Shock after Dutch priest endorses pedophilia

Link:
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20110521/D9NBQ01G0.html

...not sure if the moral lapse is because he's a priest, or because he's Dutch...

Well, probably the brief springtime of sexual liberation (now officially over) contributed. It doesn't seem an unreasonable hypothesis. Of course what we can't know at this stage- since we're in the midst of the moral panic- is how much was abuse, how much was just old-fashioned pederasty, and how much was bandwaggoning.

There's probably also a significant factor that Progressivism is a secularised development of Victorian Era fundamentalist Protestantism, and has a strong remnant anti-catholicism as an inherent recurring theme, which comes out in panics like this. And of course because of the current zeitgeist there's been an enormous Proggie effort to make sure this was a narrative about abusers rather than homosexuals, even though there seems to be a very high preponderance of bent old priests fiddling with altar boys, kind of thing.

Anyway, blaming the feminists is a bit odd in the sense they have, since feminism is almost entirely a reactionary erotophobia whose devotees would ideally just like to ban sex in all its forms altogether. The authors seem to have confused feminism with the liberalism which arose in the 60s, since they both happened about the same time. But the feminists were not and are not sexula liberals, they are the puritan reaction against that liberalism, so that's all rather off-base. They're probably confused by Feminist promotion of homosexuality, which is nothing to do with promoting buggery and everything to do with, "if we can encourage men to inflict their vile lusts on each other, they will inflict them less upon us", kind of thing.

Everybody wants to complicate this and blame religion or faith or lack of marriage or whatever.

It's so much simpler.

It's power.

Anywhere that power is allowed to concentrate into a few hands, it will be abused. Whether it's sweetheart land deals, mistresses, little boys, murder, or what have you.

Power corrupts. This has always been true.

Brian is absolutely right.

Well, one can avoid the Church. The government is a different matter. At least they have Inspectors General to make sure the agencies toe the line. Until they get fired for actually doing their jobs.

We've got the laws anyway. Well, unless they decide not to enforce them. Icky stuff like borders and war powers.

Well, you've got the cops. Who wouldn't feel safe in Philadelphia, where the police have openly declared that they are going to harass law abiding citizens who exercise their right to be armed?

The Church is just another failed institution. How about that IMF? The baby raping, cholera spreading, oil for food UN?

The list is long.

I don't like the conclusions of the study, so I'm going to disagree with it. But I'm not going to read it. Or quote it. And I'm going to mischaracterize its funding.

"ancient, rigid, secretive, all-male monarchy" - rather sexist statement. How accountable is the NOW or any all female monopoly?

When NOW has the power of the Church, I'll worry more.

True, but this statement does not pass the "if the other gender is used, would it still be accepted/published" test. If anyone criticizes some organization and makes one of the qualifiers as an all female monopoly/monarchy or any such thing, everyone would be all ripping the person apart for making such a sexist statement.

everyone would be all ripping the person apart for making such a sexist statement.

No, I don't think so. They'd just be slamming feminism here on Amy's blog. Or, as I like to call it, a day that ends in "y."

Agreed, the "all-male" part doesn't seem relevant to me, unless one is connecting it to the fact that more men than women are charged with sex crimes, but it hardly seems worth getting distracted over it.

"When NOW has the power of the Church, I'll worry more" - NOW has more power than the church. At least, church has power only over those who voluntarily enter it and stay in it. It does not have power over people of other religions in the USA and over atheists or people who are not religious in any manner.
NOW has power over anyone in the country(legal and extra legal) and to a large extent, even outside the country(since it is able to influence policy even in other countries). NOW is able to stop the lamestream media(cnn,bbc) from publishing things which will offend it just like Muslims do with their terror tactics.NOW is able to make people resign for making statements which are not so palatable to their group let alone actually abuse their specific group.

"but it hardly seems worth getting distracted over it" - NOW never shows the same attitude. For NOW, anything remotely pro male is worth suppressing(nipping in the bud). And while here on Amy's blog people would be slamming feminism, the lamestream media which is far more powerful would have finished ripping apart the person who actually made the statement.

Has any real research been done on what someone who typically joins a celibate religous order is like? That type of lifestyle draws a certain personality type.

Is it accepted as "fact" that there was a "spike" of abuse in the 60's and 70's, or is it that the people who were abused back then were amoung the first groups to come forward with allegations? Realistically, if someone was abused as an altar boy in the the forties, we're probably never going to hear about it.

Sometimes I wish people actually had some experience before they offer stupid opinions. Amy is right, the representatives of the catholic church are flawed, but dont blame the "church". I went to a catholic high school (and I am not catholic). The priests there were fantastic teachers and very good mentors. The was one obviously gay one who liked to touch your hair, he served one year and was sent to the desert. I could never castigate the "church" because of one bad apple that was appropriately shipped out of an all boys school

Why does no one ask aloud the question: Has the Catholic Church (at least in America) become a homosexual ring, and they protect each other?

Why would any healthy male sign up for lifelong celibacy?

George Weigel had an article about the John Jay report on National Review last week. Here's a blurb:

"Most clerical abusers were not pedophiles, that is, men with a chronic and strong sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children. Most of those abused (51 percent) were aged eleven to fourteen and 27 percent of victims were fifteen to seventeen; 16 percent were eight to ten and 6 percent were younger than seven":

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/267600/priests-abuse-and-meltdown-culture-george-weigel

Wow, only 6 percent of the kids raped by priests were younger than seven. What a relief! Posting this sort of thing as a defense of the Church does more harm than good.

