And a happy "Good morning, to you, too!"

I'd love to hear what Santorum has to say about this.

Sick. Fucking sick. No wonder the churh has led to so much disaster in the world. It is inherently perverse.

Ah, I see. The "handbook" thing is a joke. When I read this, I thought Mr. Savage was claiming that child rape was explicitly and officially condoned by the Church.

These people are criminals and should be punished. The Church should have protected the children in its care and it failed, but child rape was NOT, as a literal interp of Savage's post would imply, encouraged.

@4: Nor was child rape discouraged.

@4 You must be new, right? So here's the deal: Dan's using sarcasm to point out that in practice, the Church's actions have gone beyond the point of merely failing to protect children. Rather, the structural failure is so egregious that they might as well have had an active policy of raping children, because if they did, this is what the reality might have looked like. Keep an eye out for this rhetorical strategy of his in the future - he does it a lot.

Babies stolen from poor people in Spain and given to the rich. Mass molestation, child rape and cover-ups in almost every country they operate. Abuse of young pregnant girls in Ireland ("The Magdalene Sisters"). Beatings and sexual abuse of aboriginal kids in foster schools where they had the "Indian" beat out of them.

How the FUCK is this criminal enterprise still operating?

This is cartoonishly evil. Not to insult cartoons, of course.

@4 - “… government inspectors were aware that minors were being castrated while in Catholic-run psychiatric institutions. Minutes of meetings held in the 1950s show that inspectors were present when castrations were discussed. The documents also reveal that the Catholic staff did not think parents needed to be involved.
“...Vic Marijnen [Dutch Prime Minister] was the chairman of the Gelderland children's home where … children were abused. He intervened to have prison sentences dropped against several priests convicted of abusing children.”

They approved the abuse, they documented it. The Catholic PM felt somehow compelled to release the abusers. That seems pretty official to me.

@7:
1. the catholic church is the ghost of the roman empire, and wealthy beyond belief. they've been hoarding since 300 CE.
2. the alternative christianities are/could be worse. think evangelicals, mormon, koresh, snake handling. catholic theology looks relatively rational in comparison.
3. fear.

@2 I think that's an unallowed question. We're not supposed to ask him direct questions about his faith or the religious organization he’s a part of because he's a real Christian.

A huge reason this story is important is that if it happened then, it can happen now. There's a lot of countries, people and organizations twisted over GLBT rights. What's going on in those places today that we're not hearing about? What's on deck for the future's public inquiries?

@4: I think the actions of the church hiding the crimes of priests and other religious orders against children, moving offenders from parish to parish without disclosing their crimes, obstructing justice in investigations, claiming that the church is exempt from local laws, and seeking to silence, discredit, and marginalize the survivors is a pattern that has been seen around the world.

Given the history and the power of the church in the 50's castration as a punishment for survivors reporting their sexual abuse by priests fails to surprise.

The church itself is clear that sins of ommission are as wrong of sins of commission, so the idea that they did nothing wrong because they did not "encourage child rape" while allowing it to happen, actively hiding the perpetrators, and allowing children to be physically mutilated after being raped is patently absurd.

1 in 6 boys and 1 in 4 girls experience some form of sexual abuse before the age of 18. For those of them who were abused by the religious the distinction between what was "allowed" and what was "encouraged" is meaningless.

I'm more and more convinced (though I'm aware this is a complete fantasy) that government officials and other leaders should be atheists. You can't trust people who worship false idols. Brainwashed people do unpredictable, irrational and dangerous things.

It is a wonder that these bishops haven't been dragged from their palaces and burned at the stake or that priests aren't regularly found hanged from streetlamps.

The flock shows much more Christlike tolerance and charity than do their savage clergy.

But of course, atheists could learn something from religion, so says NPR! http://ttbook.org/book/atheists-believer…

Why are atheists so angry. Worth a watch in its entirety.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUI_ML1qk…

So much attention paid to the children the church castrated. Why not talk about all the millions of others they didn't castrate? The ones they didn't rape?

It's not a perfect record, but a high proportion of kids who grew up in the church were neither molested nor mutilated. A very high proportion.

