Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
It's like the old joke . . .
. . . about how advertising your Love Canal home as Now 3% Less Toxic isn't going to send the right message to potential buyers:
Apparently the Vatican has finally decided that the best defense is a good offense. According to a bellicose statement issued Monday, the Catholic Church doesn't have a paedophilia problem, it has an ephebophilia problem, thankyouverymuch. Plus this:
The statement, read out by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's permanent observer to the UN, defended its record by claiming that "available research" showed that only 1.5%-5% of Catholic clergy were involved in child sex abuse.
He also quoted statistics from the Christian Scientist Monitor newspaper to show that most US churches being hit by child sex abuse allegations were Protestant and that sexual abuse within Jewish communities was common.
Only 1.5-5%! Not bad! And anyway, Protestants and Jews are doing it too. So there.
Admittedly, I'm not a theological expert, but to my ears this sounds only slightly more sophisticated than something you might hear from a red-faced five-year-old. Augustine must be spinning in his grave.
Gotta love Kevin Drum.
Jim Downey
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Perverted priests
The trouble with quoting percentages is that it's quite hard to get a grip on what the figures mean so I just took the number of RC priests in the UK and the Irish Republic. (I'm in the UK so these are the easiest for me to lay hands on). There are 8,000 priests in total, excluding any in monastic orders or nunneries, so on a percentage of 1.5% to 5% this means that there are, on the church's own figures, between 120 and 400 child abusers in the priesthood. Now with the scandals that have been breaking in Ireland recently, the percentages quoted by the Archbishop seem on the low side but since he is a man of God then we must of course take his information as gospel!
However scale the numbers up to the USA and world wide, 1.5% to 5% of priests being child molesters do not seem trivial numbers. Add to that the Church's activity in concealing what has been going on and you might conclude that the good Archbishop is spinning an unpleasant truth.
A scary 1st cut estimate
A scary 1st cut estimate --
Wikipedia (always use the best sources) says:
Just swagging some numbers:
234 thousand / 300 million(US pop.) == ~0.08%
~0.08% * 2 = ~0.16%(only men commit sex crimes, don't count women)
Does that mean that Catholic priests are about 10-30 times more likely to be sex offenders than the general public?
Everybody reading this should take into account the extreme questionability of these numbers -- 'convicted' offenders vs. self-reported Catholic priests, etc. But still... my 2-minute sanity check is very disturbing.
Worse..
Is it a worse crime when a priest or pastor or whatever molests a kid than when a teacher or Boy Scout leader or relative does it? Is it the greater sense of hypocrisy? Or maybe it's cause it's an institutional problem in the Catholic Church?
p.s. don't read into my question as a defense of the church or clergy; genuine curiosity here because it seems like to most people it's a worse crime than when non-clergy commit such an offense. I'm guessing it's the hypocrisy part, not so much the trust, that makes it seems worse.
For Better Or...
I don't think it is a "worse" crime. It is a crime, but "worse" is so subjective that it is hard to even get a handle on it.
I am pretty sure it has to do with being perceived to be in a position of authority. With trust, in other words. Hypocrisy too, I suppose. Folks who have been placed into a position of authority over us, or have convinced us to willingly place them into a position of authority over us (as in clergy), are expected to be - at least partly - responsible for our wellbeing. ("Spiritual", financial, physical, emotional, political, etc., depending on the type of authority figure we are talking about.) This is a constant in most human societies.
I think you'll find just as much shock and dismay when a teacher or Boy Scout leader molest one of the children in their care. I think it is most likely a human thing. We associate authority figures with parents. So, when any authority figure/parent molests a child it is a deep, DEEP taboo in most modern societies today. This taboo is bolstered by tens of thousands of years-worth of evidence that tells us collectively that incest is a really bad survival strategy.
Hence the disgust and dismay we feel.
Dis May, Dis June and Dis July
My strong feelings are based on the fact that the Catholic Church has protected them, covered up for them, knowingly exposed children to them over and over by moving them to new areas, and always, always, always thinks of the welfare of the church over that of the victims.
..........
On a side note, I know a woman who was forcibly raped when she was in her 20s, and just shrugged it off with "The bastard took one night of my life, he's not going to get the rest." I've often thought that was a darned sane approach.
But when we hear about rape, the story always seems to be that it's a totally shattering experience, a major trauma that the woman never gets over.
Molesting seems to follow the same story line. Yet I also know a guy who had a couple of icky-iffy things happen to him when he was a pre-teen and older, and he doesn't seem to see them as especially traumatic.
I wonder if there are kids who are unaffected by it. Considering that even today I think it's probably more common than we hear, I kinda hope that's the case.
I think Monty Python said it well...
(letter complaining about a sketch which portrayed cannibalism on a Royal Navy lifeboat)