun 16, 2015 12:36
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Peel posted:To be fair, the Catholic Church predates the concept of national sovereignty by more than a thousand years. I vaguely remember Benedict complaining that the Irish authorities interrogating Irish priests about covering up for pedophiles was somehow a violation of the Vatican's sovereignty, but I don't recall the specifics.
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Jun 16, 2015 12:48
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ThaGhettoJew posted:I suppose that The Church has its own obligation to protect its reputation from outside criticism since they sort of represent Christianity as a whole (other sects notwithstanding). But they seem to be taking a stance on how to handle sexual predators that doesn't jibe well with that of our criminal justice system or the American Psychiatric Association. More than that (and I agree that there is no special proclivity of priests or celibate men towards abuse or pedophilia), it makes them a haven for serial abusers and shuttles them around to discover fresh boys.
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Jun 16, 2015 14:46
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System Metternich posted:The The John-Jay study of 2005 came to the conclusion that the most cases of abuse occurred during the 60s and 70s and have been continuously on the decrease since then, while the obligation to celibacy remained. It's been nine years since the John Jay study and modern abuse cases continue to roll in (see this thread, for instance). Furthermore, the John Jay study was based on self-reported data from Church sources; this is a serious design flaw, given that the Church has consistently been lying and underreporting (see this thread). National Catholic Reporter Online posted:Too often, the research team uses assertive language about the number of abusive priests or the number of victims rather than qualifying these as accused or reported perpetrators and only victims who have come forward. While acknowledging that abuse is both underreported and reported years after the fact, Terry does not convey tentativeness about her findings. There are reasonable, literature-based extrapolations that can be made to conclude that the actual number of victims over 60 years is closer to at least 35,000 than 11,000 and that there are priests who perpetrated but were never accused. In addition, priests already accused may well have had more victims who have never come forward. Terry should have included statements about the significant likelihood that the number of reported victims and of reported perpetrators are both understated.
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Jun 16, 2015 15:26
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SedanChair posted:More than that (and I agree that there is no special proclivity of priests or celibate men towards abuse or pedophilia), it makes them a haven for serial abusers and shuttles them around to discover fresh boys. Strangely I agree with this, I don't think priest == kiddy fiddler. Statistically it feels more like when they exist, due to the nature of their office, they have far more opportunities to offend and get away with it longer due to how HQ shuffles them around, so the cases kind of... aggregate. There was a relatively famous case in Canada about a minor league hockey coach who serially abused tonnes of kids, and eventually got caught, yet there's no narrative of minor league hockey coaches == kiddy fiddler because they're hopefully dealt with more strictly and more promptly.
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Jun 17, 2015 00:17
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The priesthood also attracts sociopathic abusers due to the relative safely with which they can operate and the access to their preferred victim class the church affords them more than most are ready to admit. If there was somehow totally accurate data on priest proclivities I think we'd find a higher proportion of pedophiles in the priesthood than should be statistically expected. But that's not really the point. The problem is one of institutional culture. Only an absolute fool denies at this point that the church made it way too easy to get away with sexual abuse for a very long time. Even if abusers were no more common in the clergy than in the lay population, you'd still expect there to be a shitload of abuse committed by priests. When they can get away with it, predators are going to be loving prolific in their misdeeds. Smudgie Buggler fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Jun 17, 2015 |
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Jun 17, 2015 00:56
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One thing I never realized is that it's very normal to move priests around in general. Like, if you're a priest, odds are good you'll get reappointed once a decade or so. This is for a few reasons, such as to meet the current needs of the church, improve your personal development (e.g. being appointed to a parish with another primary language), and avoid parishioners getting overly attached to any specific priests. I've seen a lot of turnaround at my parish. Some evidence for what I'm talking about : http://wdtprs.com/blog/2014/05/ask-father-moving-priests-every-6-or-12-years/ http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=4493 So bishops are often accused of re-assigning people as cover-up for their nefarious deeds, but it should be kept in mind that re-assigning priests is a matter of course. I'm not sure celibacy is relevant, since a lot of child abuse is committed by men (and women) who have not taken a vow of celibacy. I have heard it said that there are more instances of abuse by teachers than in the priesthood, and much more amongst the family, especially the father, but a cursory look at Wiki makes it seem the numbers reported by studies are in huge variance. As for the invulnerability of the Church to the law, a priest is most likely to self-report this sort of crime during confession, and confession is held to be a sacrament with an inviolable seal. The Church cannot allow any government to monitor confession, and any priest who violates the seal is considered instantly excommunicated. In the past, priests have been martyred over this issue.
