A year ago I wrote about how the Vatican was investigating the activities of Marcial Marciel Degollado, founder of the religious order the Legionaries of Christ. This is a very popular and powerful man in Catholicism, but he has also been accused of abusing and sodomizing young boys for decades. The Vatican is finally taking action, but are they doing enough?
The LA Times reports:
Maciel has denied the allegations, and his organization, the Legion of Christ, repeated that position Friday.
The Vatican said in a statement that Maciel, 86, had been instructed to refrain from all public ministries and to adopt a “life of prayer and penitence.” The statement did not specify whether the charges were true, but experts said the Vatican’s decision indicated that church investigators believed at least some of the accusations.
Given his age and frail health, the statement added, Maciel will not be prosecuted under canonical law. The Vatican said Benedict, who has vowed to rid the church of the “filth” that sexual abuse represents, personally approved the sanctions that were determined by Cardinal William J. Levada, his successor as head of the body that led the inquiry. Levada is the former archbishop of San Francisco.
So, it appears that the Vatican finds at least some of the accusations credible enough to take action — but they have delayed and waited so long that Marciel is too old for them to really do much against. If Marciel has to lead a life of “penitence,” he must have something to be penitent about — but what? What kind of “justice” is that? This suggests that if priests can get away with molesting children long enough, the Vatican won’t do anything significant to them.
Read More:
“…the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”
See report:
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/4/5/01552.shtml
This editor could care less about child abuse. Its obvious he wants to demean religion, especially Christians, when he reports only on Catholic sexual abuse but says nothing on child sexual abuse in any other profession. His biased reporting helps foment an undercurrent of religious bigotry and hatred and is border line hate speech. Contact me to help remove this editor from his position. I’m not against expressing atheism, I am against religious bigotry in the public square.
To help remove this religiously bigoted editor contact theMan at stopbigotry@hotmail.com
Yeah, I suppose the fact that I write here about religion and not schools doesn’t have anything to do with writing about child abuse in religious organizations rather than in other organizations.
Sheesh.
His biased reporting helps foment an undercurrent of religious bigotry and hatred and is border line hate speech.
Wow, reporting the Vatican punishing an accused child abuser is “hate speech” now?
Reminds me of that South Park episode where the Catholic priests are discussing how they want to fix the problem: “How do we get these kids to stop telling other people about it?”
PLEASE DELETE MY PREVIOUS COMMENTS, here is the corrected version:
I read the article above. I didn’t see that its author has compared the number of cases via any reasonable initial ratio because the national school system is vast, with many more kids and teachers having regular daily contact with each other than in the case of Catholic priests and kids. In other words most priests aren’t teachers that spend hours and hours of time with kid each day, so the chances of even building up contacts with kids are far less in the case of priests than teachers. If the author wanted to make a GENUINE MATHEMATICAL COMPARISON, she should first count up the number of Catholic priests in the U.S. divided by the hours of contact each has had on average with children, compared with the number of teachers in America divided by the hours of contact each has had on average with children, before doing anything else. Because I bet that based on the number of hours of contact with children, and the resulting cases of physical sexual abuse that followed, the teachers beat out the Catholic priests in having more relative “control” over themselves.
The author also seems to be admitting that only Catholic clergy were counted in calculations. But there’s other religions with clergy in America, tons of them in fact, since we have the most religiously diverse nation on earth with a wide variety of Protestant clergy, Pentecostal, Eastern Orthodox, Buddhist, Hindu, etc., not just Catholic clergy, all of which have some sexual scandals that have been reported. So the author is only comparing the Catholic sexual abuse scandals with that taking place in schools. But clergy is clergy, they are men devoted to the highest ideals of their respective faiths and in none of those faiths is physical sexual child abuse a virtue. So adding together clergy abuse scandals from all of America’s clergy, not just Catholics, would raise number of sexual abuse cases considerably if mere “total numbers of incidents that occur nationally” were all that one wished to compare. Though please see my point made in the first paragraph above.
