Brazilian authorities are investigating three priests accused of sexually abusing altar boys after a video allegedly showing one case of abuse was broadcast on television, police and church officials said Tuesday.
Today would be a fine day for Ross Douthat to recant his “only Irish-Catholics molest kids” theory.
gbear
It would also be a good day for the Times to decide that he’s kind of a worthless putz and show him the door.
Zifnab
So he can up it to “The Irish and the brown people”? :-p
Sam Hutcheson
Germans are brown now?
geg6
@Sam Hutcheson:
Beat me to it. Damn, you’re fast.
MikeJ
@Sam Hutcheson: No one who speaks German could be an evil man.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Sam Hutcheson:
When that’s proven, he’ll add Germans, and then Russians, and then Italians, and so on. Conservatives never see the big picture, and it wouldn’t matter if his list contained every country in the world, he still wouldn’t see the pattern. See health care or any of the “it’s only a problem when it affects me” issues.
Mnemosyne
Don’t forget, Brazil is where the doctor and mother of a 9-year-old rape victim were excommunicated by the bishop for getting her an abortion.
Now we know why they were so eager to act to protect the parental rights of child rapists.
Glenn
um…how about the Irish and the Braun people?
Corner Stone
@MikeJ:
Horst: (Sinister) Okay, Mr. Burns, you win. But beware. We Germans aren’t all smiles and sunshine.
Mr. Burns: (Sarcastic) Oooh, the Germans are mad at me. I’m so scared! Oooh, the Germans! (Hiding behind Smithers) Uh oh, the Germans are going to get me!
Horst: Stop it!
Man: Stop, sir.
Mr. Burns: Don’t let the Germans come after me. Oh no, the Germans are coming after me.
Man: Please stop the “pretending you are scared” game, please.
Horst: Stop it! Stop it!
Mr. Burns: (Pause) No! They’re so big and strong!
Man: Stop it.
Horst: Stop it, Mr. Burns.
Man: Please stop pretending you are scared of us, please, now.
Mr. Burns: Oh, protect me from the Germans! The Germans–
Horst: Burns, Stop it
HumboldtBlue
Today would be a good day for that sanctimonious little prick to have a big, frothy mug of shut the fuck up.
Slainte!
geg6
Can I just say that as a proud ex-Catholic that nothing could make me happier than seeing the very public crumbling of that monument of greed and immorality that is the Roman Catholic Church?
That said, I have to say that I am glad my mother isn’t alive to see this. She was a truly devout believer in the Church and this would break her heart.
asiangrrlMN
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): This is my problem with conservatives in general. They have to twist themselves into pretzels in order to fit new info into their world views. TNC has a few interesting posts about this, especially as it pertains to Sully. Here is one of them. I haven’t read the comments, but I mostly agree with TNC. The power structure and the status quo is to be preserved at any cost. That seems to be the bottom line.
LuciaMia
If I had a young son, and was Catholic, you’d have to put a gun to my head before letting him be an altar boy. And any priest who had the gall to question why would get, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
jacy
Much like conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed, apparently the Catholic church cannot fail, it can only be failed by, well, apparently the entire Catholic church hierarchy.
People like Douchehat never look at the underlying problems with the institutions they worship. They can’t be wrong, or their entire worldview would fall down and crush them.
Sam Hutcheson
It’ll be like a real-time devolution of the historical “becoming white” of immigrants in America. We’re already back to Ben Franklin and the swarthy Germanic hordes!
J. Michael Neal
Since we need another pedophilia thread like I need another rejection letter, other news.
I’m not getting a second interview at either Deloitte or the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. I’m really down about the second one. I not only REALLY wanted that particular job, I was sure that I had a really good chance to get it. I have no idea what kind of recent graduates applied that would be better then I am. The difference between a bachelor’s in accounting and a master’s, at least here, is almost entirely on point: I’m taking a class in advanced auditing right now, and last semester, I took a class IN FINANCIAL REGULATION. Got an A, too. For crying out loud, pretty much every other freshly minted accountant they could hire really wants to work for a Big 4 firm, and will abandon them as soon as the economy picks up. I actually want to work for them. If I had gotten an offer from both, I’d have picked the OCC.
If there’s one thing that I think did me in, it was my answer to the question, “What do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment?” My stock answer to that is going back to school 13 years after dropping (er . . . failing) out, and finally getting my degree. I was feeling too comfortable, though, and the truth slipped out. I told her that my greatest accomplishment is beating depression. While that’s what I really believe, it probably wasn’t helpful.
Fuck, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I need a job. Almost more for emotional reasons than financial ones. I also really need a hug, but there isn’t anyone I can go to. Well, I could go to my ex-wife, but I’d really rather not.