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Jun 17, 2015 11:08
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Arsenic Lupin posted:It's been nine years since the John Jay study and modern abuse cases continue to roll in (see this thread, for instance). Furthermore, the John Jay study was based on self-reported data from Church sources; this is a serious design flaw, given that the Church has consistently been lying and underreporting (see this thread). That's definitely correct, but on the other hand I wouldn't necessarily call it a "design flaw" - where else could they have obtained such a dataset? When they had only looked at the cases reported to the police, it would have been even less - only 14% of the ~11,000 officially known to the Church, as the link you posted said! They probably should have communicated it more clearly, but I honestly think that this is probably the best they could work with, given that a large number of cases remains unreported or hushed up by Church authorities. I also didn't say that sexual abuse within the Church was a closed chapter or anything - there are about 38,000 priests in the US alone, of course there are and will be cases of abuse. Their number has been declining since the 70s though, both following a general societal trend and apparently also due to a "change of culture", so to speak, within the Church that pays more attention to this topic. I understand that most of the post-2005 allegations also refer to incidents occuring several decades ago, too. I would also be hesitant to paint the Church with too broad a brush - it's far from being the monolithic block non-Catholics tend to see it as. Priestly education, attitude toward abusers, transparency of the proceedings after a report has been made - these can all be vastly different from diocese to diocese, bishop to bishop, even parish to parish. And this doesn't even take the hundreds if not thousands of monasteries, schools, kindergardens, universities, hospitals etc into account that are all operated by the Church in one way or the other, just in the US alone! Especially nowadays it is my impression that the handling of abuse cases depends strongly on the acting bishop - maybe in diocese A it's handled really well, while the neighbouring diocese B tries to keep it all hushed up. This isn't meant to downplay the institutional guilt and shortcomings of the Church as a whole, fown from the smallest parish all the way up to Rome - it was and still is systemic, and it's IMO up to the Vatican to implement even stricter controls and mechanisms to ensure that no bishop can get away with just shuffling around an abusing priest to another parish. Smudgie Buggler posted:The priesthood also attracts sociopathic abusers due to the relative safely with which they can operate and the access to their preferred victim class the church affords them more than most are ready to admit. If there was somehow totally accurate data on priest proclivities I think we'd find a higher proportion of pedophiles in the priesthood than should be statistically expected. I strongly doubt that, however. Becoming a Catholic priest isn't something you do on a whim; it is a major life decision that requires on average 5-6 years of intense and intellecutally demanding training, during which the Church authorities repeatedly try to find out why you joined up and if it really is your calling. I really don't think that anyone chooses to become a priest simply because then they can molest children better. Why not choose one of the thousands of other possibilites to interact with children like volunteering in their parish, being a football coach or joining the boyscouts? It's not like those have a starling reputation for immediately singling out molesters and reporting them to the police, either. Smudgie Buggler posted:But that's not really the point. The problem is one of institutional culture. Only an absolute fool denies at this point that the church made it way too easy to get away with sexual abuse for a very long time. Even if abusers were no more common in the clergy than in the lay population, you'd still expect there to be a shitload of abuse committed by priests. When they can get away with it, predators are going to be loving prolific in their misdeeds. No argument about that. e: Kyrie eleison posted:One thing I never realized is that it's very normal to move priests around in general. Like, if you're a priest, odds are good you'll get reappointed once a decade or so. This is for a few reasons, such as to meet the current needs of the church, improve your personal development (e.g. being appointed to a parish with another primary language), and avoid parishioners getting overly attached to any specific priests. I've seen a lot of turnaround at my parish. That too; my parish priest has been continously working here for 40 years and it loving sucks - he's basically turned the parish into his personal fiefdom. Otoh, it's happened way too often that abusing priests really were just kinda shuffled away, even when they normally would have stayed for another ten years or whatever. I don't doubt that moving accused priests from parish to parish is an easy and popular move by bishops who want to keep the whole thing on the down-low. System Metternich fucked around with this message at 11:20 on Jun 17, 2015 |