Well I think the thing is Martin, whether or not one is dealing with paedophilia does actually matter. As a clinical diagnosis, it means somebody with a strong inclination towards children- that is, the pre-pubescent. The word is now being used to describe anything in contravention of age of consent laws, which is quite a big expansion of the term. It's the difference between "against the law" and "against nature".

Simply put, if a teacher finds a fifteen year old pupil attractive, there is nothing psychological wrong with him. If he finds a five year old pupil attractive, there is. If he has sex with that fifteen year old, he's broken the law. If he rapes her, he's a rapist. But he isn't a paedophile.

That really does matter.

And, the figures in the article do seem to suggest that the lion's share of the problem was the pederastic model common to homosexuality throughout the ages. 81% is a pretty high figure.

the bottom line in all this is that you cannot blame external forces whenyour cloistered and inward facing priesthood does, what is biblically wrong. Each one of these guys should have bee clobbered with a ton of bricks from within, and they DO have the rules to do that... but instead with a wink and a nudge.

as if they don't actually believe it's wrong. It IS important that it is an all male monachy, because the things happening are an abomination of their OWN canonical law. As such their hierachy are complicit in this wrong, and should be prosecuted for it.

the law is there but somebody has to use it.

Is it a surprise to anyone that pedophiles would actively seek positions of trust and authority, with children?

Amy, I don't think it's so surprising, and the article addresses that Church response-

In fact, according to the John Jay study, the bishops were as clueless as the rest of society about the magnitude of the abuse problem and, again like the rest of society, tended to focus on the perpetrators of abuse rather than the victims. This, in turn, led to an overdependence on psychiatry and psychology in dealing with clerical perpetrators, in the false confidence that they could be “cured” and returned to active ministry — a pattern that again mirrored broader societal trends. In many pre-1985 cases, the principal request of victims’ families was that the priest-abuser be given help and counseling. Yes, the bishops should have been more alert than the rest of an increasingly coarsened society to the damage done to victims by sexual abuse; but as the John Jay report states, “like the general public, the leaders of the Church did not recognize the extent or harm of victimization.” And this, in turn, was “one factor that likely led to the continued perpetration of offenses.”

People are judging events in the liberal, socially chaotic 1970s by today's standards. There is an unprecedented sensitivity to sexual abuse matters currently, but that didn't start until the 1980s and the Satanic Panic witch hunts. Prior to that, everybody was trying to be liberal, rather than the current en vogue sensitivity. You simply can't judge the actions of the past by the standards of today, and it seems to me that most people simply don't grasp how great the gulf in sexual attitudes is between the 1970s and 2011.

Ian, I'll call your attention to one of Amy's earlier posts on this subject:

http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2009/06/13/church_abusers.html

There was no sinful modern society in rural Ireland oh-so-many decades ago when this old man was a little boy being raped by priests. No Sexual Revolution, no NOW, none of today's hysteria over sexual abuse. Just an all-powerful Church that abused its power monstrously.

I can remember when I was a freshman at a Catholic University. A priest asked me to a retreat, "where there would be a lot US Navy guys."

So okay, at the retreat there is a lot of drinking, and these Navy guys hold me down so the priests can shoot it in both holes.

My views on religion and the military have changed from that day.

The surprise was that the church, upon finding out that children were molested, simply moved the priests elsewhere, etc.

No surprise at all. The Church is a bureaucracy first. And what is the Iron Law of Bureaucracy? The Bureaucracy MUST BE PROTECTED.

When you look at the issue as one of massive ass-covering (in a manner of speaking), it all makes perfect sense. That homosexual pederasts and predators would be attracted to such an organization is not at all confusing either. Look at the types that are attracted to mall security jobs, or the TSA.

When you show an abuser a place where they are paid to abuse and won't ever be held accountable, they will flock to it.

The Bureaucracy MUST BE PROTECTED.

There are some interesting parallels between the church scandals and the controversy that had engulfed the BSA (Boy Scouts) several years ago. The difference being that the BSA actually attempted to protect their kids. The BSA's policy was implemented to thwart a pattern of sexual misconduct that had come to light (e.g. over 2000 incidents in the US as of 1994). But they did so in a way that ran afoul of PC sensibilities and so were excoriated for it, suffering genuine damage to the organization as a result.

As with the church issue, there was a deliberate effort by opponents to frame the issue as one solely concerning pedophilia though the incidents at the basis of the controversy typically involved young men too old to be of interest to pedophiles (e.g. boy scouts are at least 11 and may be as old as 25). The focus on pedophilia was really intended to distract from the nature of the offenses, which involved homosexual sex with teenaged boys and young men. It was used to frame a straw man argument. That is, the offenders aren't homosexual because the offenders are pedophiles. They'd then claim that the organization was conflating homosexuality and pedophilia, which demonstrated its inveterate homophobia. But in the case of the BSA, there was no claim that the offenders were pedophiles. They simply prohibited homosexual acts and overtures. It wasn't until they began to be approached by homosexual activists that an explicit policy against homosexual troop leaders was drawn up. In truth the BSA has been in the crosshairs of feminists, athiests, and homosexual activists for decades and they recognized the overtures by gay activists to be an attempt at political subversion.