Roman Catholic Church officials in Milwaukee vigorously shielded pedophile priests and protected church funds from lawsuits during a decades-long sex abuse scandal, according to hundreds of newly released documents.
The documents include letters and deposition testimony from Cardinal and Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan who, during his time as archbishop of Milwaukee from 2002 to 2009, appealed to Vatican on numerous occasions to help address the ongoing fallout from the scandal.
The 6,000 pages of documents related to eight decades of abuse cases showed in great detail the Milwaukee archdiocese regularly reassigned priests who were accused of sexual molestation to new parishes and Dolan himself asking the Vatican permission to transfer $57 million to a trust fund to protect it against court action.
He tried to bury those assets in the cemetery trust fund. You can’t make this stuff up.
As Dan Savage always says, if any other organization did this (his example is Denny’s), we’d be after them with pitchforks and torches, but the Church has a 80 year documented history of child rape and we’re still supposed to listen to their considered opinions as if they have some kind of moral authority.
srv
I so miss the poorman’s comments on this sorta stuff.
Comrade Carter
What did ANY of you expect? I’ve been living here for more than half of my 53 years. Of course he was.
Duh.
I only had to know he was a “close friend” of my brother to see this one coming. (This is in Milwaukee.)
Redshirt
Our spiritual betters.
There’s been untold amount of suffering caused by the Catholic Church, but maybe its all for the best in the long run if it helps further break the grip of organized religion.
MattF
Well, expected or not, Dolan’s been caught in a flat-out lie. It may take a little time for that to sink in, but it’s a big deal.
kwAwk
Pedastry was almost universal in ancient Greece yet we still revere their poets and philosophers as examples of the greatest our species has to offer.
The catholic church did have a problem with pedastry in an era where pedastry is severly frowned upon but it seems a bit unfair to categorize the actions of the entire church using the actions of the few.
The foundation the Christian church is built upon is constructed of foregiveness and grace. I can understand the actions of the clergy in this context but not really approve. And perhaps as the men who’s business it is to hear everybody else’s sins and offer forgiveness they felt that they were required to forgive their own too.
Even though I’m an athiest, I sometime think I spent too much time in church as a child.
Shakezula
Other than to howl for the accusers’ blood we’re not supposed to comment on it at all, or we are attacking the poor defenseless Raped Child Corporation and its lay members and all of the nice sweet nuns doing charity work and the people who benefit from RCC charities (although this benefit might be greater if it weren’t spending so much cash shipping rapists around the planet), and so on.
Is it any wonder corporations and their lackeys in the legislatures run around screaming that they’re victims when someone suggests radical things like paying its employees a living wage or not dumping a mountain in the nearest river? It works for the oldest corporation on the planet.
MoeLarryAndJesus
@kwAwk: Atheists should know how to spell atheist. Apologists for the Church should learn how to spell “pederasty” the way sane, educated adults do: rape.
Higgs Boson's Mate
Or a RICO investigation.
Shinobi (@shinobi42)
Is it too early in the day for this song? No, No it is not. (SUPER NSFW by the way, headphones only.)
the Conster
@kwAwk:
LOLWUT?
BIBLE_DUDE1
i too despise the papists. they are not actually Christians fyi.
kwAwk
@MoeLarryAndJesus:
My apologies for offending your inner spelling demons. It is early in the morning and I wrote what I wrote fairly quickly.
Redshirt
@BIBLE_DUDE1: Indeed. The only True Christian sect is…
Comrade Dread
@kwAwk:
The catholic church did have a problem with pedastry in an era where pedastry is severly frowned upon but it seems a bit unfair to categorize the actions of the entire church using the actions of the few.
I would say that many of us are angry about the abuse that occurred. But if that abuse had been exposed by the institution, the men remanded to the police and tried, and the church did everything it could to bring healing and restoration to the victims (and not the perpetrators), then a lot of us would be more willing to let it go.
But they didn’t. And they still haven’t (to my knowledge) apologized or even made a full confession as to the awful, institutional coverup.
You can’t have forgiveness and restoration unless there it is preceded by confession.
Shinobi (@shinobi42)
@BIBLE_DUDE1: Memo all protestants, baptists and other “followers of christ”
The catholic church is the origin of your religion. The followers of that religion follow a religion older and closer to the origins of the Christ myth than you do.
Actual historical facts prevent you from winning this argument.
Also, no one cares but you, you sound like kids arguing over who their imaginary friend likes the best.
Comrade Dread
@BIBLE_DUDE1: Yes, they are. You simply follow a different set of church traditions than they do.
Comrade Dread
@Shinobi (@shinobi42): Well said. But technically, I think the Orthodox are actually closer to the early church traditions and doctrine.
The Red Pen
@Comrade Dread:
Traditions?! Feh! Sola Scriptura!!!!!one!!!1!!!
BIBLE_DUDE1
@Comrade Dread: actually no, you are a clueless. they use a different bible. they worship ido.s and Mary. this is prohibited by the King James Bible.
kwAwk
@Comrade Dread:
True but the church doesn’t confess to the public, and I don’t think that Catholic doctrine requires public confession for the masses either.
Villago Delenda Est
@BIBLE_DUDE1:
No one cares what Mammon worshiping slime like you think.
On Dolan: there are all sorts of institutions available for guys like him.
They’re called “prisons”.
The Red Pen
Timothy Dolan isn’t “the Church” any more than Jesse Jackson Jr. is “the Democrat Party.”
That’s Wingnut logic.
The Red Pen
@Redshirt:
Ethiopian Orthodox.
That’s my final answer.
Villago Delenda Est
@Shinobi (@shinobi42):
“Sound like kids”? This IS an invisible sky buddy they’re taking about.
Shinobi (@shinobi42)
@BIBLE_DUDE1: And the King James bible is based on what? A bible that was re written by the English in the 1500s from the catholic bible so that Henry VII could get divorced?
Christianity’s history is nothing but political power struggles and schisms. The idea that any of it is based on finding the “True faith” is truly foolish.
Religion is just crowd control.
Higgs Boson's Mate
One day out of the blue a co-worker informed me that anyone who hadn’t accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior would burn in Hell. That took me aback for a moment and I asked him “What about infants who die before they can accept Jesus?”
“Burn in Hell”
“What about John the Baptist? He predated Christianity.”
“Burn in Hell.”
I named a few more people whom I thought to be pretty good and his answer was always the same.
Made me glad that I embraced Buddhism at an early age.
The Red Pen
@BIBLE_DUDE1:
Sorry, but the entire Christian world settled this issue in 787 and you’re wrong.
Too bad the notoriously flawed King James Bible wasn’t around to set them straight. By the way, King James was a flaming, cross-dressing, homosexual so nice hat tip to the recent Pride celebrations that you choose him as a champion.
Roger Moore
@kwAwk:
It seems entirely fair to categorize the actions of an organization based on the actions of its acknowledged leaders. This was done by an archbishop who got the permission of the Vatican. Those aren’t the acts of a few bad actors; they’re the official acts of the organization itself.
Shinobi (@shinobi42)
@Villago Delenda Est: Sad that they are actually adults. Jesus loves me this I know, because my parents told me so.
BIBLE_DUDE1
I try to agree, and still my posts are subjected to vile insults and scorn.