JGabriel
Actually, the Celtic Irish are believed to have sailed there from … Portugal! And the Brazilians speak … Portuguese!
So that gives Douthat a loophole.
.
DougJ
@J. Michael Neal:
Good luck with the job search.
freelancer
@MikeJ:
You know who else was German and took advantage of the idealism of many Youthful individuals…
ChrisZ
@LuciaMia:
You may not want to use that phrasing around Catholic priests, might get them thinking about the wrong thing.
jacy
@J. Michael Neal:
Crap — sorry to hear that. My only lame advice is keep trying. The belief that we can get through anything and that things will eventually work out is the only thing that’s gotten me through tough times. Good luck.
Robert Waldmann
If not on St Patrick’s day then when ?
Nellcote
@J. Michael Neal:
{{{ J. Michael Neal }}}
there ya go. Congrats on beating the depression. Good Luck! going foreward.
jrg
J. Michael Neal – Sorry to hear that. Keep your head up, and keep trying. Good things will happen. Just remember to try different approaches if your current one is not working. A few things I found helpful:
1) Target every company/agency/association that might need your skills, even if they say they are not hiring. Leave them a resume.
2) Try to get in contact with hiring managers, not HR.
3) Always follow up with a thank- you note after an interview.
4) If your alma mater has a career placement office, use it if possible. At many schools, they will help you no matter when you graduated.
5) Read “What Color is Your Parachute”.
Rhoda
@J. Michael Neal: You’re going to make it. Keep the faith and good luck, man.
Mnemosyne
@J. Michael Neal:
Unfortunately, you’re probably not up against other recent graduates. You’re up against people your same age with years of accounting experience who got laid off and need a new job.
Searching for a new job in a down economy sucks ass.
LuciaMia
**Hug**
Also, keep in mind, in this weird job market, nothing’s set in stone. The fact that you specifically wanted to work for the OCC is really in your favor. Some other candidates that the interviewer decides are
too flighty…
General Egali Tarian Stuck
If they’d quit picking wingnuts to run the Catholic Church, maybe some of this shit would start to change. One thing I learned long ago from my Reagan loving winger pappy is that image and maintaining the right kind is more important than facing the truth up front. It’s the wingnut way, the lies pile up at the same rate as the bullshit cover ups. Till the whole thing crashes down and counting the victims is all that’s left.
Fergus Wooster
@geg6: I’m really glad my wife became a “recovered” Catholic on philosophical grounds before all this happened. Now she can break out the marshmallows and weenies as she watches it burn.
Her mom, though, is a hard-core believer (Filipino-born), albeit one whose village is populated by dozens of descendants of a priest who impregnated every female on the island.
My conundrum though – I’ve got a good friend who recently converted, and a question I cannot ask: What the hell could one possibly be thinking to convert to Catholicism under Benedict XVI?
les
@jacy:
You could just stop at:
When you believe, you don’t need to see.
patrick II
Well, there goes El Cid’s theory from a previous thread that Latin American Priests are a step up because they tend to fuck women.
Violet
What’s Douthat’s ethnic heritage? What’ll he say
ifwhen there’s a Catholic priest pedophilia scandal in the land of his ancestors? Just another Irish problem, then?Comrade Dread
Even though I’m Protestant, this still depresses me to no end.
I honestly cannot believe how screwed up things got so that the Catholic Church came down hard with edicts against divulging the depth of the scandals with penalties up to excommunication for whistleblowers and then, to add insult to injury kept quietly transferring priests around to horrifically abuse and victimize children.
And people wonder why so many of the younger generation are not attending churches.
patrick II
@ J Michael Neal
What are you doing here then? It’s St. Patrick’s day. Go to any bar with an Irish name and look for a pretty colleen with a “Kiss Me I’m Irish” pin. If you’re too shy, wear one yourself, maybe you’ll get lucky.
Stefan
If there’s one thing that I think did me in, it was my answer to the question, “What do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment?” My stock answer to that is going back to school 13 years after dropping (er . . . failing) out, and finally getting my degree. I was feeling too comfortable, though, and the truth slipped out. I told her that my greatest accomplishment is beating depression. While that’s what I really believe, it probably wasn’t helpful.
Fuck, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I need a job. Almost more for emotional reasons than financial ones. I also really need a hug, but there isn’t anyone I can go to.
I can’t give you a hug, Michael, and if I had a job to give you I’d hand it to to you in a heartbeat, but I can tell you that I really admire you and what you’re doing. Depression is a stone cold killer and the fact that you beat it and are still fighting is all that counts. I was in your situation too, once, and things turned around and I got a better job than I ever could have imagined.
Stay strong, brother. Stay strong.