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Jun 17, 2015 11:16
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I actually think the answer is more celibacy. I'd like to think this is the direction the Church has taken it since the scandal. By this I mean, no more ordaining priests who are caught engaging in any sort of outward sexual behavior during their time in seminary, or have a recent history of lots of sexual activity. I know about the Confessions of St. Augustine, but even he had mostly overcome his unruly lusts long before the time he was converting. Priests should be an elite class of people with high standards, not an "all are welcome" sort of thing. Similarly ordained priests should be defrocked if they are caught breaking their vow of celibacy, or any other significant violation of their position. There's just no excuse, it's totally unacceptable for a priest to be doing that. Go be a taxi driver.
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Jun 17, 2015 11:32
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Have you instead considered that every pope since Miltiades is a Roman puppet?
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Jun 17, 2015 11:41
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System Metternich posted:That's definitely correct, but on the other hand I wouldn't necessarily call it a "design flaw" - where else could they have obtained such a dataset? When they had only looked at the cases reported to the police, it would have been even less - only 14% of the ~11,000 officially known to the Church, as the link you posted said! They probably should have communicated it more clearly, but I honestly think that this is probably the best they could work with, given that a large number of cases remains unreported or hushed up by Church authorities. Data on child abuse have a built-in latency, because many, many children don't realize they were abused because the abuse was normative in their household/school whatever. They don't report because they won't be believed. They *do* report and aren't believed. They don't report because they think it's only them. All of these motives for underreporting become less important -- although not unimportant -- as the children mature. The John Jay study simply didn't have enough reliable data to make forward predictions.
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Jun 17, 2015 16:04
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Kyrie eleison posted:I actually think the answer is more celibacy. I'd like to think this is the direction the Church has taken it since the scandal. By this I mean, no more ordaining priests who are caught engaging in any sort of outward sexual behavior during their time in seminary, or have a recent history of lots of sexual activity. I know about the Confessions of St. Augustine, but even he had mostly overcome his unruly lusts long before the time he was converting. Priests should be an elite class of people with high standards, not an "all are welcome" sort of thing. Similarly ordained priests should be defrocked if they are caught breaking their vow of celibacy, or any other significant violation of their position. There's just no excuse, it's totally unacceptable for a priest to be doing that. Go be a taxi driver. That sure is a reasonable and pragmatic plan for a church that's already hurting for priests (not in the least BECAUSE if you ordain in this day and age you can expect lots of questions about your proclivities towards children from lay people). The answer is to make the job unattractive for pedophiles. Show that the days of shuffling priests around are over. It helps if it's actually true, and as this article shows, we're maybe not there yet.
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Jun 17, 2015 23:18
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Skeesix posted:That sure is a reasonable and pragmatic plan for a church that's already hurting for priests (not in the least BECAUSE if you ordain in this day and age you can expect lots of questions about your proclivities towards children from lay people). idgaf about the declining number of priests. That is not a good reason to not hold priests to a very high standard. The shame is that a bunch of losers were ordained in the first place. Also there's nothing wrong with shuffling priests around, it's good policy.
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Jun 17, 2015 23:29
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Celibacy must be maintained because without it priests will pass along church property and fiefs to their sons, and heck, we can't totally prove celibacy correlates with weirdos since we have too little data. Great , solid arguments for celibacy. Are there any good arguments for priestly celibacy?