Ripley
Today’s lesson: Don’t be a clueless.
The Red Pen
@Shinobi (@shinobi42):
That’s not historically accurate. If you made it less absolute, it would be historically accurate, but the antidote to ignorant blanket statements is not more ignorant blanket statements.
Sri
@The Red Pen:
Oops, you forgot to clean up your tell.
Comrade Dread
@BIBLE_DUDE1: Can’t tell if you’re a troll or serious. Good work.
The KJB came about nearly 1600 years after Christ. There is nothing inspired or special about that particular translation.
Catholics honor Mary as do the Orthodox and as did the Early Church. You will note in the progression of the gospels as they are written that Mary takes a much more prominent role in the latter gospels (Luke and John) than in the earlier ones.
And all Christians follow some sort of church tradition. Your insistence on the KJV (assuming you’re serious) as well as your peculiar ideas regarding Christianity in general were taught to you by a pastor, who learned from his pastor, who learned from his pastor, back to the founder of your particular sect.
The liturgical churches simply lay claim to a far earlier set of founders than you.
Another Halocene Human
Dolan has been pushing hard to get public funds sent to “vouchers” to go to private schools, ie parish schools to keep the criminal enterprise going.
They’ve been fighting the City of DC for years trying to get guaranteed subsidies to their parochial schools there, using their influence in the US House to do so.
Dolan is one sick mother who doesn’t believe in separation of church and state except to separate the state from its tax revenue for the enrichment of the church, at which point the state should butt out.
Catholic Church in DC got BUSTED forcing religious activities on homeless folks in one of their transitional/shelter facilities which was receiving federal funds.
I have no idea why Obama went back on his campaign promise to stop that shit. Maybe he thinks it’s too dangerous and will try to crush it at the end of his term. I dunno. Or maybe he got conned into thinking it does so much good it’s worth the risk. I think it’s poison.
Chris
@Comrade Dread:
This.
I expect criminality to happen in the Catholic Church for the same reason I expect it to happen in every last profession on Earth – they’re human institutions. When the institution covers it up and then screams injustice and oppression when someone points out that, you know, WTF? – then it becomes the institution’s fault and not the individuals.
The Red Pen
@Sri:
There’s a reason that phrase was in quotes, dumbass.
Another Halocene Human
@Comrade Dread: Instead, they blamed the victims.
Ever wonder why wingnuts don’t “get” consent? Because Catholic and Evangelical Protestant churches don’t “get” it either. They teach children at a young age that all that matters is not offending God by breaking his taboos. Hurting other people is not only irrelevant, it’s practically justified.
Shakezula
@kwAwk: Pedarsty was a legal or sanctioned relationship between a boy and a man. Priests having sex with children was never sanctioned by society or the church. Shoo.
Roger Moore
@Comrade Dread:
It’s not clear if any Christian organization is particularly close to the early church, if by “early church” you mean the people who actually heard Christ firsthand. By the time that generation was past, the church had already broken into factions who didn’t hold to a single set of traditions and doctrine; the lack of any kind of agreement is a major subtext of the Epistles. The “early church traditions and doctrine” that churches are claiming to be closer to were created by a complex political process hundreds of years after Christ’s death, so it’s not clear that being closer to them is somehow an advantage in being a good Christian, at least if you judge that following the word and example of Christ.
Sri
@The Red Pen: And there have been times in your other comments when it wasn’t. Oops!
Shinobi (@shinobi42)
@BIBLE_DUDE1: We don’t want you to agree with us, we want you to have a rational argument that supports our point of view.
Ash Can
All right, BIBLE DUDE is making me LMAO, especially in the context of this thread. Well played, DougJ — er, BIBLE DUDE.
The Red Pen
@Comrade Dread:
You are assuming that this guy has any kind of scholastics in his denomination.
In fact, a lot of people who wave around the KJV (“the authorized version”) follow a doctrine that says that any one — be they educated or a complete idiot — can pick up a KJV and determine what God said from the “plain reading” of the text and that this text is all they need (Sola Scriptura).
For example, there’s a story where Jesus say that faith is like a mustard seed: it is the smallest seed but grows into the largest plant. People at that time knew there were smaller seeds and larger plants, but the story was using exaggeration (a feature of Jewish teaching stories) to make a point about something that seems small having a great net effect. If you Google around, you will find the “plain reading” crowd writing blog posts claiming that Jesus was talking about some obscure variety of mustard plant that grows really large because “the plain reading” has to be 100% true.
These are the people that keep Christianity stupid.
Shinobi (@shinobi42)
@The Red Pen: Yes, lets argue over my absolutist language instead of the substance of the point. Another tell, heh.
Sorry for not appropriately qualifying my BLOG COMMENT with the correct historical and argumentative context. Oh wait, no I’m not.
Chris
@Shinobi (@shinobi42):
I’ve always loved that about the Protestant Reformation. They claim that the Catholic Church was too worldly, too corrupt and that the clergy had too much power, and that the solution was to go back to the Bible and nothing else.
… that is to say, after they’ve rewritten the Bible, tossed out a half dozen of the books in it, and put in their own translations. Who gave them the authority to do that, exactly? Are they claiming that they’re infallible, agents of divine will, and totally qualified to interpret and propagate the Word Of God? Remind me how that’s any different from the Papacy’s claims?
It works if you’re in the liberal Protestant denominations and admit that there’s a lot of interpretation and trial and error going on and that we’re all just doing the best we can. But for fundiegelicals who simultaneously claim that the Bible is perfect, inerrant and eternal, while following a version of it that didn’t exist until the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, it’s hilariously fucked up.
The Red Pen
@Sri:
Find a comment of mine where I didn’t quote the phrase “Democrat party.”
Feel free to search on Daily Kos as well, moron.
kwAwk
@Roger Moore:
But what leader of any organization facing a lawsuit isn’t going to take steps to financially protect that organization from catestrophic losses?
He wasn’t shifting the money around in order to buy more children.
Comrade Dread
@Roger Moore:
I would agree. I think individual Christians who reject the world’s values (money, power, status, notoriety) in favor of lives of quiet service to their fellow man are far closer than any institution is.
Punchy
Of course, because he self-annointed himself Cardinal and Archbishop.
And Skilling wasn’t “the Enron”, so it’s very fitting he didn’t go to jail. Wait, hold on….
Comrade Dread
@kwAwk:
One who follows Jesus’ words and example that people, human lives, are more important that power, wealth, and tradition.
You know, a Christian.
Shinobi (@shinobi42)
@kwAwk: They are supposed to be moral leaders, not a for profit organization.
Plus, for a centuries old institution whose income is based on their popularity, that is an extremely short sighted view. They should have taken steps to protect their long term income stream instead. They are losing this generation, and that is going to cost them far more money.
The Red Pen
@kwAwk:
I would suggest that the leader of an organization dedicated to the Truth and Way of Jesus Christ would feel an obligation not to cover up their sins in the first place, but maybe that’s just me.
You are supposed to have moral authority because you are moral. The USCCB (and Dolan, particularly) certainly don’t shy away from the most aggressive positions opposing reproductive rights and gay rights.
The Red Pen
@Punchy:
And Jesse Jackson Jr. self-appointed himself a Democratic congressman?