And that's not even counting murder. Church murder has dropped to next to nothing in recent decades and nobody credits them for that any more. Practically taken for granted, to the great shame of the church's critics.

@14, true, but I don't think this is about religious faith. I think this is about particular religious faiths, by their very nature, concentrating the sexually repressed, obsessed and damaged.

Think, ya know, "natural selection" at work.

If you profess a pathological hatred and fear of sex and an equally fervid worship of male authority as "divine," are you really surprised such a belief system would draw pedophiles? It's the perfect set-up: you get the consuming guilt for your supposed penance, the authority/respect granted by the church itself, and ready access to all the boys ya want.

See Stephen Fry, as he makes these points much better than I do: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDCSND2Zp….

@17
Is that you, Bill Donohue?

In other disgusting news: German newsmagazin Der Spiegel revealed yesterday that Stephan Ackermann, Bishop of Trier, who was appointed "Abuse Scandal Commissoner" by the German Bishops´conference in 2010, employs up to seven convicted pedophil priests in his own diocese. Of course, when confronted with these facts, Ackermann found no problem with that situation since he is "keeping an eye on them" and their community work doesn´t involve interacting with children...yeah sure

@ 17, and think of the millions who survived oppression and aggression committed by their own governments. A very high number of Soviet citizens survived the purges and WWII. A very high proportion of Chinese citizens survived the Great Leap Forward. Hell, more people lived through the Khmer Rouge's reign than died, too. And aren't there still Indians here in America?

Is there no low to which they haven't already sunk? How much worse will the next uncovered secret be?

@14 That is a tempting thing to think. However, the problem with things like this isn't that the people involved believe in God or the Church or life after death. The bad part of religion is the heirarchy and organization and dogma, and non-religious organizations are perfectly capable of all those things. Just look at the Communist Party in China. It's done things just as wretched as this, and people have been just as afraid to speak against it, but it is NOT a religious organization.

An obligately atheist government might even be worse because it would not necessarily incorporate a moral code (which religions do) or a concept that all bad acts are eventually punished in the afterlife (which religions do).

Think about it, even when the most sanctimonious and hypocritical politicians decide to make it look like they're pious and moral, they occasionally end up doing things that are actually moral. And the Catholic Church? Yes, they horribly failed these poor abused children, but they ALSO spent the whole twentieth century (and many of the centuries before it) feeding, educating and advocating for the underprivileged of the world. That's more than "occasionally."

So they were castrated as a treatment for homosexuality. Well, that makes perfect sense. If you have a penis in your arse, you must automatically be gay, even if you didn't want or ask for that penis to be there. So you bugger the altar boy, then have him diagnosed as gay ("look at that blood! He's obviously been taking it up the bum") and his balls whipped off. That's right up there with sink or float for witches.

@25: He's not going after people of faith. He's taking a stand against organized religion, and one religious organization in particular which has a pretty horrific track record as far as child abuse goes.

@ 23, your middle paragraph seems to say that religion is necessary for ethics. That's false.

@17 This just in: local police have announced that they will no longer investigate homicides since the majority of local residents will never be involved in one.

@25 Can you point me to the lesbian organization that condones bad parenting as a system of belief? I think you need to learn the difference between personal experience and the nature of an institution.

@17:

So by your logic, I can randomly shoot a few people today and we shouldn't make a big deal of it because of the hundreds of thousands of people that I have not randomly shot in my lifetime.

Your brand of dismissiveness of the horror that fucking organization has inflicted on who-knows how many thousands (hundreds of thousands? millions?) "because hey, they haven't destroyed EVERYBODY they've come in contact with!" is sick, disgusting, perverse, and cowardly. If you were attempting to be glib, you failed.

@29 Failed for you, at least. Seemed like pretty obvious sarcasm to me.

Problem is since this is the umpety umpteenth time the Catholic Church has been involved in pedophilia and covering it up, there is what amounts to an unofficial handbook in the Church's standard procedures. Pedophiles burrow their way into many organizations (look at Sandusky for example) but the Catholic Church has an "impressive" record for subsequently shielding and protecting their own pedophiles.

