Report says U.S. Catholic sex abuse “historical”, critics see coverup
A church-sponsored study on Wednesday blamed poorly trained priests and a deviant society for the Roman Catholic Church’s sex abuse crisis, but victims dismissed it as a whitewash of an institutional coverup. The largest study ever done on youth sexual abuse by U.S. Catholic clergy concluded that priests were no more likely to abuse than anyone else, gay priests were not more likely than straight priests to abuse, and the priestly vow of celibacy was not directly to blame.
The study, conducted by researchers at John Jay College in New York and covering the past 50 years, also found clergy abuse cases have dropped since the 1980s.
“There’s no single cause of the sexual abuse crisis … and the problem is largely historical,” study researcher Karen Terry told reporters at a Washington news conference. “It is consistent with patterns of increased deviance in society during that time” in the 1960s and 1970s, she said, adding that rates of abuse within the Church were comparable to that of organizations like schools and clubs.
Priests unprepared for a life of celibacy turned mentoring relationships into abusive ones, she said. Poor reporting of clergy abuse cases to civil authorities and a pattern of transferring of abusive priests to other parishes by some bishops have cast a cloud over the Church.
A group that represents victims of clergy abuse said bishops continue to cover up crimes, and that shame leaves many more victims of abuse silent. “Predictably and conveniently, the bishops have funded a report that tells them precisely what they want to hear: it was all unforeseeable, long ago, wasn’t that bad and wasn’t their fault,” said David Clohessy, executive director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP).
Read the full story here. The full text of the report is on the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) here.
.
Swedish Mohammad cartoonist’s house targeted in latest attack
Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who angered Muslims by portraying the Prophet Mohammad as a dog, has suffered a failed arson attack on his house, but was not home when it happened.
Vilks told Reuters on Saturday that people smashed windows at his house in the small town of Nynashamnsvage in southwest Sweden and tried to light petrol that they threw inside. But the attack resulted only in small damage in the kitchen and on the facade.
Earlier this week, Vilks was assaulted by a man during a lecture after he started showing a video (see below) about homosexuality and religion, particularly Islam. Vilks has been a target for Muslim protests since he depicted the Prophet Mohammad with the body of a dog in 2007.
In January, a Somali man was indicted for terrorism and attempted murder for breaking into the home of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard and threatening him with an axe. A cartoon by Westergaard in 2005 which depicted the Prophet Mohammad with a turban shaped like a bomb sparked outrage across the Muslim world, with at least 50 people killed in riots in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
Following is a selection of reports about Vilks and the campaign against him:
GUESTVIEW: No good deed goes unpunished
The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Father Joseph Fessio, S.J. is founder and editor of Ignatius Press, which is the primary English-language publisher of the works of Pope Benedict XVI and which has published several books by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn. He is also publisher of Catholic World Report magazine.
By Father Joseph Fessio, S.J.
Did Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna “attack” Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals and former Vatican secretary of state? If The Tablet weekly in London were your only source of information, you’d think so, because that’s what the headline screamed.
What happened?
Cardinal Schönborn, who like his mentor Pope Benedict is a model of openness and transparency, invited the editors of Austria’s dozen or so major newspapers to a meeting at his residence in Vienna. How many bishops can you name who have extended such an invitation to the press?
The journalists agreed that this would be an “off the record” meeting so that everyone could take part freely and frankly. Was this to impose silence on the press? To cover up once again the misdeeds of clerics? No, it was an attempt by Cardinal Schönborn to be as open as possible and to make himself available to answer any question that was asked. It was an attempt to help educate the press on matters that the press often finds difficult to grasp—such as the essential foundations of the hierarchical and sacramental structure of the Church, and the intricacies of moral theology.
Cardinal Schönborn is a Dominican and a professor. Which means that he has a serious scholar’s grasp of the foundations as well as the conclusions of moral theology, particularly as expounded by St. Thomas Aquinas.
objective depravity. This is what the church calls part of God’s creation – the gays.
No wonder they are driven to suicide, and sometimes murdered. by the church of “life”
The whole world is changing. Fancy words, and ideas from an age of the ‘anything but’ holy roman empire cannot change the fact that gay people are more and more being accepted as the good people they are. While the church in Europe is dying quickly, and splitting here.
And btw, the two states with the lowest divorce rate in the USA are Mass and Conn. Two of the first states with gay marriage.