My analogy holds.
kwAwk
@Comrade Dread:
This isn’t about human lives, this is about American tort law, which isn’t based upon the bible as far as I can tell. Fair compensation for injuries can be rather subjective in these cases.
Not to mention that the Church is not immune to fraudulent lawsuits.
Chyron HR
@The Red Pen:
Cardinals are hand-picked by the Pope. Congressmen are elected by one congressional district out of the whole country. Your analogy continues to be hilariously misleading.
The Red Pen
@Chyron HR:
The Democratic Party certified Jesse Jackson Jr. as their official candidate. He wasn’t an independent who was simply caucusing with the Dems.
The analogy holds.
sun tzu
@kwAwk:
Gee, & I thought one of the purposes of Dolan’s organization is the welfare of it’s supporters’ children.
I stand corrected. Of course, cemeteries are FAR more important.
These guys rape children & support laws that kill women.
And they get a tax deduction.
The Red Pen
@kwAwk:
Technically true, but at an important level, this was about human lives and it is about institutional wrongdoing on behalf of an organization which is supposedly pledged to make the world a better place. One would expect that would include protecting children from sexual predators and not the other way around. If Gordon Gecko had founded the RCC, then maybe I could buy this rationale.
Also true, but you generally don’t move to protect your assets unless you expect to lose and you don’t expect to lose unless you know that you’ve done something wrong.
Yatsuno
@Ash Can: DougJ must be really really bored in Taiwan. We should have wifey get him a girlfriend over there. She haz connections.
(I’m trying to get her to go dual citizen, but she hasn’t seen the wisdom of my argument. Yet.)
@kwAwk: For a supposed atheist, you seem rather invested in protecting the interests of the Church. I find this…fascinating.
aimai
@kwAwk: I’d say definitely.
Origuy
@Yatsuno: Sippy Cupp Syndrome?
Joey Maloney
@The Red Pen:
True, in addition to power struggles and schisms, there were a fair amount of massacres and pogroms as well.
The Red Pen
@Yatsuno:
Are you trying to out him as a Papist infiltrator?
I think kwAwk is advancing arguments based on a personal view of what is fair and reasonable. If you disagree with that view (I do) you could address it rather than advancing sleazy ad hominems.
Roger Moore
@kwAwk:
Maybe an organization needs to protect itself, but one that publicly preaches the importance of confession and penance shouldn’t be burying the truth and hiding assets from lawsuits.
Punchy
@The Red Pen: No, it sucks. When JJJr was shown to be corrupt, he resigned and is facing time in the clink. He doesn’t rep the Dems b/c after the malfeasance was revealed, he was removed by the Dems.
Meanwhile, Dolan has been shown to be corrupt in a much more inhumane manner, and still has a job (and was even a longshot for Popeness a few months back). Church wont cut him loose. The affiliation with the RCC is intact, and b/c of that, he reps the Church.
Comrade Dread
@kwAwk: Children were injured. Irreparably harmed in some cases. Many have abandoned their faith altogether after the horrors inflicted upon them by ‘men of God’ who were supposed to be representatives of Jesus.
There are a lot of wrecked human lives out there that the institution chose to ignore in favor of protecting its status, its reputation, and its money.
Had the Church responded in love to these souls by doing everything within its power to make it up to them and ensure that they had its full support against the monsters that destroyed their lives, I doubt few cases would have made it as far as a judge.
The Red Pen
@Punchy:
Yeah, the analogy does pretty much unravel there.
I think a better selection would have been someone who was clearly criminal, but stayed in office with party support, but that would force me to pick a Republican.
If Dolan hasn’t broken any laws, it will be up to Francis I to clean house. If that happens it will take many years.
Shinobi (@shinobi42)
@Joey Maloney: I sit corrected.
Gex
I read one article that stated that Catholics are surprised by this, they thought that he was part of the solution. Who the fuck are these people?
Under Dolan, the Milwaukee Diocese fought the extension of the statute of limitations for child abuse. Under Dolan, pedophile priests were given $20k and asked to resign rather than forcing the Church to respond to the problem. When Dolan left, there was documentation of over 8000 unreported cases of alleged abuse.
Dolan was promoted to Cardinal for all of his work in Milwaukee. The main perk of that position is Vatican citizenship and I’ve no doubt that that is part of an escape plan, ala Cardinal law.
If these Catholics are truly surprised, it is because they were too busy listening to Dolan bitch loudly and frequently about how horrible gay people are while refusing to take a look at how horrible he was being. I have no doubt that they will be surprised again when he skips the country and instead of being tried for his crimes, they will get to pay for his sunny Roman retirement.
Roger Moore
@Punchy:
He doesn’t just have a job; he received a promotion. In contrast, bishops who confronted the scandal head-on have been left sitting.
sun tzu
@kwAwk:
If there are fraudulent suits against the RCC, name one. It has lost almost every suit or criminal case that has gone to trial. Not to mention the billions in settlements & guilty pleas.
kwAwk
@The Red Pen:
I understand, I really do, and I do think that the victims deserve compensation for their injuries, but it would be hard to justify paying out $47MM in compensatory damages for a child moletation charge. The real fear the Church would have would be punative damages awarded.
If the Bishop didn’t move to protect the assets of the diocese and because they didn’t the church was forced to close soup kitchens, orphanages and the like, would this really be a morally superior outcome?
kwAwk
@kwAwk:
It wasn’t like the Cardinal was doing this so that he could afford another vaction home, a private jet and a Ferrari.
Roger Moore
@kwAwk:
If it were just one charge that might be a plausible defense, but it’s literally thousands. The diocese of Milwaukee could be stripped of all its assets without having enough money to make just compensation to all its victims.
LeFabe
Pardon me if it’s been said before, but I think the church probably has a 2000 year history of child rape.
aimai
@kwAwk: This is positively the most diseased thinking I can imagine. If the Church is a corporation, headed by people whose primary fiduciary duty is to its owners and shareholders, there is no reason to keep advocating a special exemption for Dolan for, essentially, fradulently moving monies between one part of the organization and another. If it is something else, with a mission to the poor, you can’t “rob peter to pay paul” and leave the clients of the church–the poor, children, orphans, the sick–to be victimized by actual representatives of the church and then deny them compensation. To take the word of the church’s supposed founder “It would be better” for Dolan et al to be cast into the pit of hell than to have “offended these little ones.”
But be that as it may the idea that the Church selflessly funds orphanages, adoption agencies, or hospitals and that it is this money that would be “lost” to good works if the Church had to pay reparations for its misdeeds is completely absurd. As was demonstrated in the Catholic Charities debacle here in MA almost all of the money the Church uses for its children’s services is, in fact, taxpayer money that the Church gains access to when it promises to contract for those services. It is not money collected from the faithful in the pews.
At any rate–head over to the Vatican and have a gander at what they could sell to pay for the crimes of the American Church. A few statutes, jewels, and paintings would more than have paid for the millions the Church owed.
Gex
The Church has set themselves up to be a honey pot. Like white-hats will trap hackers with an easy spot to hack, the Church has unwittingly demonstrated that the one of the oldest, richest, most powerful institutions in human history will fight tooth and nail to protect pedophiles from the law. Even if a pedophile’s proclivities come to their attention, they will just give him more access to children.