I wish I could remember which smart person it was that said that religion is inherently immoral, because when you threaten people with hell if they disobey, and promise heaven if they obey, then people won't do what's right because they believe it to be right, they will do it because they are afraid and thus by definition not have a moral code.

Also, to everyone here who belives that atheism is bad, I have only this to say: http://a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-a…

@30 I don't recall anyone doing a comparison of one religion against any other. I was simply trying to get you to consider the very specific--and peculiar and regressive--beliefs of the Catholic church, yes, as an institution, around sex and gender. You dodged all of that, by, first, making the absurd claim that your bad parenting experience can be extrapolated as a critique of all lesbian parenting and, second, by charging Dan and then me with not understanding the ludicrous point that you're trying to make.

If you cannot answer why the Catholic Church hierarchy just "happens" to have a concentrated number of pedophiles relative to their ranks in the population at large, it is you who lack sufficient understanding of the issue being discussed. This is not about lay Catholics, or about Catholicism versus any other system of belief.

For starters, try considering my basic point: there is no such thing thing as a queer organization or institution that advocates the abuse of children as "for their good." The Catholic orthodoxy on sex is inherently the opposite. Whether its virgin/whore bullshit, the inherent divine supremacy of men over women, the fear of all sex for pleasure or outside marriage, the hatred of gays--these beliefs cause real damage to people's psyches and the church ends up "selecting for" (just like bacterial resistance to antibiotics in a damn petri dish) "leaders" who are closet cases, pedophiles or who are simply running from their sexual demons. The whole point of organizations for LGTBQ people and their families, in contrast, is to do the precise opposite. So, sorry, but no individual anecdote about a poor gay parent has relevance here.

What you're calling a "double-standard" is your failure to realize that your personal experience is just that, a personal experience. The topic herein was about the nature of a given institution. This topic doesn't imply that all who follow a given religious insitution believe exactly what that institution promotes (98% of Catholic women, remember, use birth control) or that that institution's failings cannot be pointed out without doing some kind of exhaustive comparison of other religions in order to be "balanced." (That's, btw, the adult coward's version of the child's defense of, "Well, he did it first!")

In short, you can dissemble all you want, but, really? You're just full of it.

@31 I missed the sarcasm too.

They have the benefit of time on their side, which may be why people can still attend mass (and funerals and weddings) and not feel like they’re condoning child abuse. These things come to light many years later and they can say, ”it’s not like that anymore, that was years ago, this was a problem then, we screwed up then, but we know how to handle this now, you can’t hold us accountable…”

And then, if there’s another incidence of abuse that’s happening right now it’ll come to light several years from now and they can use the same excuse again.

@ 36: "Red Herring". I don't think that means what you think it does.....

On a related note, I'm loving this graphic on "Freedom Explained" from Reddit:

http://i.imgur.com/LaY8o.jpg

@7: It's not just Spain, Ireland and Australia.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/th…
2004: Poz children in a New York Catholic orphanage, some as young as 3 months old, used in toxic HIV drug experimentation, without the consent of their parents or other relatives, and, apparently, with no regard to the pain and suffering it caused them.

@ 27 What I said was that religions DO incorporate moral codes and the concept that bad acts are punished. I did not say that atheistic organizations do not. However, most of them don't. For example, there's the Communist Party in China and both major political parties in the U.S.

The politically active organizations that spend the most time encouraging people to think about how a human being should act are the churches, synagogues, temples and mosques. Most of the others have other priorities. (The Humane Society focuses on how humans should act toward animals, but that has no bearing on taking bribes or covering up crimes or other temptations that a politician might face.)

Sure, atheists can be moral; there are many wonderful examples throughout history, but when it comes to whether the people are better off if their government, a set of professions that self-select for ambitious and driven people, is better off being entirely staffed by atheists, my answer is that no they're not. Religion itself is not the problem. Ambition and us vs. them in-crowd-ism are.

