Many U.S. Catholics have independent streak – survey
A majority of American Roman Catholics feel strongly about the sacraments and traditional church values such as caring for the poor, but they may not agree with the church teachings on topics such as abortion, same-sex marriage and maintaining a celibate, male clergy, a survey has found.
The “Catholics in America” survey of Roman Catholics published by the National Catholic Reporter found 86 percent said Catholics can disagree with aspects of church teaching and still remain loyal to the church.
“Stated in simplest terms, Catholics in the past 25 years have become more autonomous when making decisions about important moral issues; less reliant on official teaching in reaching those decisions; and less deferential to the authority of the Vatican and individual bishops,” according to the study led by William D’Antonio, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America.
The weeklong survey was conducted online with a representative sample of 1,442 Catholic adults beginning on April 24 (Easter Sunday), and had a 3.5 percentage point margin of error.
“It is noteworthy that helping the poor is almost as core to Catholics’ identity as their belief in Jesus’ resurrection, with 67 percent rating this dimension of Catholicism as very important,” the survey said.
Seventy-three percent said belief in Jesus’ resurrection was very important to them personally.
By contrast, 40 percent said the church’s teachings opposing abortion are very important to them, and even fewer said church teachings opposing same-sex marriage and the death penalty were very important to them.
Belgium’s Catholic sex abuse scandal prompts questions on mandatory celibacy
Three Roman Catholic bishops in Belgium, reacting to damaging sexual abuse scandals in their ranks, have taken the rare step of urging their Church to consider easing its ban on married men in the priesthood.
The three are all from Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region shocked by the resignation of a prominent local bishop who had sexually abused his nephew. About 85 percent of cases in a recent report on abuse in the Church were also from Flanders.
The head of the Belgian Church, Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard of Brussels, has put out the message that the priority for the embattled Belgian Church is to help its victims.
“First things first,” his spokesman Jurgen Mettepenningen told Reuters on Wednesday. “The priority is to do what we can for the victims of sexual abuse.” If mandatory celibacy is to be debated, it should be done on a worldwide level and not only in Belgium, he added.
Calls for easing the celibacy rule have grown in Belgium since former Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe quit last April after admitting to abusing his nephew for years. A damning report on 475 abuse cases in recent decades, including 13 where the victims committed suicide, increased pressure this month on the Church to protect children and discipline clerics who committed or condoned sexual abuse.
Homosexuality, not celibacy, linked to pedophilia, says Vatican #2
It is homosexuality, not celibacy, that is linked to pedophilia, the Vatican’s Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said on Monday, seeking to defuse the sex scandal that has battered the Roman Catholic Church.
On a visit to Chile, Bertone, dubbed the Deputy Pope, also said Pope Benedict would soon take more surprising initiatives regarding the sex abuse scandal but did not elaborate.
“Many psychologists and psychiatrists have shown that there is no link between celibacy and pedophilia but many others have shown, I have recently been told, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia,” he told a news conference in Santiago.
“This pathology is one that touches all categories of people, and priests to a lesser degree in percentage terms,” he said. “The behavior of the priests in this case, the negative behavior, is very serious, is scandalous.”
Bertone’s visit to Chile comes as the Catholic Church has been buffeted by scandals concerning sexual abuse of children — most of them boys — by priests. There also have been allegations of cover-ups and even that the Pope mishandled cases when he was a bishop in Germany and a Vatican official before his election in 2005.
What do you think of this? Is homosexuality to blame for pedophilia? Or did the Catholic Church ordain too many men who were sexually immature and fatally attracted to children at their emotional level?
The Church seems to have lost its bearings as it lashes out at the world for its own evil behavior. They beat and abused children, just like many other organizations did years ago but they never advanced in the world and this is what happens, they are trying to instill more hatred for Homosexuals to divert the light from the inherent evil at the Vatican.
Why don’t they mention some facts they are true, one is that even though the Priests have abused children it happens at three times the rate outside the Church.
Instead of spewing hate the Pope could be helping to solve a terrible problem, the victimization of children, what a missed chance to become relevant.