I wouldn’t think that there would be an above average population of predators in Catholicism, but I do think that there are ways to encourage predators to become Catholics. And in my opinion, the Church does all of those things to the nth degree. They chose this, not because they want to support pedophiles, but because they refuse to accept that they fall under the umbrella of secular law rather than sitting above it.
America needs to decide soon: Does “religious freedom” mean you can hurt people? Children? Gays? Again there was a guy kicked out of his husband’s hospital room in MO, their Power of Attorney contract nullified because it violated the
Church’shospital’s “moral beliefs.” Are we willing to “respect” religion right into annihilating the rule of law? Apparently we are seriously considering it.Seanly
@The Red Pen:
How many other dioceses have shielded or shuffled priests as well as hidden assets? Off the top of my head, I think we’ve heard about Phoenix, LA, NYC & Boston all doing this.
The 80 year time frame shows this goes well beyond just Dolan. In addition, I suspect that the 80 year time frame is a bit short.
Less Popular Tim
@MoeLarryAndJesus: @MoeLarryAndJesus: C’mon, kwAwk is one of the athiest atheists I know!
Villago Delenda Est
@kwAwk:
You need to hang from the same gallows as Dolan.
The Red Pen
@kwAwk:
Would it? If someone came to you and asked you how much it would cost to molest your child, what price would you set? Now multiply that by 8000.
Actually — and I’ve only had time to skim the news on this — the concern was protecting the trust for a cemetery, which is a fiduciary duty.
The Red Pen
@Seanly:
Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.
Gex
@kwAwk: If the real fear the church has if punitive damages, then they shouldn’t have been so willing and eager to aid and abet.
The argument of “whoops, I didn’t know I’d get caught and the punishment is too severe!” is not a compelling argument to just turn our backs on the harms. Especially when doing so does nothing to make them change their ways. The punitive damages you bemoan are meant to be that to incentivize good behavior. Otherwise child rape settlements are just the cost of doing business.
What a sick, sick mentality you have.
I don’t suppose it occurred to you that we have better options for helping the poor and need other than sacrificing children to the Catholic Church. No probably not. Either we feed the monster virgin child ass or the poor and the needy get it!
The Red Pen
@Villago Delenda Est:
Nice.
Well, this was kind of an interesting thread. I think it’s done now.
Comrade Dread
This. I remember someone advising His disciples not to store up treasures on Earth, but to work for treasures in Heaven.
Gex
@Gex: No really, that chaps my hide. The POINT of punitive damages is to make it so people do not commit crimes that might otherwise be acceptable to do from a cost/benefit analysis. So to argue against the punitive damages after the fact is to simply argue the wealthy should get to do what they want so long as they find it worth spending the money on settlements. We have no way to make it not worth their efforts if they decide they want to do it.
It’s very weird to see a tort reform argument on Balloon Juice. Especially in this context.
Yatsuno
@The Red Pen:
lolwut? I dinna think that means what you think it means.
Roger Moore
@The Red Pen:
I’m pretty sure he’d be willing to settle for reciprocal privileges.
JR in WV
@kwAwk:
“The foundation the Christian church is built upon is constructed of foregiveness and grace. ”
More like burning at the stake, after crushing bones and organs to elicit confessions to made-up sins, when real sins were flourishing all around. No, the Christian church has nothing to do with the teachings of Christ, and is based upon fear of a god filled with hatred for his people. Truly perverted.
@BIBLE_DUDE1:
Your lack of historical knowledge is not astonishing, you have been lied to by your ministers since you were old enough to listen.
All you religious fanatics are deluded. The RCC should be RICO’ed out of existence for the rape conspiracy they have conducted for the past 2000 years.
Catsy
@kwAwk:
Yes, let’s examine that for a moment. Why do you suppose the Church might be held liable for ruinous punitive damages when it’s an individual abusing their position of power to commit the crimes?
It couldn’t, do you suppose, have anything to do with the fact that the Church routinely, as a matter of top-down policy, covers up those crimes and protects their perpetrators?
Here’s a protip for your friends at the diocese, Sparky: if they don’t want to be liable for punitive damages from child rape lawsuits, maybe they should hang the child rapists in their org out to dry and report them promptly to the police instead of covering up the crimes and sheltering the child rapists.
It’s a pretty simple calculus, and one that–unlike the Church’s current policy and documented history of cover-ups–has the benefit of actually being consistent with the drivel they’re preaching.
kwAwk
Egads! You folks have me swinging from the gallows yet again. Such a bloodlust runs through this group.
But let me pose a hypothetical for you. Suppose you have a child. That child borrows your car from one evening and in a fit of teenage stupidity gets drunk and runs over a 5 year old child. You know that you are responsible for your child and your car, so when the parents of that 5 year old come knocking on your door do you just have the deed to your house waiting for them? Do you say, you know what I know I’m not required to give this too you but it’s yours. Do you then say I know their not fancy or worth much but here are our wedding rings and my grandfather’s watch too!
Ofcourse not. You, if you’re normal would want to offer just compensation to the victim but not be completely destroyed yourself. And you and the parents would have to understand and accept that not every wrong can be righted and not all damage can be compensated.
Catsy
@kwAwk: Oh good grief, just stop. Your tortured analogies and desperate efforts to defend the indefensible are just embarrassing to watch. You’re spinning so hard and fast that you’re a few coils and a magnet short of generating electricity.
I’ve edited your idiotic hypothetical to reflect the reality of what we’re discussing. No need to thank me.
Bill
@kwAwk: A jury determines what’s “just compensation” not the defendant. Thus, while the church is certainly free to argue that the plaintiffs (read childhood rape victims) are not entitled to their $57m; what the church is not entitled to do is fraudulently transfer its $57m so as to make it unavailable to satisfy an eventual judgment.
But more importantly, any moral organization should WANT to make sure these victims are justly compensated. Particularly one that claims to be THE moral authority.
If your argument is that the Catholic Church is like any other corporation and should be expected to act as such, its already laughable claim to moral authority is on even shakier ground.
The Other Chuck
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: I think I would have said something like “Your loving god sounds like the most evil force in the universe. Well good luck with that, and if you ever talk religion to me again, I’ll be talking to HR.”
the Conster
@kwAwk:
Uh, if you kept assuring that your car would be given to other children who would most assuredly kill with it, then justice for those killed as a result would be for you to be completely destroyed financially and every other way. WTF is wrong with you?
Higgs Boson's Mate
@The Other Chuck:
Tempting. He was a pretty decent guy in most every other respect and it was a small shop. We didn’t have any other conversations on the subject. That might have been because I finished with something to the effect that there would be so many great people in Hell that I’d be too busy making friends to notice the heat.
kwAwk
@Catsy:
Perhaps I should be a little more direct. Do you think that those most of those angry here are using this issue as a proxy for grievences with the Catholic Church that are completely unrelated to this issue? That maybe someone like Cardinal Dolan knows that this is the case?
Otherwise, why would you be so angry that the Cardinal is simply taking the steps to defend the institution, which I’m sure he loves, and has been entrusted to defend.
The arguements here are that the actions of the Church related to molestation are wrong are uncontended, the question of the thread is how does the Church deal with the fall-out of that without being destroyed, when the reality of the institution is that the Catholic Church has done some bad things and has done some very good things for people in this country.
