Tuesday, April 19th, 2016
Stephan: I don't do stories on the sexual dysfunction issues surrounding the institutional Roman Catholic Church unless there is something notably egregious about a particular story. Part of the reason for my decision about this is that I do not want SR to be seen as a Catholic bashing website. That is not my personal feeling and I don't want even the appearance of bashing. The other reason is that I could run child abuse stories everyday. And I am not speaking here of just the U.S.. The media of Ireland, Poland, and Australia, to name but three nations have reports on child sexual abuse literally everyday, and it is more or less the same story each time. Other than numbers there is nothing new. Finally, I respect Pope Francis and what he is trying to do to save his church.
But the takeaway from over a decade of reading these stories each morning as I go through the world English language press is that the Catholic Church as an institution has a major and apparently irreconcilable dysfunction when it comes to human sexuality. This is a sick institution essentially standing at a cross roads. One road leads to inclusion, growth, and a change in rigid clerical celibacy.
The other leads to focusing on Africa and parts of Latin American, where old-fashioned patriarchal rigid sexual distinctions prevail for the moment. It would probably buy Catholicism another century, but even in Africa and Latin America the arc of history bends towards tolerance and inclusion, which spells ultimate decay of institutions like the Roman church. If that is the road chosen, which seems to be what is happening, I think we will see the Church wither into a vestigial organization in the developed world. It is already well along in much of Europe which, after centuries of religious wars, just isn't interested much in religion of any kind. But it is also happening here in the U.S. Millennials are dropping away from religion in droves.
This essay lays out a number of the major issues facing the Roman Church.
It is testament to Pope Francis’s skill that he has managed to reinvigorate the Church’s standing despite continuing corruption and abuse controversies.
Credit: David Tulis/UPI
When the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, told a newspaper the firm was “doing God’s work,” his appeal on behalf of higher powers was an attempt to rescue the tainted reputation not only of his own investment bank, but of the entire industry. But for the Catholic Church, even this most obvious of strategies might not be enough to stem an inexorable decline.
The Catholic church is one of the oldest and most profitable brands in history. Financial details are kept sketchy, but this vast multinational dwarfs any other. The Economist has estimated that, in 2010, spending by the U.S. branch of the church and its various entities (probably the wealthiest and least opaque of the […]
Hi Mr Schwartz,
I’ve read a number of article’s recently that point out that pedophilia is many times more prevalent among the Protestant Clergy than among Catholic Priests, (in total numbers of children molested) but for some reason bashing Priests sells more papers than stories about wayward pedophile Ministers, so one doesn’t see those stories in print as often. Quit a conundrum that.
Respectfully Damien McLeod
I meant “Quite” in the above comment but there’s no edit button so I was unable to correct my misspelling.
More to the point, the incidence of molestation in the Catholic Priesthood is much lower than that in the general US population. Perhaps the Church’s hierarchy biggest sin was covering up molestation cases. But, we have to remember that Priest-Penitent confidentiality is required by Canon Law and recognized by US Courts. Of course, the law has changed and now the Church is compelled to report suspected cases of molestation to authorities. With regards to law changes, California removed the statute of limitations in cases of molestation, and went so far as to apply the law retroactively, meaning that some of the Church molestation cases went back over 40 years, and in some instances the alleged perpetrator was deceased. The retroactive application violates the basic principle of jurisprudence that the accused has a right to defend himself.
As a side note, where was the outrage and the multi-million dollar lawsuits when public school teachers and administrators in Orange and LA counties were involved in molestation? How is it that an adult woman, who claims to have been molested by a priest when she was 16, can settle her case for a million dollars, but yet the parents of a 17-year-old who was killed by a derailed train can only settle for $500,000. Honestly, I know about these cases by the the adult woman “victim” is a relative of mine, as are the parents who are my aunt and uncle. How can consensual sex (albeit illicit) create more monetary damage than the death of a daughter in a wrongful death suit? It doesn’t make sense.
It appears that most pedophiles were themselves victims of abuse in their formative years. If that is true, then the Catholic church has not only covered up the crimes committed by their priests for literally centuries, they are also responsible for the spreading epidemic of this horrible, destructive impulse in our society.