Here’s a little break from the convention news:
Kansas City Bishop Robert Finn today became the highest-ranking U.S. Catholic official convicted during the church’s decades-long child sexual abuse scandal.
Following a short non-jury trial, Jackson County Circuit Court Judge John Torrence convicted Finn of one misdemeanor count of failing to report suspicions of child abuse but acquitted him on another count of failing to report.
Torrence sentenced Finn to two years of probation then suspended the sentence, meaning that if Finn completes the unsupervised probation without any new incidents happening, his criminal record will be expunged.
The whole thing looks like a deal engineered to spare the victims from testifying. The civil cases are still pending, so the diocese will probably be paying some hefty settlements. Still, decades of abuse and only one bishop has been convicted – much too little and a way too late.
debbie
Sorry if this is too old school, but the guy needs some public shaming and humiliation.
Schlemizel
You would think since they are in the God business that they would not try to repeatedly prove there is no God.
Rich2506
Speaking as a Protestant (Congregationalist), I believe that the only way to preserve any moral respectability for the Roman Catholic Church is to toss the pedophile-enabling Bishops into jail and to elevate the “Nuns on the Bus” to positions of leadership. The Nuns represent the only good and hopeful thing that the Church has done over the past decade.
Schlemizel
@Rich2506:
My guess is you never had to deal with nuns. The problem (at least the abuse of power problem although there are plenty of the other abuse incidents committed by nuns but primarily the power abuse one in this case) is not gender related.
Its the power not the sex that gets them into trouble. While the “nuns on the bus” meme is popular now plenty of nuns have abused power when they had it, they just never had it to the extent that the boys do.
master c
@Schlemizel: wow
never had a bad nun experience in all my 12 years-I feel the nuns helped shape me as a questioning, thoughtful person. Where are all the nuns accused of raping children? NOPE-
since we only have men as priests, we have only men in the highest leadership positions, and therefore abuse, of power, of children. I identify with the nuns, cuz Im a social justice Catholic and they[the RCC] dont want us around either.
Aimai
@master c: That’s, sadly, wrong. Anyplace the religious were in charge of orphanages and boarding schools, as in Canada and Ireland, there have been horrifying stories and lawsuits about the abuses of power and sexual abuse of children.
master c
@Aimai: I see the larger point is that it’s not gender related, but I dont like taking it to a “both sides do it” level. Someone is not being served well with that argument.
Villago Delenda Est
@master c:
Yes, the children who were abused, be it by priests or nuns.
Because in this case, the ‘both sides’ is NOT priests vs. nuns, it’s children vs. adults in positions of power conferred on them by a religious hierarchy.
Kathy in St. Louis
And, they learned absolutely nothing from all of this. A cardinal in Rome,who was formerly the Archbishop of St. Louis made a speech last week that blamed all this on the individual priests not following canon law. Well,yes, sure, that’s part of it. But the fact that the church has been short of single males interested in becoming priest for the past 30 years is a much bigger part. Add to that the hierarchy (management) need for warm bodies to run parishes and you have the hierarchy (management) taking any warm body who claims to want to be a priest. The church got rid of screening processes and this is the type of person that is attracted to the life, guys who don’t want to get married because they have sexual issues and a nice place to hide in many instances.
One of the worst things about this is that there are lots of good guys who becamse priests for the right reasons and have just done their thankless jobs. They are all tarred with the same brush as the perps who molested kids and the hierarchy who looked the other way.
Pongo
This is how you make a point about the criminality of ‘failing to report’ to religious authorities who hide behind the supposed sanctity of their beliefs. Too many treat child sex abuse as a sin, rather than a crime, and think they can handle it internally. Hopefully, hitting them in the pocketbook will provide some badly needed ‘enlightenment’:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/16/calif-jury-awards-28m-in-_n_1602997.html
Brachiator
@Aimai:
Just not aware of many reports of nuns sexually abusing children. Not in the US, not in Ireland, not in Canada or anywhere else.
Other problems and issues of abuses of power and authority, certainly.
But there has also been an attempt by the Church to stifle nuns (and some priests) who have attempted to bring a more humane approach to areas where new approaches are desperately needed.
Mnemosyne
@Aimai:
It’s not like secular orphanages and juvenile detention centers and “boot camps” have been free of adults abusing the children there, though. The problem is more of giving adults unsupervised power and authority over children, not necessarily the source of that authority. The kids who were abused at “boot camps” aren’t less damaged because it wasn’t done in the name of the Catholic Church.
Mnemosyne
My point, I guess, is that quite a few atheists on the left seem to think that banning religion will magically prevent adults from abusing children who are under their authority. That strikes me as ridiculously naive. The asshole who might have become a priest will become an abusive coach or juvenile detention guard instead because they don’t do it because of religion. They do it because they’re abusive assholes who love power and they use religion as yet another tool to do what they already wanted to do.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
This is true.
However, the Catholic Church has been egregiously involved in sexual abuse scandals for a number of reasons. Priests (like other religious figures) have had an almost unique authority, which pedophile priests have used to get continual access to children and to use the cover of their religious status to secure co-operation, obedience, fear.