This notion you have that any organization or group of people with the size, scope and history of the Catholic Church would simply voluntarily disappear into oblivion because of the actions of a small subset of those people isn’t terribly realistic.
Catsy
@kwAwk:
No, but the motivations of those who are angry about it are irrelevant to the facts of the matter.
Because it is generally 1) illegal to move assets in order to shelter them from a judgment in a lawsuit, and 2) deeply immoral to do so in order to thwart restitution for victims of a crime that your organization tried to cover up.
The “but the Church has done good things too” line of apologia is getting very tiresome and has long since worn out its welcome. It is based on an utterly nonexistent premise: that the charitable works of an organization should carry some weight in mitigating punishment for crimes committed by that organization.
You got a little straw on you there. Perhaps you’d like to review what I’ve written on this subject and identify where I have ever argued that the Church has an obligation to voluntarily disappear into oblivion.
Complying with the law and not sheltering child rapists would be a welcome start.
JR in WV
@kwAwk:
You’re missing the point here.
This organization claims to be a moral authority, the most moral organization ever in the history of the universe, which was created by the founder of the organization, for the benefit of the members of the organization.
We aren’t talking about the Telephone Company here, we’re talking about THE Church and Bishops and Cardinals, whose authority comes from the Lord God, who presumably disapproves of child rape. Except that the Bishops and Cardinals are assisting the rapists, not the victims.
And another thing: what about the adults who may have been sexually attacked by Priests who want a more mature experience? Does anyone doubt that young women (and men) are being attacked, or are we sure that only little children are being molested by Priests who can’t live up to their vows?
RICO all the property of the church, make them preach in parks and alleyways, like Jesus did. They don’t need giant cathedrals to preach the gospel, around here lots of preachers work out of re-purposed garages and trailers.
The giant cathedrals are for the ego of the senior members of church management, the very fellows who are facilitating the rape conspiracy that appears to have lasted at least the past couple of centuries.
Sick! and Evil!!
aimai
@kwAwk:
I’d like to turn this around for a second and just ask how kwAwk justifies to the Catholic in the Pew the fact that their money has been used to bankroll pedophilia and political interference in the lives and health of others? If I were a member of the church I’d be furious that my leadership, such as Dolan and Cardinal Law, permitted and even encouraged the hopscotching of criminal priests from vulnerable parish to vulnerable parish and then, when called to account, failed to minister to the needs of those who had been abused. When Dolan hid the money he defrauded the Church’s creditors–its victims–and those were none other than the believers and the tithers themselves.
kwAwk
@Catsy:
Actually it is only illegal to move to shield assets from a lawsuit after you’re lost, and I’m sure there are some really creative lawyer types around here who could show us a legal way to do it then.
If prior to losing a lawsuit you decide to place your assets in a trust there is nothing wrong with that as just because somebody has sued you, you are not required to live your life as if you’ve already lost.
While in the article at hand I did see reference to moving assets into the cemetary trust fund as a way of shielding them from legal liability, what I didn’t see is any reference to whether this could actually have been considered to be fund that were actually required to maintain the cemetaries. Should they have just vacated the cemetaries too? Maybe dug up all the bodies and sold the land to help with the payment of the lawsuits?
The notion of complying wtih the law and turning over those who are accused of molestation is already a concession that the Catholic Church has made. It’s not germaine to this conversation.
The
The notion that we don’t weigh the good someone has done in society against the bad they’ve done which looking to punish a crime is poppycock. A mother of three with no criminal record who happen to face a vehicular homicide charge, will probably recieve more leniency than a career criminal or a drug addict.
Comrade Dread
No, I am angry because when confronted with the very real evidence that men entrusted to be examples of Jesus Christ were, in fact, raping children, that their superiors in case after case after case decided to engage in a systemic cover-up of said rape and enabled child rapists to continue to rape more children.
Clear enough?
Yeah. The Pharisees took steps to defend the institution they loved to. I would have hoped that Christians would realize that engaging in evil in an attempt to ‘preserve the greater good’ is immoral, evil, wicked, and contrary to the life and teachings of Jesus who tried to teach us all that people were the most important thing in this world.
You seem to be viewing the Church as a business and your chief concern is its financial bankruptcy, which given their assets seems rather unlikely.
You neglect that in covering this up, the church has destroyed itself. It has destroyed its moral authority. It has destroyed its reputation. It’s evils have far overshadowed any good that it has done in the eyes of many people.
As I said before, they had a proper opportunity to deal with this. They still can. They can come completely clean. Open up all of the records, admit guilt and start doing what they can for the victims and they can start creating policies within their organization that try to mitigate the chances of it happening again in the future.
If that means opening up the Vatican vaults and selling off some priceless works of art to cover the bill, then so be it.
I don’t know how to be more clear than that.
RaflW
@BIBLE_Doofus:
Moar better trollz pleez.
And, on a more substantive note: can’t Dolan be charged with criminal fraud in hiding that $57 million? I mean, he’d just flee to the Vatican and avoid prosecution, but the US would be (marginally) better off.
kwAwk
@aimai:
As I’m not catholic I couldn’t justify to a catholic about why they spend their money in the Catholic church in the first place. It certainly is their right to do so if they feel that the benefits of being Catholic outweigh the costs. Perhaps there is the answer? That they need to do the cost/benefit analysis for themselves and see which side of the scale is heavier?
BC
@kwAwk: Actually, since the RCC gets more than 90% of funding for its “soup kitchens, orphanages and the like” from either state or federal programs, I think we can rest assured that the homeless and orphans could be cared for, probably more cost-efficiently than paying the RCC to do it. The idea that the RCC collects money from parishioners to cover these expenses is just a myth – in actuality, they are best at competing for public funds than practically any other non-profit in the country.
El Cid
@Catsy: Now suppose that evidence reveals that perhaps 4% of your employees in certain jobs which facilitate interacting with members of the public are shown to have engaged in sexual molestation, assault, pedophilia, etc., to have done so throughout the entire extent of your company’s corporate range, to have done so for decades upon decades, and that your company is shown to have systematically engaged in preventing the testimony of victims, to have hidden evidence of these crimes, to maintain these employees as employees and to protect them from law enforcement exposure, and to have used corporate resources to not only to protect these serial violators and to coverup their activities but to protect corporate resources from being legally seized as a result of this systematic corporate facilitation and protection of sexual criminals.
kwAwk
@Comrade Dread:
I’m actually speaking of the church as being more than a business. It this was a business, like Walmart, I’d say let the place go. Shut the doors and wait for somebody to take their place.
But this isn’t a business, it’s a religion that means a lot to a lot of people. It’s existance is justified in our society by the comparison of the good it has done measured against the bad it has done. Not a simple element of money. Just as money to the victims won’t alleviate their pain and suffering.
To be angry at the church for this one issue is perfectly acceptable, but this one issue does not define the entire church.
the Conster
@kwAwk:
This isn’t an “issue”, it’s a criminal conspiracy with the Pope as mastermind. As long as the Church harbors criminals and obstructs justice and hides its assets, not only will the Church be defined by its crimes, it should be, especially since it’s supposed to be a religion.
Comrade Dread
@kwAwk:
The gates of hell will not prevail against the church. Christianity will survive. But if the Catholic Church wants to reclaim any sort of honor and decency, it will have to make a full confession and ask for pardon.