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Jun 18, 2015 00:15
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Best Friends posted:Celibacy must be maintained because without it priests will pass along church property and fiefs to their sons, and heck, we can't totally prove celibacy correlates with weirdos since we have too little data. Great , solid arguments for celibacy. Priests with girlfriends and wives in their flocks might treat them differently than normal parishioners? The priests couldn't be good Confessors for their own families? Getting your dick wet makes it unholy because lust is inherently sinful? Wait, you said good arguments. No idea. Maybe something to do with benefits packages or other HR concerns. Although it probably has something to do with having such relationships means focusing your life too much on Earthly considerations instead of Godly ones.
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Jun 18, 2015 00:26
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Best Friends posted:Celibacy must be maintained because without it priests will pass along church property and fiefs to their sons, and heck, we can't totally prove celibacy correlates with weirdos since we have too little data. Great , solid arguments for celibacy. The argument for celibacy is that it's what exists now. The discussion is whether celibacy encourages child abuse or if it's a non-correlated figure. If the former, then yes you should campaign against celibacy. If the latter, there's no reason why someone should care, really.
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Jun 18, 2015 00:27
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computer parts posted:The argument for celibacy is that it's what exists now. The discussion is whether celibacy encourages child abuse or if it's a non-correlated figure. If the former, then yes you should campaign against celibacy. If the latter, there's no reason why someone should care, really. Limits talent, directly impedes the priestly mission of counseling by limiting priestly experience with both relationships and families, and celibacy in the 21st century is weird and therefore stands to reason will attract disproportionately high weirdos (not just pedophiles). There's plenty of concrete downsides and no upsides except "it's been like this for centuries" when most of those centuries it had at least one upside - preventing priestly dynasties. That is no longer a concern in most of the world. As for the thread point, even if it's not proven that celibacy correlates with pedophilia, it's not proven it doesn't. It's basically a "who knows" data wise, and intuitively it makes a lot of sense that people not interested in adult relationships might tend toward pedophilia. And that's just the molesters themselves, how much has the celibacy requirement attracted a group that didn't report or covered up molesters.
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Jun 18, 2015 00:57
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Best Friends posted:celibacy in the 21st century is weird and therefore stands to reason will attract disproportionately high weirdos (not just pedophiles). I suppose some would consider this an upside; perhaps priests should skew towards people who don't care about what the 21st century considers weird. The point about counseling is a good one, though.
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Jun 18, 2015 01:08
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Priests have to be MGTOW or they will be corrupted by the influence of the devil.
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Jun 18, 2015 01:10
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Kyrie eleison posted:Priests have to be MGTOW or they will be corrupted by the influence of the devil. Kyrie, you were making relevant points in this thread, even if I seriously disagreed with some of them. There's no need to revert to your gimmick.
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Jun 18, 2015 01:12
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Here is the thing. When you've got self-reported retrospective data from a secretive organization, that's your dataset and you're stuck with it. However, once you have that dataset it is a scientist's responsibility to acknowledge the study's shortcomings. In 2004 you can't say there are fewer child abusers than in the 1970s-1980s. You can't say that because (1) the Church is known to have a history of underreporting child abuse until there are criminal indictments and (2) children tend not to report abuse until they reach adulthood. The children from the 1990s forward turn out to have had the same problems with Church denial -- see Kansas City and Minneapolis -- and thus any retrospective prediction in 2004 about the continuing rate of child abuse is statistically meaningless. Great post, it absolutely is a design flaw to just throw your hands up and work with the data as if it has no flaws. It's like trusting an internet poll on Fox news to be representative.
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Jun 18, 2015 18:02
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Silver2195 posted:I suppose some would consider this an upside; perhaps priests should skew towards people who don't care about what the 21st century considers weird. Well, that is the subject of this thread.
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Jun 18, 2015 19:35
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