In Catholic debate on celibacy, “ask about” is different from “question”
Vienna’s Cardinal Christoph Schönborn set off a storm in a teacup this week when he said the Roman Catholic Church had to ask tough questions about the reasons for the clergy sex abuse cases coming to light now in Europe. “The issue of celibacy belongs to that (questioning) as well as the issue of personality development (of priests). And a large portion of honesty belongs to this too, in the Church but also in society,” he wrote in a newsletter for Vienna archdiocese employees called thema kirche.
In the blogosphere, this somehow got turned into headlines like “Schönborn questions celibacy” and speculation that he was somehow challenging this centuries-old tradition. Those comments must have been based on dodgy Google translations from the German, because it’s clear in the original that he never questioned the celibacy rule itself. He said the Church should “ask about the reasons for sexual abuse” (nach den Ursachen sexuellen Missbrauchs fragen) and “celibacy belongs to that” set of issues to ask about. He did not say “put celibacy into question” (in Frage stellen) or “challenge celibacy” (hinterfragen).
What he did do, though, is what several other prelates and experts in the German-speaking countries are doing these days, i.e. say that celibacy has to be considered as one of the pieces in the sexual abuse puzzle. This bring the public discussion about celibacy a lot further than the traditional arguments Pope Benedict puts forward. In my analysis today “Celibacy debate re-emerges amid Church abuse scandal,” Hamburg Auxiliary Bishop Hans-Jochen Jaschke is quoted as saying celibacy was not the reason for sexual abuse but “the celibate lifestyle can attract people who have an abnormal sexuality and cannot integrate sexuality into their lives. That’s when a dangerous situation can arise.”
Bishop Stefan Ackermann, the German Church’s point man for sexual abuse cases, told a ZDF television discussion (full video in German here) on Thursday evening that “the Catholic Church is especially affected because, as the experts tell us, sex crimes are almost always male crimes. Since priests in the Catholic Church are male, that means the group is clearly defined. And certainly, when you think about boarding schools, there is a family atmosphere there that creates a confusion situation where people don’t want to speak out.”
Professor Klaus Beier, head of the Institute of Sexology and Sexual Medicine at Berlin’s Charité hospital, told the same ZDF discussion round that pedophile tendencies developed at puberty and were not influenced by celibacy, but “celibacy attracts pedophiles into the service of the Catholic Church.” In an interesting article in this week’s The Tablet (subscription only), Beier says the problem arises when men with pedophile tendencies…
…”assume that strong faith and obedience to religious instruction will make their undesirable sexual impulses disappear. Celibacy is so attractive to paedophiles because they want to leave their conflict-laden sexuality behind them and liberate themselves from their sexual impulses.
“What we are dealing with is a built-in biological mechanism. The stability of the sexual preference structure in the case of the majority, those people with an adult heterosexual orientation, guarantees the founding of families, the realisation of a joint wish for reproduction and for jointly raising children. This principle is a part of Creation.”
Do the Catholic Church claim to believe and teach the Holy Bible?
The 1st book of Timothy Chapter 4 verses 1-3 describe what would happen within the Church “in later times”. Verses 2 & 3 says “Speaking lies in hypocricy having their conscience seared with a branding iron, forbidding to marry….”
How can the Church justify the celibacy rule when it causes so much damage and heartache?
A Mafia-like “omertà” on sexual abuse in the Catholic hierarchy?
The Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano has published an interesting article saying the Catholic Church might have avoided some of the clerical sex abuse scandals it now has if more women were in decision-making positions. The Italian historian Lucetta Scaraffia says that women “would have been able to rip the veil of masculine secrecy that in the past often covered with silence the denunciation of these misdeeds.” The word she used for “secrecy” is omertà, the Italian term for “code of silence” well known to anyone who’s seen the Godfather movies or read about how the Mafia works.