While we're at it, could we please remember that this happened in the 1950s? During that time, LOTS of organizations were doing things that we consider immoral today. Native American women who went to U.S. hospitals would end up sterilized against their will (and knowledge) as late as the 1970s, but we're not vilifying today's hospitals. We acknowledge that times have become more enlightened.

The Church is on a slow burn but it does learn from its mistakes.

@ 38 : it's not the fault of Slog that you are bad at both logic and sarcasm I'm afraid.

@ 42, does the Church really learn from its mistakes? Occasionally admitting to errors centuries after the fact hasn't seemed to help them not make new ones. And the evidence suggests that religious politicians are no more likely to be ethical than non-religious ones - you can name just about any regime and I'll find the graft and death they caused.

"In 1956, Mr Marijnen was the chairman of the Gelderland children's home where Mr Heithuis and other children were abused. "

Gelderland!?! GELDerland?!? Irony attack.

@45 well spotted, and might I say ouch indeed.

@44 What we'd actually need is a side-by-side comparison of both religious and non-religious politicians (and a way of weighting the amount of damage done by the degree of religiousness). Saying that specific religious politicians here and there have been responsible for graft and death is not in question, but it's no less true of atheists.

Church learning from its mistakes? One century after being banned, books on the solar system were required reading in Catholic universities. It took them five hundred years to officially admit that they were wrong about Galileo but only fifty to talk about the Holocaust. The concept of children's limbo was knocked out a few years ago. Yes, the Church learns and updates itself. It just does it very slowly.

I fully expect that contraception will be endorsed as an active good within one hundred years. Abortion they might never budge on; we're more likely to get a technological solution to that first.

@ 47, I said regimes, not politicians. You know, like China's been under one regime since 1949, the US since the 1780s, France since WW2 (or 1956 if you're going to be technical), Russia since 1991...

So, regarding the Church, why aren't you speaking to the fact that they keep committing new, egregious errors that show that the are not, in fact, learning anything? If they had learned, they wouldn't keep on repressing and exploiting as they do.

And your contraception remark demonstrates why the glacial pace is itself an evil. So maybe, just maybe they'll decide that contraception's okay, right around the time that the world's population will be hitting 25 billion (if collapse has somehow been averted)? And that's a conservative estimate, given how the population has doubled in the past 40 years. Give me a fricking break.

Your apologies for the Church are absurd.

@31

Ya think? Where do they get these idiots?

Well, back to printing up another batch of "Hearty congratulations for not burning anyone at the stake in recent memory!" bumper stickers. Want one?

Look, religious organizations aren't any more moral or immoral than any other organization. They are bureaucracies that do what they decide they need to do to continue existing. The problem is that human society needs morality defined and enforced, and we've allowed churches to serve as the ultimate arbiters of morality. Thus, anything the dominant church has done is moral by definition, and there's been no higher moral overseer to disagree.

Thank goodness at least portions of the world are growing more secular and democratic, which gives the hope that humanity's ethics can continue to evolve.

@48 With regimes there will almost always be other factors that affect the level of corruption, and they change over time. Corruption was a lot more tolerated in the NYPD in the 1890s than it was in the 1990s, for example.

"new, egregious errors that show that the are not, in fact, learning anything?"

Like what? Most of the stuff that they're still doing wrong--on birth control, etc.--isn't new.

You may find my defense of the Church absurd, but that same word applies to calling an organization evil when it does far more good than bad. That's like calling Planned Parenthood evil because it spends 3% of its time performing abortions and the other 97% on sex ed, contraception and medical treatments. The Church is the same way. Terrible crimes were committed years ago, and today it has some toxic political positions, but most of what it does is good for the underprivileged and people in general.

@ 51, "far more good than bad" is a subjective judgment; and they're most certainly committing crimes as we type this.

The church is a force of power, and like all forces of power, their primary interest is maintaining that power. That code of ethics is for other people to follow, not the church hierarchy.