Amanda in the South Bay
A while back the lay Catholic Thomas Day wrote a book called (off the top of my head, I may have gotten the title wrong) “Why Catholics Can’t Sing.” Basically, he rips the Church a new one for the post Vatican II liturgical meltdown, and asking why Catholic congregations can’t sing as well as their (for example) Episcopal and Lutheran cousins.
He pointed out that, indeed, a lot of the American hierarchy was Irish, and the Irish Church, out of instinctual anti-English sentiment, and partly because of persecution, really wasn’t big into pomp and solemn liturgy. That attitude sorta carried over into America, and became the de facto standard in many places (vibrant immigrant parishes from other parts of Europe excepted) and very much became the norm after V2.
TBH, its not just the Irish Church that suffers from a willingness to blindly follow leaders. A sort of retrograde authoritarianism seems to have infected the entire post-Reformation Catholic Church. The image of the Catholic Church for many Protestant Europeans for a good chunk of the 20th century was that it propped up or had connections to unsavoury authoritarian regimes, for example.
After all this rambling, I have to conclude Douthat is still a fucking douchebag.
Josie
J. Michael Neal – I know it is so hard to lose a job you really wanted, but you must not think that you did something wrong. The sheer numbers a job seeker is up against right now are really daunting. My son has been looking for work for over a year without success. One company he applied with told him they had over 200 applications for the position, and it wasn’t that great a job. Keep on trying, even for positions you might not be thrilled with and don’t give up. I think the point about going back to school and succeeding would be a great one to emphasize since it shows real determination and courage.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Dread:
A big part of it is the internal battle in the Church by the people who have been quietly undermining the reforms of Vatican II for years now. The current pope has been on the forefront of that.
The late cardinal from Chicago, Joseph Bernardin, confronted the whole scandal early on and really created a model for others to follow. He was also part of the group of really strong supporters of Vatican II. Therefore, anything Bernardin did was bad, at least as people like Cardinal Law saw it, so they took the opposite tack of concealment and deceit. And, unfortunately, Rome supported them in that, which is one of the reasons we’re in the mess that we’re in.
(Of course, the fact still remains that abusive priests were shuffled from parish to parish pretty much until the 1990s, but at least Bernardin tried to do something to right the wrongs when he found out, unlike that asshole Law.)
Roger Moore
Fixt.
Corner Stone
@freelancer: Proust?
patrick II
@ J Michael Neal
After my flippant “go kiss a colleen” comment above, I thought I would also say keep you head up. Few things are as ego busting as looking for a job, particularly now. But don’t take it personally. The people who are judging you barely know you really and pick for reasons that do not always make sense. You are qualified in a field that has real use and if you keep banging away it will work out.
I would guess you already know all of this, but I just want to reassure you (as someone who was raised Irish Catholic and had the commensurate bouts of depression myself). Your value is not in what some stranger thinks of you.
And, ok, my advice to go out tonight still stands. The worst that can happen is loud company and green piss.
Jon H
@Mnemosyne: “A big part of it is the internal battle in the Church by the people who have been quietly undermining the reforms of Vatican II for years now. The current pope has been on the forefront of that.”
There’s also the weird paranoia: just look at the recent rants from people at the Vatican saying that Ratzinger’s being targeted by Freemasons.
People who believe that probably think the same of all the other accusations. Why, the guilty priests were probably Freemasons all along!
Sigh.
schrodinger's cat
{{{{@J. Michael Neal: }}}}
Wishing you the best of luck in your job search.
Mnemosyne
@Jon H:
I think the paranoia is part and parcel of the internal battle. After all, if you’re fighting back against the heresy of your fellow priests, you’re going to be extra-alert for any sign that other people are not with the program. The Catholic Church has always been eager to weed out dissent, and the current Pope was with the inquisitor’s office, so you get that extra dose of J. Edgar Hoover-like paranoia.
schrodinger's cat
I have a solution to the problem that Catholic Church is facing, let the nuns run everything and get rid of the vow of celibacy.
J. Michael Neal
@patrick II:
Actually, I don’t. Thank you, though.
For me, the major part of beating depression was realizing that things like this aren’t my fault. I feel much better about myself than I used to. However, I’ve decided that the opinion I developed about the rest of the world while I was in depression was unfortunately accurate.
In this case, I’m right and the world is wrong. I’d make a great employee. I’d also make a great boyfriend. All the rest of them that aren’t hiring me to be either are wrong. Unfortunately, there are a lot of times when you can be right, and the world can be wrong, but the world wins. There comes a point where not taking it personally doesn’t help much, because you still don’t have a job.