Then, on top of this, other religious authorities have used their considerable influence to protect priests from discovery and prosecution. In Ireland, religious authorities had to admit that they actively impeded investigation, that they had persuaded the police to drop investigations.
It is not as easy for a coach to get the police or the DA to drop an investigation. Unless you are the head coach of Penn State.
And no, banning religion is not going to solve the problem. But this does not deflect from the privileged position that priests, ministers and rabbis often have that gives them an edge when it comes to abusing children and even some adults.
Catsy
@Mnemosyne: I’m not aware of anyone of any significance calling for banning religion. That’s a very different thing than hoping organized religion will eventually die off due to its own cultural irrelevance and inability to adapt to modern understandings of the world and human rights.
It’s also different from noting that Catholicism and other sexually repressive fundamentalist religions help generate sexually disordered individuals by repressing and stigmatizing natural biological processes and activities.
And it’s a world apart from recognizing that the RCC in particular is a toxic, secretive criminal organization with a long history of knowingly harboring and protecting sexual predators within their leadership and ranks.
People can and will believe what they want. If they want their lives to be governed by willful ignorance, guilt and magical thinking, that’s their problem and it’s nothing that can or should be banned. Social opprobrium, fine. Legal sanction, no.
But the RCC as an organization needs to be destroyed and those involved in its criminal conspiracies prosecuted.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
It’s easier than you’d think. A lot of schools are more interested in making a problem coach or teacher go away than they are in drawing scandal to the school. Wasn’t there a recent teacher here in California who had been bounced from school to school because no one wanted to have to deal with the hassle of getting the cops involved?
Maybe it’s just because I don’t take religion as seriously as everyone else here, but I don’t see that ministers etc. have a position that’s privileged so far above cops, teachers, doctors, psychologists, and coaches that of course we have to take special steps against them.
The problem in Ireland was not that the Catholic Church talked about God and Jesus. The problem was that the Catholic Church had a huge amount of authority in secular life that allowed them to do things like ban birth control in the country. It was allowing them secular authority beyond their religious authority that caused the problems, not that they had religious authority. It’s not like the old Soviet Union was a bastion of freedom and non-abuse just because they didn’t allow religion. China certainly isn’t free from the abuse of authority because they don’t permit religion.
The problem is the abuse of authority, not the source of that authority.
Catsy
@Mnemosyne:
You know what? Screw “special” steps. I’d settle for following the law and prosecuting sexual predators and their accomplices.
The very problem is that religious institutions are granted undue deference–special “kid glove” treatment not given to any secular organization. If the RCC were anything other than a two thousand year old religious institution, the crimes and cover-ups its hierarchy and members have perpetrated would have long since brought down a RICO case against it.
You’ve got the root cause turned around here. Why do you think that undeserved secular authority exists in the first place?
The church’s secular influence grants it the leverage to get away with protecting sexual predators and evading the law. But it is the irrational hold that religion has over people’s minds that is the source of that influence.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
No. And part of the problem here is the despicable insistence of school unions that it is more important to protect teachers in all circumstances than it is to carve out exceptions for abuse cases. But here the problem was in schools not believing children, and in information being withheld from investigators.
This is not the same thing at all as a cardinal or church official being able to go to the police or to the district attorney and telling them not to pursue an investigation.
This just ignores the authority that priests, bishops, and cardinals have in some countries, especially Ireland. Even in the US, religious authorities have considerable power.
That you don’t take religion seriously says little about how others take religion seriously, and what results from this.
In Ireland, for example, there is simply no other institution that compares to the Catholic Church, in terms of ongoing protection of pedophile priests. This is in part, because for decades the Church had greater authority and control of institutions that supposedly protected children. The Church provided and controlled the saftey net, not secular child service agencies.
Not all authority is equal.
See, for example, The Magdalene Sisters for a cinematic investigation of this. When Church officials complained that the film exagerrated the problem, actual victims were able in many cases to show that what happened to them was worse than what was depicted in the film.
And for the sake of the slow in the room, other religions can behave just as despicably. There have been some recent and ongoing problems in some Orthodox Jewish communities, for example.
It’s not just a Catholic thing.
The Other Chuck
@Mnemosyne:
The church claims to only answer to God, and will resist to its dying day any efforts to suborn it to a temporal authority such as non-canon law. Damn skippy the source matters.
Fighting criminal organizations may be whack-a-mole, but this does not mean you stop whacking the moles.
ottercliff
Here in Boston, we had the cardinal (Bernard Law) who presided over the pedophilia scandal of the 90’s get airlifted to Rome on diplomatic passport ahead of the law and given a nice cushy position in the Vatican, his boss John Paul II is on the fast track to become a saint, and the head of the Vatican office that was in charge of the investigation/cover up was promoted to Pope!
That was enough to disengage me for the church and I hold out little hope for the future as long as a cabal of perverted old farts remain in charge.
Wally Ballou
@Kathy in St. Louis: This is also how our overstretched military gets infiltrated with skinheads and other unsavory types during a misadventure like Iraq, no?