I don't believe that the point of these posts is to paint all religious people as evil. So many religious institutions seem to think that being religious means that they own the concept of Goodness®, and can decide for everyone what is Good®, and what should be branded as evil. They look down on gay people, and consider us all evil, sinful people, hell bent on destroying all that they "know" to be Good®. They seem to think that they are inherently more Good®, because they love Jesus. We couldn't possibly understand Good®, because only the religious know true Goodness®. They believe that since they are coming from the superior Goodness® high ground, their religious beliefs should be legislated into law by the government onto us barbarians. They think of us as dogs who pooped on the church floor, and while we may not understand it, they're punishing us for our own Good®! The point of these posts are to show that they are no more Good®, than any of the rest of us.

@51 Terrible crimes were committed years ago, and today it has some toxic political positions, but most of what it does is good for the underprivileged and people in general.

Holy rationalization alert! Why not just say "mistakes were made" if you're looking to evade so transparently?

Your mentioning of Planned Parenthood deserves comparison for a minute. Yes, abortion comprises 3% of its services. Whether you find abortion immoral or not, however, it is a 1. legal and 2. elective and 3. medical procedure. To even mention abortion in a discussion of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church promoting and hiding pedophiles is grotesque! Child molestation is a fucking crime. Period. I don't care if it's 0.01% of the Catholic Church's "activities," nothing else the Catholic Church endorses or does excuses it when the hierarchy itself is invested in covering it up. This logic, if you can call it that, is not that far from battered wives who will tell you, "Oh, but he can be so sweet and caring the other 315 days of the year." Bull. Shit.

Next point. Planned Parenthood doesn't, no matter the scaremongering insistence of the right to the contrary, mislead, coerce, or force its members to adopt a predefined set of beliefs. It provides health care services! In fact, because of the ceaseless investigations initiated by the right, folks at Planned Parenthood have become very adept and routine in making it very clear to patients that they are not being "pushed" toward an abortion. Contrast that with the fake Christian crisis centers that give women misinformation about their bodies, create delays in getting seen, and then outright shame or bully them, all to prevent an abortion. Better yet, contrast that with the ONGOING efforts to use the hierarchy of the Catholic Church to protect the concentration of pedophiles in its leadership positions.

And that brings me to a point that none of the apologists in this message board are willing to acknowledge. Please stop giving us this bullshit about how "other institutions have corruption too" and start being honest about the worldview and orthodoxy of the Catholic Church itself. Planned Parenthood doesn't preach shit about the origin of life, the nature or existence of God, the proper role of women in society, the appropriate kind of sex you should be having, and so on. To compare them is to dodge how warped the Catholic Church's actual doctrines are, so much so that they concentrate the damaged and repressed.

Who's evading? I'm saying that if we're going to criticize the Church for the bad stuff that it does--or did sixty-odd years ago in this case--then we should also acknowledge the good stuff that it does or we're no better than the people who convince themselves that Planned Parenthood is an abortion mill and no more.

I stand behind my comparison of the Roman Catholic Church and Planned Parenthood. MOST of what both organizations do is (or should be) unquestionably good. Feeding and educating, providing medical care, etc. However, both organizations also do things that people find immoral, and this causes their opponents to blind themselves to the service that they do for society.

The Church doesn't coerce or force people to believe things either, no more than schools force children to believe in math or history. Just because you don't agree with a religion doesn't mean that its members were forced to believe it.

It seems that the exceptions are starting to outnumber the faithful. When is it that the exceptions become the norm?

@55: "The Church doesn't coerce or force people to believe things either, no more than schools force children to believe in math or history. Just because you don't agree with a religion doesn't mean that its members were forced to believe it."
Well, not any more it doesn't. Remember the Holy Inquisition?

@57 Yes, I remember the Holy Inquisitions taking place in the 1500s with most of them dying out slowly, none lasting past 1858. Yes, the Church did brutal things back then, but so did a lot of organizations that existed back then. Compare the Church of the 1500s to Henry VIII and compare the Church of the 2010s to Queen Elizabeth II.

Who, btw, "believes" in math or history? You understand math or history; you don't believe in them. Teaching and indoctrination are different things.

