On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 17:19:09 -0700 (PDT), Damon Agretto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > As far as the church harboring molestors, I think > something that is being overlooked here is one of the > fundamental problems the church is currently facing: a > shortfall of new priests coming into the system to > replace those coming out. If you are a bishop and such > a thing happened within your diocese, your choices are > going to be bad and worse: you can dismiss the priest > and face the very real possibility of having not > enough priests to attend to the laypeople (a > significant concern if you are a believer in > Catholicism or Christianity), or harboring a priest > that has done wrong.
I can't imagine any community preferring to have a known molester priest over having no priest at all, given the choice. But of course the communities that these priests are transferred into weren't allowed that decision. > A second point I want to make is the ideal of > forgiveness. I think in our modern society we are far > less ready to forgive, or accept the idea of > repentance. I really don't know what happened behind > closed doors in these cases; did the local > bishops/archbishops pat the priest on the back, wink > slyly and let it go, or was there a more spiritual > punishment? What about the incidence of repeat >From what I've read, following the nastiness here in Boston, early on the church saw the whole pedophile priest thing as an "illness", something that could be cured or rehabilitated. So when complaints came in on a priest, it was treated as a private internal church matter, so the priest would maybe get counseling or be sent to some center to be "cured", and then discretely transferred somewhere else, likely with no disclosure of his past behavior. I think that's what happened with Paul Shanley, practically an early founder of NAMBLA. Cardinal Law, knowing Shanley's predilections, wrote a glowing recommendation to a parish in California for Shanley, not mentioning this at all. http://www.kenanderson.net/bible/paul_shanley.html > offences AFTER discovery? Where these priests > rehabilitated after they were exposed? For an Lots of repeat offenses after discovery and "rehab", and sometimes even in the midst of actively fighting off other accusations. The general concensus is that rehabilitation doesn't work, but the Catholic Church was slow on the uptake of that fact. > organization that believes in repentance and > forgiveness it begins to make more sense... It would, but there's also plenty of stories of Catholic priests and nuns being treated with far less forgiveness and charity by the Church, for far lesser church-specific offenses. Further, even if the church is willing to forgive the pedophile priests, that does not justify the Church's active obstruction and lack of cooperation in the criminal investigations. Cardinal Law's obstruction here in Boston is well documented, and the AG even tried to charge him with a crime, but MA lacks a strong law to enable him to do so (unlike some other states). http://www.snapnetwork.org/legal_courts/boston_weak_statutes.htm I just saw an article (was it here?) that IIRC a cardinal in California was fighting a legal battle to prevent turning over archdiocese records on a priest for a criminal investigation on the grounds it violated the principle of separation of church and state. Also fairly recently, I saw an article mentioning a pedophile priest that had an arrest warrant out for him, who the chuch shipped off to Canada. And in that same article, they tracked another *admitted* molester priest who was transferred form the US to some tiny 3rd world place, where he was running the youth center, among other duties. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