Scaraffia writes that Pope John Paul said women should be given posts of equal importance as men and that Pope Benedict has written to bishops promoting collaboration between men and women in the Church. She then writes, in a rather academic style:
“The problem is that this important theoretical development has not been followed with equal clarity by a transformation in women’s participation in the life of the Church. Their participation, although significantly enlarged, has remained mostly outside the decision-making spheres and areas of cultural processing. One can understand, then, that the pressure of the excluded – who are often shut out for no justified reason — can be felt, even if quietly. It is not just a matter of social justice or equal opportunities. The Church risks failing to develop energies and contributions that are often of primary importance.
“One example suffices: In the painful and shameful situation where harassment and sexual abuse by clergymen of young people entrusted to them is coming to light, we can hypothesize that an increased female presence, and not only at lower levels, would have been able to rip the veil of male secrecy that in the past often covered the denunciation of misdeeds. In fact, women — both religious and secular — are naturally more inclined to defend the young in cases of sexual abuse, avoiding the serious damage these guilty attitudes have done to the Church.”
One can argue whether women in some leadership positions would act much differently from men. Some, like Margaret Thatcher or Indira Gandhi, can make one sceptical about that. But if women had been part of the decision-making process when abusive priests were shuffled around from one post to another, there surely would have been some who — like the Boston mothers in the photo above — would have shamed the bishops with that simple question, “What would your mothers think?”
Even though I am a gay person and no longer a member of the Catholic Church, what would be the point? I find most of the comments about church sexual abuse a little phony. I think the issue of pedophilia is very specifically targeted at the money of the church more than the practices of a few priests. The hypocrisy about his issue approaches that of charges against “witchcraft”. The prize for making these charges against the Catholic Church is – the accuser might get bundles of cash.
Some women seem to treat themselves to the notion that all women are good and all men are bad. They think they are always somehow superior moral creatures and that they could not possibly harm a child. I know personally of several people who have had abusive mothers. One who was severely strung out on drugs and abandoned her child to its own filth in its crib and another of a friend who was molested by his parent’s housekeeper who pulled up her skirts to show him her private parts while he was still a toddler. She asked him to “touch the spider”.
My own mother remembered a story of a nun who had a nervous breakdown one day when she asked the entire class of the Catholic girls high School my mother attended, to write out the names of all the insane asylums in the US. That woman didn’t return to class the next day. I recall personally suggesting to one nun in a CCD class I was trying to teach (I was having second thought about the prospects of a happy gay life) and had very little experience in sexuality at all except for a date with a girl during the High School prom. And I may have caused her to quit the program because I asked her why people expect an eternal life? They are usually never worried about what they missed before they were born. She didn’t come back to run the program. And I quit too.
The old school nuns could be very cranky, cruel, vicious and very frustrated women just like these pedophile priests are supposed to be. I am sure these pages could be flooded with stories along these lines. That was before the days Masters and Johnson and Dr, Ruth.
It never seems to be mentioned that most child abuse occurs in the home. At least 95% of it is among family members and relatives. So I have read. A label like “crimes against humanity” is appealing but do you really want to target the rest of those who sexually abuse children? Who will you ask to pay for the damages?
The Catholic Church is always targeted but none of the other religious denominations ever seem to be mentioned. I find it impossible to believe that only Priests have been pedophiles. I once asked a roommate in college – who I thought was interested in living with me – a big failure to communicate BTW – and he told me that he had been molested by a counselor at a Boy Scout camp and was not interested. The Boys scouts are practically a gay cliché. So are the Mormons. What does one make of extra marital relations among members of protestant denominations? Aren’t they also as likely to be abusive of their own children and the rest of the population?
I know someone is looking for money in this issue more than they are looking to child welfare. They give no credit to all the religious people in either the Catholic Church or others denominations who take their vows seriously.
The people who naively think celibacy, and I was taught that meant priests never marry – never have offspring and I have since learned that married priests before the time of Gregory “the Great” (VIII?) wanted to prevent priests, bishops and Abbots from regarding any church property that may have been their charge as property they could pass down to their own offspring. Monks take vows of chastity – no use of the plumbing whatsoever. There may have been another thought on the mind of Gregory whatever – that married priests would be inclined to insist that their children marry only the children of other priest. The Catholic Church would have created a caste system within its own ranks very like the ancient Hebrew model.