As for the attention such scandals generate, Catholics make the greatest claims that celibacy is the finest decision, justified by God, and therefore when something goes wrong people tend to notice, i.e., based on how loudly Catholics brag about their grace-filled religion, the only true church and its only true inspired ways.
The author keeps crying, “double-standard” because the clergy stories make the news so often while the teacher ones do not. But that misses the point of interest of such scandals for anyone curious about the truth or falsity of religion or what it boasts it can do and might not be able to do. It’s news when a member of a celibate holy priesthood sexually molests young people, and added news when that priest’s church has so much power and money it can cover up such crimes for decades, moving priests around the country, keeping priests out of the hands of the law. Not to mention spending billions of the parishoner’s money “given to God” in order to do so.
It’s not as great news when a 13-16 year old boy and an older female his teacher, arrange to have sex. (Though it certainly seems to be in the news a lot LATELY!) Neither of them is consecrated to God, neither has taken an oath to God of celibacy. Neither of them has a holy orgnization behind them that has been covering up such things for decades.
I even saw a news report about the Catholic church in Ireland shipping hundreds, even thousands of orphans to Australia to work as practical slaves building monestaries for Catholic monks, who in turn also molested the boys. You don’t consider that newsworthy?
And what about Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan’s book, Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools, a story of incredible cruelties perpetrated by minions of state and church?
And what about this story also?
Forty years ago at a Catholic orphanage in Dublin run by the “Sisters of Mercy” the children were regularly, ritually beaten with the legs of chairs; in some cases eight-year-old children were whipped with rosary beads. Infants strapped to potties were beaten if they did not give quick results. Children who misbehaved–or were “bold”–were trussed up like chickens and hung upside down on high oak doors, so that every time the door opened their heads would bump on the floor… Those who wet their beds were made to carry the stained sheet around all day. Some who threw up the foul food were force-fed and made to eat the vomit…
For hours after school, each child was obliged to turn out 60 rosary beads a day. Working with sharp wire, pliers and beads, they were not allowed to stop, even when the wire bit into their bleeding fingers…
Christine Howe was persuaded to let the sisters take care of her baby temporarily when she had to go to the hospital and her husband was working in England. Four days later her husband received a telegram telling of the child’s death “from acute dysentery,” and also saying he had no need to return, the convent would take care of the funeral arrangements. The husband insisted on seeing the child prior to burial and discovered bandages on the child’s legs; removing them, he found deep holes in the inside of both knees, the kind of wound that could be caused by a hot poker. The nuns admitted it had been an “accidental death” but refused to discuss the details with the parents…Reports of abuse are still coming in from other orphanages in southern Ireland. [Source: Peter Lennon, “The Sisters of Evil,” The Guardian Weekly, March 31, 1996–a discussion of the documentary, Dear Daughter by Louis Lentin, along with the deluge of corroborating reports that came in after the film was first aired on British TV.]
And frankly, the power of authority that a devout clergyman may hold over the youngster he molests, is also a power of a more frightning magnitude, what with heaven and hell and the Eucharistic ceremony, and tall steepled churches where the priest’s words are heard to echo as he intones holy words, speaking about matters so exalted that the child can see even his parents respecting what the priest has to say, it all being so much more psychologically intimidating than a teacher’s authority which is of a less frightening magnitude, more ordinary, and one that parents are more likely to speak up to and complain about.
Furthermore a priest’s denial often sounded more plausible in the past because of his relatively high status in a community (at least the priest’s status was higher back then before such scandals hit home), while a teacher can lose their right to teach forever, might as well dump their diploma in the trash, via a single wrongful accusation, even when the court’s are unable to prove she or he was guilty.
At least that’s how it appears to me. Now let that person who wrote the article go back and do some more calculations and attend to more thought concerning the controversy.
Sincerely,
Edward T. Babinski (confirmed Catholic, born again in high school, spoke in tongues, studied Calvin, then moderate Anglicanism, and finally left the fold a few years after graduating from college, author of Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists, available at amazon.com