As for the whole "coercion and force are things of the past," I guess it would be no problem then if a Catholic lay person routinely challenged their church leaders on homosexuality, or contraception, or the position of women in the church, or the supposed immaculate conception, or, ffs, even the ludicrous and vengeful concept of eternal hellfire. I guess, then, that Catholic Church services have become these open spaces where critical inquiry and thoughtful questions are heartily welcome! Good to know!

And, no, of course, the Catholic Church's teachings have nothing whatsoever to do with emotional bullying, manipulation and guilt. Nothing whatsoever.

And, @55 your use of passive voice is classic "distancing language." I stand by my argument that no social work performed by the Catholic Church could ever be used to "cancel out" the abuse of children by its leadership. And when we're talking about this topic, we are not, as you would so emotionally prefer it, talking about events in the easily-contained and comfortingly-distant past.

@4: Naw, just implicitly and functionally encouraged.

@55: Have you been following the present efforts of the Catholic Church to mandate that public policy here in USA reflect their views and only their views with respect to the Affordable Care Act? Or any of the anti-abortion and anti-contraception laws passing in Republican-controlled state legislatures? Legal mandates certainly qualify as coercion.

Also @55: Yes, schools do indoctrinate children (or, if one prefers a less-loaded term, schools socialize children to a particular normative cultural perspective). That's a non sequitur. Also, you're arguing from the presupposition that the Catholic Church does more good than bad. As far as I can tell, it doesn't do ANY good, ever, anywhere, any time. Every single activity dedicated to social justice ever performed under the auspices of the Catholic Church has involved proselytizing, making all such efforts coercive (and coercive to believe in a demonstrably-untrue and demonstrably-harmful worldview). So, yeah, it's evil because it does NO good at all, only evil.

Still, re: your Planned Parenthood analogy, if one thinks abortion is evil, then I have no issue with that one calling PP evil, even if they mostly don't perform abortions (after all, serial killers or child-raping priests don't kill or rape people a majority of their time; most of what they do isn't evil). It's just that abortion isn't evil, unlike raping children.

Perhaps it's time to call for the castration of Catholic priests. They supposedly don't need fully functional genitalia, according to their religion; so they shouldn't miss the bloody things.

And maybe, just maybe, if they were all castrated, they wouldn't devote so much time to raping the shit out of little boys and then getting away with it.

@40: Note the "the BBC has upheld a complaint that this program was inaccurate" link in the sidebar. While there are some serious ethical questions that can be raised about the experiments in question, the portrayal is quite distorted, and relies on at least one "expert" who is an HIV denialist.

Catholic masses are religious rituals, not vehicles for discussion. And yes, people do challenge the Church, all the time. You will notice that you are doing it now. Often, nothing bad happens to them. Sometimes they are kicked out of the Church.

I didn't use the passive voice in post 55. I used the first person plural and active voice.

"As far as I can tell, it doesn't do ANY good, ever,"

Then you need to read more. Catholic organizations all over the world provide food, education, medical care and other services to the underprivileged.

"Every single activity dedicated to social justice ever performed under the auspices of the Catholic Church has involved proselytizing"

That's not true. No, different priests et al. have different takes on proselytization. One priest whom I knew said that his take was to wait until the people he was helping asked him why he was doing it.

It sounds like you need to learn more about the Catholic Church. For someone who disapproves of indoctrination, you sure seem to repeat a lot of things that someone told you without offering real proof.

@64 Sigh.

Your words:

"Terrible crimes were committed years ago"

=

Passive voice, distancing language, textbook rationalization.

Please note that you are still arguing that the good works of Catholics somehow evens out against a global conspiracy of child molesters promoted and protected by the church itself. Try that shit on one of the victims or their families.

You also are not addressing any of the points raised about the church's sexphobic and misogynistic orthodoxy.

I'm saying that all the people who are shouting, "The Roman Catholic Church is evil!" and "Religion is nothing but trouble!" should take into account the good that the RC Church and religions in general have done as well as the bad.

That's because you have not made any points about the orthodoxy, only rants. As for that, yes, the Church has a problem with women and sex. As to whether these problems specifically foster child rape, I'd say that no, the Catholic religion does not promote child rape. That's like saying that Islam promotes terrorism. Are there Islamic terrorists? Yes, but those people are perverting legitimate religious beliefs to justify themselves.