I’m reminded of an ol’ not entirely clean joke I once heard about a visitor to a small town in Scotland who went into the local pub for a drink. He sat down next to an older local and the two struck up a conversation. Before he knew it an hour had passed and he had never gotten the man’s man. So he asked him what it was.
“Well, I’ll tell you. You know that stone bridge ye walked over to get here? That’s my bridge. I designed it. I drew up the blueprints. I hauled the stones, and I built it. Stone by stone. Now everyone uses it when the main road washes out. But do they call me Angus the Bridge Builder? No.”
“Do you see that beautiful church? When the old one burnt down, I built that. I designed it, drew up the prints, filed the permits and did the whole thing myself at cost. But do they call me Angus the church builder? No.”
“Do you see the school playground? I built that. I knew the wee children needed a place to play. So I built that for them at cost. Set it up meself. Can you guess what they call me?”
The man smiled, “I’d call you Angus the Humanitarian.”
“So would I, but no. Because apparently if you fuck one goat…”
RaflW
@kwAwk:
Keep in mind that kwAwk thought that donations to the Catholic Church were not deductible, only donations to Catholic Charities. So take anything he opines about the legality of asset-shielding with a few pounds of salt.
Bill
@kwAwk:
RaflW
@Bill:
Right. The outright statement of intent makes what Dolan did appear pretty despicable in light of the 2011 Milwaukee Diocese “bankruptcy.”
If this model were applied to BP’s Deepwater disaster, they could have declared “BP of Louisiana” bankrupt and walked away with all their assets in the other 49 states, N. America, Europe, etc etc in tact.
Why does a global organization with one CEO get to have individual offices say “oops, we’re broke!”
rikyrah
the Mob and Drug Kingpins WISH they had it like the Catholic Church.
sun tzu
@ (almost) all of you:
The response here has been beyond what I could have imagined.
My maternal grandfather, a deacon, repeatedly assaulted & raped me from the time I was 5 until I was big enough to throw him out of the house. Before they over-dosed, both my mother & my youngest cousin said that he had also raped them.
He was Lutheran, but the RCC’s TOTAL opposition to statue-of-limitations reforms has made it impossible for me to hold accountable the doctors & the school guidance person that I notified several times–as well as their employers.
Thanks to responses like those here, I have finally turned a corner in my “recovery.”
I often wondered if I would live to see this sea-change in attitudes to child assault/rape victims. Thanks most of you, I have.
You’ve made, my, well decade.
El Cid
By the way, this issue is specifically about the organizational hierarchy (i.e., the Catholic Church as an institutional employer) and the actions of its employees (both in terms of those employees’ criminal assaults & other abuses upon the public and other employees’ protection of those abusing and criminal employees), not people who attend Catholic services and so forth.
If people were finding out that some large percentage of the laity attending a Catholic church were committing sexual abuses and so forth on Church property or in some way connected to official functioning, and that the Church had systematically protected non-employee abusers as well, then that would be directly addressing the entire Church population.
kwAwk
@the Conster:
The Catholic Church is an anomoly in the Western World. It predates the fall of the Roman Empire by a couple of centuries. It is older than any country in the western world. It has seen Kings and Empires and Great Countries come and go. It has never been a pristine organization nor is it an organization that is used to submitting itself to every government under whom it finds itself in the jurisdiction of. It has a tendency to try to handle it’s problems internally and think of itself as independent. This has been demonstrated to the church to be a fallacy on this issue.
In fact this particular scandal that you say defines the church is small potatos when compared to other times in the Church’s history, such as the Spanish Inquisition. Ofcourse there wasn’t much for Tort law in the 15th century but you get the drift.
My point in this thread would be that we’ve identifed a problem within the church and it has been fixed. Time to move on and quit trying to define every catholic priest as a pedophile.
kwAwk
@RaflW:
I know it is surprising but as an atheist, tax deductions for religious giving doesn’t seem to pop up on my tax returns all that often.
Kind of strange that you give money to God and the US Government gives it back to you huh?
kwAwk
@Bill:
In order to be fraudulent it would have to be determined that the payments to the cemetary trust were not reasonable and necessary for the ongoing maintainace of the cemetaries.
We only have one line from the letter from Dolan to the Pope. Not enought to make a determination.
El Cid
@kwAwk: Actually, once Constantine converted, and thereby converted Rome, the Church went from being a religious organization operating within and across Roman boundaries to becoming the Roman nation-state itself. It was the nation-state controlling Western Europe for centuries as well. It simply cannot be discussed as though its nature has primarily been that of a church or other informal actor for most of its existence. This history is real. There was no other set of denominations outside it; the first English-language print translation was banned, censored, and its translator punished by death, all because of the extraordinary hold upon state power exercised by this former Roman imperial state.
It’s a different thing now to the extent that the nation-states within which it operates have changed their character, and because it has so adapted over centuries. But this particular set of revelations of widespread, systematic, well-known, and well-hidden abuse of children, of minors, of adolescents, and of adult men and women in, say, Ireland, is bound up as well with interactions with public authorities whose actions were considerably covered by state-Church relations.
Context varies, but the anomaly in comparative history is that the Catholic Church as a multinational institution is being investigated and prohibited from the institutional cover-up of its employees’ abuses.
the Conster
@kwAwk:
Shorter kwAwk: compared to centuries of genocide, oppression and torturing non-believers to death, having child rape as the problem is a breath of fresh air for such an enduring institution! Watch me while I wave my magic hands and all of the child rape enablers pretend to go away!
You sir are a pathetic piece of work.
JWL
“.we’re still supposed to listen to their considered opinions as if they have some kind of moral authority”.
Blame Hollywood.
Before-and-after Bing Crosby warbled his way through Going My Way, the film industry has always portrayed priests and nuns as paragons of virtue.
For that matter, the debt the NRA owes to John Wayne movies is inestimable.
PIGL
@BIBLE_DUDE1: Oh goody. Common ground.
Dumbass motherfucker.
Who gave you the right to adjudicate who is and who is not a Christian? You the second coming of Martin Luther, or what’s the case?
Bill
@kwAwk:
No that’s not what it means. It’s fraudlent if it’s made with intent to hinder, delay or defraud a creditor.
Transfering funds in anticipation of litigation is the classic fraudulent conveyance. Whether the transfer was reasonable could have been a factor (not the sole factor as you seem to think) had Dolan not stated that was his intent shield the funds from judgment. Single line or not, it was a statement of intent.
Why are you so hot to defend a guy who has stated he wanted to hide money from people who were sexually abused?
BlueSkies
@Roger Moore:
BINGO!
And emphasis should be put on “acts” in the plural. The crimes and cover-ups are many and have been going on for decades literally all over the world.
In answer to the argument “But whut about all the nuns and Father Browns and Catholic Charities?”, I say that they are the exceptions to SOP for the Catholic Church. They are the bait in the bait-and-switch that is the Catholic Church.
Catsy
@kwAwk:
Making this statement requires either staggering dishonesty or equally staggering ignorance, but it is either one or the other. Since you’re the only one who can know for sure which it is, I leave it to you to own up to it.
sun tzu
@kwAwk:
It’s been “fixed???”