I’ve been unemployed for four and a half years. I’ve probably put in a thousand applications by now, starting at least a year before the economy tanked. No luck. Trying to start a new career in your 40s, with a strange looking resume (I’ve figured out that having been an options trader is *not* a plus when applying to be an accountant), and no good explanation for why I left my last job (Mentioning the nervous breakdown is probably a worse idea than just mentioning depression) really, really sucks.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t think that’s quite right. You just need to understand that concealment and deceit (and victim blaming) have been the traditional response to a problem that goes back long before Vatican II. So there’s no need to invoke a spiteful backlash against pro-Vatican II bishops like Bernardin to explain why Law (and Ratzinger) wanted to cover things up. They were just adopting the same conservative attitude that led to their dislike of Vatican II.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
I don’t think the internal fight over V2 helped, and there was a huge Vatican backlash in the 1980s against Liberation Theology, so it’s not like this was confined to the US church.
They were already seeing dissension in the Church, so when abuse did turn up, they thought of it as yet another attack on the Church and not a damaged life, so they tried to cover it up. It’s not the only reason (to say the least) but I do think that was one of the reasons they reacted the way they did and attacked the victims rather than cleaning house.
Maude
@J. Michael Neal: Jeebus, I’m sorry.
You survived and that is a huge deal.
I wish I could add words of comfort.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
My point is that the abuse didn’t just show up. The cases people are talking about now go back at least to the 1950s, and it’s a good bet that you could find systematic abuse going back a lot further than that if you had access to good records. The thing that’s changed recently is that the Church hasn’t been able to hush it up as effectively as it used to.
You’re very likely right that there are some internal Catholic political overtones to the issue. I assume that traditionalists want to double down on the cover up at least in part because they see an admission of any kind of wrongdoing as a blow against the Church’s authority. But I think it’s important to point out that the cover up came first, and the idea of admitting wrongdoing came much later. That the people who wanted to admit wrongdoing were on the other side of an ongoing political battle might have stiffened the spines of the ones who wanted to cover up, but it wasn’t the cause of the cover up.
WereBear
@J. Michael Neal: Criminy, man, you don’t tell the truth in a job interview! What were you thinking!?!?
Seriously, you have accomplished a lot. Perhaps if you work up a new speech; maybe angle for something in the same line you are struggling with yourself, and your unique qualifications will bear fruit.
Deschanel
Big big hugs to J. Michael Neal.
It’s NOT your fault. We have an economy that has been rewarding CEOs and stockholders for destroying American jobs, outsourcing abroad, for almost two decades now. Thanks , NAFTA, and Clinton, the Republicans’ favorite Democrat president. What a world of good that shit did. No, not really, not at all.
I want to give you a hug because there’s such a fucked up mentality in the US where masses of people who are out of work are meant to blame themselves, and not the rotten system. Which has been massively rewarded in stock gains for massively throwing American workers overboard. And they all think it was some personal failing when it wasn’t.
I’m pissed off on your behalf, and millions in the same boat, and the absolute stagnation of the US economy right now, where kids graduating now have nowhere to go. (The Onion today jokes about cryogenically freezing them until the economy improves.)
Why is this not the main issue discussed on CNN etc? The American middle class has been shredded, and they’re yapping about Tiger Woods. Something’s very fuct and out of whack in this country, media don’t want to talk about the reality of what’s staring us in the face. And we spent another half-billion in Iraq and Afghanistan today. Doing what, and why, God only knows.
sfp
For the last time, Douthat is not saying that only Irish Catholics are pedophiles. He’s observing that the bulk of the cases that had come to light involve Irish Catholics, and comes up with a historical explanation as to why that might be so.
What he is not doing as claiming that all pedophile priests are Irish. Neither is he claiming that there is something inherent in the Irish that makes them more likely to be pedophiles. He says this explicitly, and I see no reason to disbelieve him–either from the rest of the article or from anything else he’s written.
Look, the guy is a putz. He’s wrong on a great many things, and he may very well be wrong on the facts here but he’s not saying anything offensive: let’s save our energy for those times when he actually does say something worth taking offense at.
Tax Analyst
DougJ:
Potential picture for this a thread on this topic. See your e-mail.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
I think we’re in agreement, actually, because I definitely wasn’t saying that the coverup was something new. It’s more that, because of the greater openness after V2, people had higher expectations, and some of those expectations were validated by people like Bernardin. When those expectations were betrayed by people like Law, Catholics were pissed because they had been told that things had changed when they clearly hadn’t.
This was the Church’s chance to show that they’d changed since the bad old days of The Magdalene Sisters, and they blew it in a major way. I think that part of the reason they blew it was the ongoing tension between those who wanted to move the church forward and those who wanted to return it to the glory days where no one ever questioned their parish priest, even if little Johnny kept coming home in tears every time he went to the rectory.