But I can’t argue that it isn’t right to take advantage of children. That’s what adults do to themselves, most of the time. Sometimes they do it even when they are married to each other.
BTW – the Catholic Church is not alone in having strict rules about Chastity – celibacy etc. Buddhists also have monks and nuns. Some follows of the Hindu religious also practice complete abstinence.
Are people seriously pushing the idea that happiness can only happen in marriage?
Focus turns to pope as German, Dutch sex abuse scandals unfold
The more the scandal of Catholic priests sexually abusing boys in Germany spreads, the more the focus turns to Rome to see how Pope Benedict reacts. The story is getting ever closer to the German-born pope, even though he has been quite outspoken denouncing these scandals and had just met all Irish bishops to discuss the scandals shaking their country. Nobody’s saying he had any role in the abuse cases now coming to light in Germany. But the fact that some took place in Regensburg while he was a prominent theologian there, that his brother Georg has admitted to smacking lazy members of his choir there and that Benedict was archbishop in Munich from 1977 to 1982 lead to the classic cover-up question: what did he know and when did he know it?
This is only the start of what can be a long, drawn out and possibly damaging story for Benedict’s PR-deficient papacy. His crises to date have been linked to his statements or decisions, such as the controversial Regensburg speech that offended Muslims or several run-ins with Jews over restoring old prayers they consider anti-Semitic or rehabilitating an ultra-traditionalist priest who is also a Holocaust denier. But now it’s about what he did or didn’t do in the past and how he moves to avoid further scandals in the future.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says that if anyone leads innocent children to sin, “it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
That passage must now be ringing in the ears of the Roman Catholic clergy in Germany and the Netherlands, where the Church’s latest scandals of priests sexually abusing boys have broken out, and echoing down the marbled halls of the Vatican.
The alarm bells are tolling all the more urgently in Rome, where tenuous links run from Bavarian boarding schools all the way to the German-born Pope Benedict. Critics are asking what he knew and did then and what he will do now.
Benedict will meet Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, president of the German Bishops’ Conference, at the Vatican on Friday to discuss the scandals and address a letter to the Irish people, possibly on St. Patrick’s Day next Wednesday. Other stories we’ve run in this series include “Vatican says wrong to single out Church over abuse”, “Pope’s brother “didn’t know of school’s brutality”, “Germany wants Catholic clarity on abuse cases” and FACTBOX – Sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church.”
Fr. Andreas Batlogg S.J., editor in chief of the German Jesuit monthly Stimmen der Zeit, said these abuse cases would be “radically cleared up, even if it’s uncomfortable” but also stressed how difficult that might be. “It’s very hard to go back 30 or 40 years with today’s knowledge and crisis management and ask if something was right,” he told me by phone from his office in Munich. “The Church is learning now. There has been a change of perspective, now the victims are in the spotlight, not the perpetrators any more.”
In an article for his journal’s April edition (here in German), the theologian and psychotherapist Wunibald Müller warns his German readers that the U.S. Catholic Church “has not yet recovered” from the scandals that hit it early in the last decade. “It would have been spared some shocks if it had taken available insights and proposed procedures more seriously,” he wrote. “In cases of sexual abuse of minors by priests, the only option is a relentless approach that shines unlimited light on the situation. Nothing must stay in the dark, be hushed up or hidden or played down. Nothing.”
Is this one of the all time travesties for the church to undermine the seriousness of these crimes, check out newsbackatcha.com it show in real time (graphs) people who supports the church there are some sick puppies out there
-
Resident FaithWorld Expert
-
Catholics may think that they can be pro-choice, use contraception,
support same-sex ,and use in vitro fertilization and be a good catholic.
You are in a big danger to lose your soul, you have never read the teachings(catechism)of the Catholic Church.
The church is a 2000 year old wise mother., and only wants to protect you.
For more information you “catholics”. please visit this w e b site CATHOLICANSWERS.