Professions that give people access to children are attractive to pedophiles. This is true of the priesthood but also of secular professions.

@66, Child rapists in secular professions do hard time. Catholic priests are protected by the Catholic church, and spirited away to different parts of the world where they can continue raping children. Comparing this with Islamic terrorism is absurd, Islam is not a monolithic entity like the Catholic church. This is like holding Quakers responsible for the institutionally protected child rape perpetrated by Catholic priests. Sure, Islamic terrorists pervert legitimate religious beliefs - well the Catholic church does the same. There isn't any other Christian denomination whose hierarchy, all the way to the top, systematically covers for child rapists (well, I suppose there's the FLDS church, though they're pretty unabashed about it). Also, there isn't any other organization in the world perpetrating abuses like this on this scale - the Catholic church is Child Rape International™ - it is intellectually dishonest to compare the church with far smaller secular institutions that a) answer to the law, b) do not actively break said law, and c) do not institutionally condone child rape by shuffling child rapists to other parts of the world where they can continue raping children. Planned Parenthood and public schools meet the criteria of a, b, and c, making you intellectually dishonest.

Sure, the Catholic church has arguably done good things (and as others here are quick to say, arguably not). You want us to take this "good" into account... why? Mussolini made the trains run on time, Hitler loved his dogs, Pol Pot no doubt had some good aspect as well. Historically the Catholic church has been a vehicle for evil, and continues as such today with its institutionally condoned abuses, forceful political lobbying, and teaching of a blatantly misogynistic and homophobic orthodoxy. If it weren't for that, maybe more people in this corner of the internet would have a more kindly take on the Catholic church.

@67, yes, but the REASON why the hierarchy protected those criminals was not because it was a specifically religious hierarchy. Insular organizations of all stripes do that. The Church just has more of this stuff to work with because it's been around longer.

@68 Maybe religion is not the specific reason the hierarchy protects child rapists (sure, a lot of it is just protecting their business model), but it is certainly the specific reason the hierarchy is able to protect child rapists. When a secular organization manages to game the system, most people have the sense to call that a gross failure of justice - but because the Catholic church is a religious organization, despite the fact that it plays a strong role in influencing the laws and policies of governments around the world, it can carte blanche ignore the law. You are making a false equivalency. You are being obtuse.

@69, and other organizations have other methods for protecting their crimes -- see all the discussion about the Penn state pedophilia crisis and how they tried to cover it up, 'inner culture', etc.

The Catholic church has a much longer story, and it (wrongly in my opinion) mandates celibacy. This single last fact is probably more of an explanation for the whole abuse thing than any religious dogma; and the cover-ups seem more like wanting to keep an image than again really thinking that raping is OK. (I'll bet there are other crimes they also cover up; I'd be really surprised if child abuse were the only thing.)

Not only that, but since life is complicated, good and evil are often intertwined. The same Catholic priest who abused me was also the organizer and manager of a project that helped street children escape a life of poverty and crime through music -- and hundreds of former criminals-to-be now have a life because of him. And he also was a child abuser. And...

Life ain't simple.

And yes, the Catholic church does a lot of good work in a number of places, and proselytism is at a historical low in these times -- I've seen the difference between Catholic missionaries and Protestant (American) missoniaries among South American Indians: the Catholic missionaries are way better, by any criteria you'd care to use. (Except the Protestants usually have more money.) DRF is quite correct on that.

Note that this is not to say that the Catholic church shouldn't have to answer for these crimes. It should. It's just that people are (via "rhetorical devices" like the one @6 above calls attention to) demonizing it more than it deserves. Maybe part of this has to do with the fact that most Americans are not Catholic and are still quite distrustful of "papists" (JFK notwithstanding).

@61(Mr Horstman), if you think all Catholic projects necessarily involve proselytizing, then I think you haven't checked them lately. Proselytizing has been at a historical low; and, at least in the field I know best (South American Indians, and their problems with missionaries), Protestant proselytizing is a much stronger and more vicious problem than anything the Catholics are doing.