We have just begun to fight. In 1994, there were ~250 “out” clerical assault/rape survivors in the US. Now, one organization of us alone has over 12,000 members in 62 countries. A very large percentage were victims of RCC clergy & other employees or volunteers.
All over the world, the RCC has been resisting almost every legal as well as less formal attempts at healing & reconciliation. They are only CONSIDERING change now because they are being forced to.
The Church has industriously covered up the sexual assault & rape of at least 10’s of thousands of its’ parishioners’ children in the last several decades alone.
Additionally, a large number of children in Ireland, Spain, & Argentina were stolen at birth or soon after from “bad” families & given to “good” Catholic families. This continued in Spain until the ’90’s.
The most important goal of many of us survivors is to make sure these horrors can’t happen again. Not by ANY organization.
This battle is still in the very early innings.
BlueSkies
@The Red Pen:
No, your analogy is weak and narrow. Using your players, a better analogy would be if the ENTIRE Democratic party leadership – Obama, Pelosi, Reid, all committee chairs, whips, and ranking members – you know, the elected people who then elected or set their own leaders within the party – were all in on the child rapes and cover-ups. THAT analogy would be much better to what the Catholic Church has been doing since before you or I were born because THAT is what the Catholic Church has been doing. In Chicago. In Atlanta. In Boston. In LA. In Seattle. In NYC. In Dublin. In London. In…
Maybe it’s easier to name diocese where this HASN’T happened.
BlueSkies
@kwAwk:
Is this a trick question? OF COURSE this would be a morally superior outcome. Just ask any priest, he’ll be the first to tell you that the end never justifies the means.
And yes, in reality such an outcome is preferable. If there were fewer religiously-based charities, the state would be forced to step in, as has happened in most of Europe. Arguably they treat their poor, elderly, orphans, and sick people much better than we do. Thus, a morally superior outcome.
A side-effect with a morally superior outcome is that without those facade elements (charities), John Q. Public could more clearly see what the Church (and all other churches) really are: Rackets.
kuvasz
Follow the Gourd! The Holy Gourd of Jerusalem!
Gravenstone
@BIBLE_DUDE1: Dude, you’re a parody troll. You should be stirivng for the abuse as a mark of status.
tybee
@Catsy:
you have him pegged.
BlueSkies
@kwAwk:
Of course it defines the entire church. Many members of the organization committed the most heinous crimes possible, around the world, for decades, and all of the LEADERS of the organization covered it up, and worse, actually helped the criminals repeat the crimes.
The leaders of the organization, at all levels of the organization, helped child rapists avoid justice AND they helped them rape more children. I know I’m wildly optimistic to expect that this might sink in, but think about just how horrific that is on a grand scale and on the individual scale.
Not only does this “one issue” define the entire church, it PERFECTLY defines the entire church.
kwAwk
@BlueSkies:
I kind of disagree with you. The Catholic Church’s scale both in history and population is hard to grasp. 15,000 people in a church of a billion isn’t such a large number. Based upon the law of averages you’d expect to find 11,000,000 of them with autism.
Child molestation is a horrible crime, and but in some regards I think the scope of the problem is being exaggerated.
And we keep hearing about a global criminal conspiracy but couldn’t a lot of this be accounted for with simple naivety? Think Joe Paterno. Did he really not report Sandusky because he didn’t care or did he simply have that old fashioned naivity and misplaced loyalty? I suspect what a lot of you guys are calling a criminal cover up was simply just that.
Bill
@kwAwk: ” I think the scope of the problem is being exaggerated.”
Are you a professional child rape apologist, or is this just a hobby?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jay_Report
According to the church’s own investigation 4 % (about 4,400) of priests in service between 1950 and 2002 committed acts of sexual abuse. Of those, only 252 were ever convicted of a crime. That appaling low number was in no small part because the church covered up abuse, moved abusive priests and failed to report abuse to the police.
What exactly is “exaggerated” about that? By the offending parties own numbers (which are undoubtedly conservative), thousands of priests committed sex crimes which were covered up by the church.
Again, hardly a “moral authority.”
Catsy
@kwAwk:
No, your increasingly strained attempts to make excuses for child rapists and their enablers is something that could be accounted for with simple naivete.
You suspect wrong, and there is a very long and inglorious paper trail documenting just how wrong you are. If you bothered to put even the slightest effort into researching this subject you would know that.
Once again: ignorant or dishonest; which one are you?
kwAwk
@Bill:
Do the math there Bill. There are 1.2 billion Catholics in the world. If there were 4400 Priests guilty of sex abuse and they each molested 100 kids each that would be 440,000 cases of molestation out of roughly 1.2 billion people.
That would mean 0.04% of Catholics are reporting they were molested as children and only if you really believe that it is possible that these guys molested 100 kids each.
Ofcourse, nothing I’ve said in this thread could be considered a defense of child rape, nice dirty little attack there.
It’s been fun though exploring this issue and to see how many of you really don’t want to have a rational discussion of the issue.
kwAwk
@Catsy:
Point me in the right direction there Catsy. Show me that long paper trail and let me take a look.
El Cid
@Bill: Oh, c’mon, practically every organization has 4% of its public contact employees continually engaging sex abuse for decades and decades and decades and having this activity silenced & covered up.
Now, if we were getting up into 70% or 80% of employees in the position of public contact sexually abusing that public, then, well, that might be reaching the level of concern–but a mere 4 out of 100 highly respected authority figures entrusted with unsupervised access to men, women and children of the public and then sexually abusing large numbers of those in their care repeatedly for literally generations? That hardly seems rare.
Toots malone
Kwawk,
When you are done making an ass of yourself, feel free to type in the words “Magdalene Laundry Ireland” 30,000 women in Ireland were sexually, physically tortured by the good sisters in Ireland. If you aren’t too tuckered out reading about that, then look up the Murphy Report. Once you are done, smack yourself in the face for being such an eijit. .
El Cid
@kwAwk:
You just used an example in which 4,400 priests molested darn near half a million people in order to suggest that maybe this wasn’t a wildly large number.
I submit that a force of 4,000 high level employees of a single organization in multiple locations found to have sexually assaulted 400,000 people would in fact be seen by anyone as being a devastatingly large and disturbing and frightening number.
johnny aquitard
@The Red Pen:
Do you mean that as snark, as in, you are making fun of Seanly speculating how long this has gone on?
If you are, how is it the person who wonders just how far back this has gone on is being irresponsible?
It’s been going on for at least 80 years. Seems irresponsible to me to not even consider looking beyond 80 years.
johnny aquitard
Wonder if this is the same troll who defended child rape in that whole Jerry Sandusky thing a while back. Sure sounds like they got something in common.
kwAwk
@El Cid:
Out of context 400,000 is a very large number. But as I’ve been saying the context is 1,200,000,000. And the 400,000 is an number that I exaggerated to be larger than it probably is. The 1.2 billion number somewhat a hard real number.
By comparison, the 400,000 figure though large, is about 10% of the number of the population who would expect to get cancer before their 20th birthday. And as I’ve shown before it is about 4% of the number of people in that population that would expect to be diagnosed on the autism spectrum.
Catsy
@kwAwk:
Oh, please.
There is no rational discussion to be had with people who expend so much energy to defend the Catholic Church’s record of covering up child rape, and who repeatedly lie to do so.
