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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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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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