To think that the Catholics -- and even the usually worse Protestants -- are doing nothing useful in their projects is really sad. The number of people whose lives have been saved or made livable by Catholic (or Protestant) projects belies that.

Which is not to say that proselytism doesn't exist, or isn't bad. It does, and it is. All I'm saying is that, in this imperfect world of ours, to claim that something is purely evil can be almost always trusted to be wrong a priori. There are many cases in which I'd like the church missionaries to go away, but in which I must admit there is nobody else who could be doing what they're doing (health, education, etc.). The necessary and dedicated secular humanists just aren't there yet.

@70, Other organizations certainly have their methods of covering for crimes, no doubt they are functionally similar to what we see in the Catholic church. Unlike the Catholic church, though, when those crimes are uncovered - like in the case of the Penn State scandal - people get arrested, fired, and forced to resign. As I acknowledged before, sometimes the law fails to exact justice. That secular organizations are answerable to the justice system, imperfect as it is, is a fundamental difference from the Catholic church, which is apparently answerable only to itself. This is what makes the two incomparable. Sandusky is facing the possibility of life in prison, pedophile priests get shuffled to different parishes.

@69, but when the Catholic Church did it, people DID call it a gross failure of justice. You're doing it now.

The Penn State athletic program requires life long celibacy of its athletic staff? It preaches to athletes that gay sex is a one-way ticket to hell? And that a woman's spiritual worth is her virginity? And that premarital sex and contraceptive use are sins requiring a series of ritualistic athletic chants in order to cleanse oneself? (Hey, that must be what the mascot is for!)

Yes, some people, out of self-interest, will use the corners and loopholes inherent to all bureaucracies to cover up crimes. The comparison of those cases to the Catholic Church, however, still speaks to someone looking for rationalizations and false equivalencies in order to avoid any thoughtful or honest examination of the church's orthodoxy around sex and the degree to which that orthodoxy selects for pedophiles in the leadership of the church itself.

No, Penn State doesn't require lifelong celibacy. It doesn't have a policy on gay sex (that we know of). It doesn't have issues with sex and women (that we know of). It doesn't have a political take on contraceptives, etc. etc. And both child rape and a cover up happened there anyway.

THIS is what I'm talking about. We should call out organizations that allow this to happen and cover it up. What we shouldn't do is ignore everything else that that organization has ever done.

Can someone clarify something for me?

Was all this abuse really "in the past", or is it just that it takes decades to become public knowledge?

In other words, is there abuse going on now which we'll only find out about when the victims are older and take action?

PS In the absence of a clear consensus, I'd suggest that the safest option is to assume that they're still doing it. In other words, the onus is on them to prove that they've changed (perhaps especially given the church report that blamed it all on the permissive culture of the 60s).

"Assume," J. Hutchins. You know the saying about that word?

Sad to say, it wouldn't surprise me if it were still going on here and there, even though it's been officially condemned. The Church has learned that these crimes will not be tolerated by the rest of society, but it's probably going to take time for that to percolate all the way through down to every last priest. It's the infrastructure that protected these criminals that must change, and the Church has never shown itself able to do that quickly. The process has been set in motion, though.

@23. The Communist Parties of China and Soviet Russia, etc are indeed religions. 1) They define the ultimate reality (the State). 2) They define the proper relationship between the individual and the ultimate reality (obedience to the State) 3) They govern based on those two principles.

@18. The priests are angry. Any rational adult would be angry to pay the penalty of celibacy in exchange for the "love of God." Man was made to poke things with his penis, and so it shall be at all times and in all places, say I. That strange idea called celibacy was called into being somewhere about a thousand years after the founding of the church, simply because the church didn't want children inheriting donations. The Priests of the time thought the donations were for them, the Vatican didn't appreciate the competition and celibacy was a cheap and easy administrative solutlion. The priesthood was a rare way out of abject poverty and enslavement to a land owner. So until recently they could trade the jobs for the 'no sex' thing and get away with it.