Don’t pretend that you’re here looking for any kind of rational discussion or good faith debate on this subject. You’re not, and we both know it; you’ve spread far too much demonstrably false bullshit, laughable analogies and flat-out bad faith arguments in this thread. I might buy a defense of ignorance from a lay Catholic or someone who’d recently extracted themselves from that informationally sheltered life. I don’t buy it from you.
Your purpose here is to cloud the issue and pretend to be an objective observer injecting the voice of reasonable doubt into a record of abuse and ongoing cover-up that is quite clear and becoming clearer with every passing year. The problem, for you, is that nobody is playing your game. Your efforts are transparent as hell and no one is buying what you’re trying to sell.
Toots malone
What the fuck is your point hmm? That the cries of 400,000 sexually tortured children wouldn’t be very loud? Because of cancer or autism or something? One raped child at the hands of those who credit themselves as the moral authority on earth is too many. That the institution is able to use its influence on the police and governments over the globe to avoid prosecution and continue its crimes makes it worse than any mafia.
El Cid
@kwAwk: No, no, you want the context to be 1.2 billion, but your own example has 4,400 priests — not random people, but highly trained, highly supported, public contact employees — molesting / abusing 440,000 people.
You can stand in a crowd of 440,000 people abused by a protected & enabled criminal force of 4,400 employees over decades and decades and plead that they please bear in mind the context of 1.2 billion people, and all you’re going to sound like is a lunatic.
El Cid
@kwAwk: And by the way, the number of those likely to be diagnosed with autism would have a very, very different aspect if it were the number of people infected by some imaginary agent or such by a known force of employees such that they came down with autism.
Priests weren’t randomly blown into sexually abusing victims like some physical variable like wind direction.
kwAwk
@Toots malone:
Amazing to me the escalation in emotional language when discussing this topic. How did we get all of the way to sexual torture?
kwAwk
@El Cid:
I’m not arguing that what happened didn’t happened, my argument is that the nature of the issue has been exaggerated. Walmart has 2,200,000 employess. How many of those employees would you reckon have committed crimes in the past 20 years?
Something to think of also is that the Catholic church has a 1600 year history of really just not firing it’s employees willy nilly. The employment at the catholic church are there for life and if is by tradition not easy to remove a priest from the priesthood. They’ve perhaps learned over the past few years that this isn’t the best policy, but a 1600 year old institution doesn’t steer like a Corvette.
sun tzu
@kwAwk:
There is an 10th Circle of Hell for those who defend “Christian” leaders who enable “Christian” clergy who violently & forcibly assault & rape children whose protection is their highest charge.
My rapist was well over twice my height & even more times my weight. And he did it as often as he could. And my parents just said, “You misunderstand his love for you.”
If I had killed him when I was old enough to be able, 3 suicides may have been prevented.
You don’t dis clergy, especially who are “family.” They prescibed excommunication for kids who “told.” Had I killed him as soon as I could, at least several lives may have been saved.
I still feel guilty for not pulling the trigger (Martin Marlin .22) but that pails in comparison to yours for defending a great slow-motion atrocity in human history.
“Lower” animals, at least, don’t rape their own.
Have the courtesy to respond. Or, most probably, not.
sun tzu
@kwAwk:
Because I was. See above.
Oh, that’s “misplaced affection.”
You’re a COWARD. you can’t, & won’t answer.
Oh, & I always take it “too personally.”
You wouldn’t, of course, ’cause you can’t think, & certainly can’t feel–at least for others.
El Cid
@kwAwk: No, no, you still do not comprehend the analogy:
If 4% of Walmart’s managers had been found to be likely of having committed repeated sexual abuses of the public, and that Walmart had been hiding and protecting their predations from law enforcement and criminal prosecution for decades, do you seriously imagine that people would be leaping to their defense as the Vatican-fetishists have done with this case of organizational, institutional, criminal wrongdoing by a multinational religious corporation?
‘Oh, well, look how many general store managers Walmart has had; really, 4 out of every 100 of them repeatedly sexually abusing underage patrons of their stores and being paid off and transferred and in every way enabled and sheltered for it isn’t that many.’
Toots malone
yes we should all be passive when reading your shite. If swearing hurts your fee-fees then imagine what being held down as a child and anal penetrated by priest feels like. Then imagine it happened to someone you love. If swearing is the only way to get it through to you then so be it.
As I mentioned in the thread further up, the Murphy report and the Magdalene laundries include sexual torture. Its not just that you are a blinkered but that you are a smug prick about it too.
oh and that’s swearing too
El Cid
@kwAwk:
A lot of the victims use that sort of language.
You’d be surprised what levels of angry wording an adult can use when describing the effect some 50 year old priest had on them as they repeatedly pressured them into continual sexual assault when they were 8, or 13.
Those victims need to tone it down.
El Cid
If your organization is really, really old, you might just have to shelter pedophile predators and child abusers, because a long time ago no one used to be able to prosecute you.
(A 1,600 year old organization is not actually run by people who are 1,600 years old.)
lojasmo
@kwAwk:
Bullshit. the church systematically covered for, and freed these rapists.
Fuck the Catholic Church.
grandpa john
@Catsy: Having seen this troll here before, the answer to your question is BOTH.
also, on a different subject, he is a known troll here. BJ posters seem to have an affinity to not only feed the trolls but to serve the a 7 course dinner with dessert
kwAwk
@grandpa john:
Catsy – You need to understand that the common definition of troll here is anybody who expresses a disagreement.
kwAwk
@sun tzu:
I don’t want to diminish what you went through so I’m not going to continue this much further, as I’ve stated I’ve just wanted to have a discussion about how this scandal went down and what it is about.
The facts on this case, as no many people on here really seem to know despite how much they choose to insult me is that the statistics recited about 4% of priests about 4400 out of 105,000 priests in the US had allegations of abuse against them during the time period 1950-2002 or about 10%. Somewhere between 10% to 20% of the allegations were found to be unsubstantiated or false and in at least 20% of the time the allegations were not even made until the priest was dead.
Of those about 83% of those priests had 1-3 allegations against them over that time, but there were 149 priests who had upwards of 3000 allegations against them. So the real serial bad actors represented about 149 out of 105,000 priests. 70% of the accused priests were ordained prior to 1970 and probably had most of their bad acts prior to the the last 30 to 40 years where our society has become sensitive to issues of child molestation. I wasn’t alive in the 50’s, 60’s or much of the 70’s but my understanding is that issues like this weren’t handled the same way then as we might handle them today. Society has evolved that way.
Again, I say to you I’m just really trying to understand this issue and not trying to demean you or your experiences what I am trying to say is that circumstances aren’t necessarily as cut and dry as they sometimes seem.
sun tzu
@kwAwk: @grandpa john:
Ah ha! Kos the trollette. Because of my very un-unique past, I’ve been feeding this, ah, d-ck.. Oh, wait, he couldn’t have one–at least that works as G-d meant. Ditto a c-nt.
He can’t think, feel for others, or understand.
Let’s be kind, & give him a bishop’s creampie.
Like Archbishop Weakland, late of Milwaukee, did to his “lover”– $400 thousand settlement courtesy of funds meant of the less advantaged, those donors & goverments duped by Catholic “Charity.” See the release.
Leave now.