And lets not forget that the church has yet to EXcommunicate Hitler. Born and Baptised a catholic in very Catholic Austria. Where he learned his hatred of the Jews – Jesus own people- from the poison the church put into society over a millenia. And it was this hatred that hitler leveraged to get elected. And 50 million people died.
And in 2009, RATZInger UNexcommunicated a Bishop Williamson, who is a holocaust denier / minimizer. To bring Williamson’s 600,000 mad followers back into the church.
At least Argentina had the you know whats to throw Williamson out of the ocuntry. And just recently their legislature passed a gay marriage bill.
I used to think that Ratzinger was a hitler in disguise. Now I believe he is part of Gods plan to help change, or destroy, the church that has always needed some victim to hate, to sell their corrupt brand of love.
The catholic church is, as we’ve seen in endless revelations of the cover up of sexual (and mental) abuse of children, like a Pathological liar. So corrupt that it cant possibly even understand its own corruptness.
it fits perfectly the definition of Power: Power corrupts,and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And when you claim to speak for God, it gets just that much more worse.
Catholic editor who rapped Berlusconi resigns, but Church may have last laugh
In the latest — but most likely not final — round in an incredible case of Italian journalistic pugilism, the editor of a Catholic newspaper sparring publicly for a week with the daily owned by the family of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has resigned. Dino Boffo’s resignation as head of Avvenire, the daily of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, ended an Italian telenovela that had riveted the media for seven consecutive days and even saw indirect involvement by Pope Benedict.
In his three-and-a half page letter of resignation (here in Italian), which he said was irrevocable, Boffo said the tussle with the editor Vittorio Feltri of the Milan daily Il Giornale had made his life unbearable. For his good, that of his family and that of the Church, he could not longer stay “at the centre of a storm of gigantic proportions that has invaded newspapers, television, radio, the internet and shows no signs of ending.”
Boffo said his only mistake was not taking his initial judicial problem seriously enough. As noted in my blog post here last Tuesday, Il Giornale editor Vittorio Feltri wrote last week that Boffo accepted a plea bargain in 2002 over a case in which a woman accused him of harassment. Il Giornale claimed that Boffo was having a homosexual relationship with her husband. It said Boffo should not have written editorials criticising Berlusconi’s sexual escapades when he was not exactly an an innocent altar boy himself.
But in his resignation letter, Boffo said “the sexual scandal initially used against me was a colossal, fictional set-up which was diabolically engineered.” Boffo says the woman was harassed by someone else using his cell phone. “The Church has better things to do than strenuously defend one person, even if unfairly targeted,” he stated in his resignation letter.
What’s interesting is that Il Giornale, which is owned by Berlusconi’s brother Paolo and regularly attacks Berlusconi opponents as if it were an official party organ, kept up its attack on Boffo — often with front-page banner headlines — for seven consecutive days. This despite the fact that the entire Church hierarchy closed ranks to support him and Berlusconi “disassociated” himself from his own family paper. The support for Boffo included an indirect intervention by the pope in the form of a letter of support to Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, who as president of the Italian Bishops Conference is ultimately Boffo’s boss.
On the surface, Boffo’s resignation could appear to be a defeat for the Italian Church. But most likely it will be the Church which has the last laugh.
Like any Italian government head, Berlusconi needs the enormously powerful Church – whose influence spreads like tentacles throughout the country — more than the Church needs the government. An antagonistic relationship with the Church has never helped any Italian government. Even a Socialist-turned Fascist like Benito Mussolini knew he had to keep peace with the Church. It was Mussolini who approved the so-called Lateran Pacts in 1929 that set up Vatican City as a sovereign state after the papacy lost its vast land holdings in Italian unification in the 19th century. And in 1984, it was not a Christian Democrat but a Socialist — Bettino Craxi – who signed a concordat between the Vatican and Italy updating those Lateran Pacts.
Do animals have moral codes? Well, up to a point…
“We believe that there isn’t a moral gap between humans and other animals, and that saying things like ‘the behavior patterns that wolves or chimpanzees display are merely building blocks for human morality’ doesn’t really get us anywhere. At some point, differences in degree aren’t meaningful differences at all and each species is capable of ‘the real thing.’ Good biology leads to this conclusion. Morality is an evolved trait and ‘they’ (other animals) have it just like we have it.”
That’s a pretty bold statement. If a book declares that in its introduction, it better have to have some strong arguments to back it up. A convincing argument could influence how we view our own morality and its origins, how we understand animal cognition and even how we relate to animals themselves.
Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, a new book by Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, presents a persuasive case for some animals being much more intelligent than generally believed. The authors show how these animals have emotions, exhibit empathy, mourn for their dead and seem to have a sense of justice. They draw interesting parallels to similar human behaviour that many people think stems from our moral codes and/or religious beliefs rather than some evolutionary process. All this is fascinating and their argument for open-mindedness about recognising animals’ real capabilities is strong.
The stories they base their thesis on are intriguing. They talk about an elephant with a leg injury whose fellow elephants in her herd slowed down for her and even fed her. They tell how dogs can agree for a session of rough play that’s not supposed to hurt and those that overstep the bounds, by for example by biting too hard, get frozen out of the group. Caged rats taught to push a level for food won’t do it when that prompts the scientists to give a rat in the next cage an electric shock. Vampire bats share the blood they collect with bats that can’t go out to hunt for their daily dose. Some sort of behavioural code is clearly working here, just as a behavioural code is at work when humans do similar things.
But the authors overreach when they say this shows that animals have morality. The problem is with their limited definition:
“We define morality as a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviours that cultivate and regulate complex interactions within social groups. These behaviours relate to well-being and harm, and norms of right and wrong attach to many of them. Morality is an essentially social phenomenon, arising in the interactions between and among individual animals, and it exists as a tangle of threads that holds together a complicated and shifting tapestry of social relationships. Morality in this way acts as social glue.”
That’s good as far as it goes. But morality isn’t only a “suite” (“a number of things forming a series or set”) of behaviours. It’s also a wider system of beliefs about what is right and wrong, not just for the person involved but for others and for society as a whole. It’s a system for evaluating actions, their causes and consequences even if we are not immediately confronted with the need to make a choice. Calling morality something “arising in the interactions between and among individual animals” is a bit too reductionist, like saying art boils down to something that comes from brush strokes on canvas. Yes, but there’s something more to it, too, that raises the requirements for any definition.
Tom, there are gaps in your information.
A reasearcher realized that she was learning the vocabulary of the chimps she was studying when she, upon hearing the vocalizations of her subjects in their quarters,heard them “say” that the treat for the evening snack was grapes. The chimps were using their own language.
In a recent “Nature” program, an invading pack of wolves surrounded the den where the pups of another wolf pack were located. In doing so, they blocked access to the den by the pack/parent wolves. They maintained the seige for 12 days. All the pups died. Without any further action, the invading wolf pack withdrew completely from the valley. The local wolf pack declined, were dispirited and lost organization. The program was, I believe “In the Valley of the Wolves.” This is genocidal behavior. How much abstract thought, strategic planning, or complex communication was required remains to be explored. 12 days is a long time. The invading wolves had an objective and they carried it out. They did not eat the pups, they withdrew. Planning and unity of purpose were involved here.
Pope says saving heterosexuality like saving the rainforest
Pope Benedict took an unconventional approach today to stand up to what he sees as gender-bending, saying protecting heterosexuality was as important as saving the rainforest.
“(The Church) should also protect man from the destruction of himself. A sort of ecology of man is needed,” the pontiff said in a holiday address to the Curia, the Vatican’s central administration.“The tropical forests do deserve our protection. But man, as a creature, does not deserve any less.”
The Pope stressed that the Church would defend the traditional roles of “a man and woman, and to ask that this order of creation be respected”.
He turned his attention to those people who call themselves in Italian “gender” or “transgender” — a broad term that includes anyone who doesn’t identify entirely with their assigned sex and can include homosexuals, bisexuals, pansexuals and others.
“What’s often expressed and understood with the term ‘gender’, is summed up definitively in the self-emancipation of man from the created and the Creator … But in this way, he lives in opposition to truth, he lives in opposition to the Creator,” the pope said. Here’s a link to the full text in Italian and a report on it by the leading daily Corriere della Sera (also in Italian),
The New York-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission reacted promptly, saying: “In a season in which the immorality of genocide, lawless governments, lust for money and power and the destabilization of the world’s economy are destroying the lives of hundreds of millions around the world, the Pope’s obsessive focus on gay, lesbian and trans people who simply seek the right to live and love is out of touch with what humanity needs right now from its religious leaders.”
What do you think of Benedict’s idea of an “ecology of man”?
What is he going to do with all the clearly non-heterosexual people in the Church then?
-
Resident FaithWorld Expert
-
