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[Catholic Cover-Up] A Cardinal, a Monseigneur, and 500 children walk into a bar
Atomika
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
The L.A. Times is breaking today with news that starting back in the mid-1980s, the Los Angeles Archdioceses has be involved in an active conspiracy to cover-up accusations of child abuse and molestation in over 500 cases. Primarily, the investigation has centered on the now-deceased Monseigneur Peter Garcia, responsible for an alleged 17 cases of abuse himself, who the the Cardinal, Roger Mahoney, in league with Monseigneur Thomas Curry, ordered to be removed to a New Mexican dioceses to escape prosecution and remove risk of PR problems with the L.A. diocese.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57565286/evidence-shows-bold-l.a-priest-abuse-cover-up/
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57565286/evidence-shows-bold-l.a-priest-abuse-cover-up/
Mahony wrote on July 22, 1986: "I believe if Monsignor Garcia were to reappear here within the archdiocese we might very well have some type of legal action filed in both the criminal and civil sectors. Signed, sincerely yours in Christ, most reverend Roger Mahony."
Monsignor Curry concurred: "There are numerous - maybe 20 - adolescents or young adults that Peter Garcia was involved with in a first degree felony manner. The possibility of one of these seeing him is simply too great."
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Like, could the CEO of McDonald's just keep rotating a nefarious Ronald McDonald around the country to avoid bad PR? I'm doubting it.
Just hemorrhaging members, especially around the Tri-Cities and Flint (Saginaw Diocese membership has been in freefall for over ten years now, by their numbers last year they were down almost 80% from their peak in the late 90's). It's pretty clear why, I could write two pages on it, but people are very vocal about their anger at the Church, and they're being told that they don't know what they're talking about, nothing's wrong, nothing was ever wrong.
A lot of problems, big and small, even a few of them imagined. But they handle them all the same way, from the most trivial slight to the most serious abuse: Deny there ever was a problem and if things get out of hand shuffle everyone involved off to other parishes or other diocese and hope the problem doesn't follow them.
And that's the real problem. They could have dealt with most of these, solved the minor ones and at least be going in the right direction to solve the major ones. But instead they're just turning over the cushions and denying there ever was a problem, so every problem the Church has had in almost twenty years is all there, festering, unresolved and just getting worse.
I'm glad the good people of Michigan are mad about it, but the murmurs I've heard from my extended family and other catholics here in the south (admittedly the most fanatical body of catholics) is this and every other scandal either didn't happen, didn't happen but was overblown by the media, or "this happens in every organization, the media only picks on catholics because it is the one true faith".
On the black screen
If people actually think that, that's incredibly sad.
If any practicing Catholic said that, they are impossibly misinformed as to how other denominations' hierarchies work.
Basically, none of them work like Catholicism. The CoE/CoS is close, but nothing on that scale.
...yeah, if it's the case that this happens in every organization, what deranged brain looks at that scenario and thinks "welp, nothing to be done, i suppose."?
Nope, the Patriarchs/whatever they're called of the Orthodox churches are primus inter pares , first among equals. The Pope is an absolute monarch.
To be fair, they're not all that upset about the abuse. Which is sad, but it hasn't hit the diocese around here that hard, there were only a few cases and most of the victims weren't actually minors anymore when shenanigans happened. But we have been a dumping ground for those shuffled bishops.
It's a host of other reasons - gutting of lay ministry programs, openly offensive homilies, closing of historic parishes, silencing of nuns, calling the popular late Bishops Reh and Untener misguided and wayward... Like I said, I could go on for a while.
It's relevant to the topic of child abuse because it's been handled in the same way - priests and bishops got shuffled around and around to new posts to avoid trouble, and their replacements denied there'd ever been anything wrong to start with. It's not just this, it's a systemic problem in the way the Church handles anything negative.
At even generous estimates, Greek Orthodoxy account for about 0.5% of all Americans.
Damn. Going straight to the top. I like this.
Also, it's worth noting that there are, in fact, dioces within the Church that aren't hellholes. Admittedly they all fall under the blanket of the Catholic Church as a whole (and whoo boy is it a very unpleasant blanket), but things are more "let not the right hand know what the left is doing" than one might think at first glance.
Or the fact that the individual dioces are basically independent unless called to whip by the Vatican. And even then there's cases where dioces politely tell the Vatican to go fuck itself.
I also fully agree that they should do that way more often than they actually do, though.
That...
Huh. That would be really, really interesting to see. I wouldn't shed any tears if the man's quiet retirement ended up being enforced by law considering his stances.
If Ratzinger stays within the physical bounds of the the Vatican, he's virtually untouchable.
Yeah, but somehow I don't think it'd be really good for the already terrible PR the Catholic Church has.
"Harbors known international criminals!" I think would grab WAY more attention than "Shuffles around terrible bishops within their organization!" It's just on a completely different strata of terrible.
I mean, I wouldn't get your hopes up. I'd be very surprised if anyone managed to successfully bring a charge against him, much less get a conviction.
Still, it's an interesting (possibly unique) situation in modern international law.
Sure, but assuming it did come to that (huge longshot), it would be the difference between "this complaint dies before it gets off the ground, you can't bring criminal charges against a head of state" and "well, he's been proven guilty but we can't nab him - the former head of the Catholic Church is now the equivalent of Roman Polanski (times about a million)".
Yeah, it would be fairly unrecoverable. It's in the Vatican's interest to give him up if found guilty, but I doubt they ever would. They don't really seem to mind anything about their decades-long struggle with pedophilia beyond the bad PR it gives them.
Oh, and y'all should really google "Servants of the Paraclete" if you haven't. It's a real thing. A friend of mine lived near it, and is featured in the movie, Mea Maxima Culpa.
People don't base their entire existence on McDonalds?
Spiritually, I mean.
I take it you've never been to Texas.
hoooooooooooo
That makes it worse, not better.
The crimes he's being accused of, covering for these molesting priests, definitely occurred back before he was Pope.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Yeah, but that wouldn't matter if he was still Pope. Immunity is immunity, and head of state immunity is about as comprehensive as you can get as long as you hold the office; I'm pretty sure it applies retroactively.
McDonalds don't have their own powerful country to protect them. Anything the Catholic Church does is connected with the Vatican and no country wants to take them on with this.
Not to mention that McDonalds doesn't define part of people's lives. Catholic is an identity for millions of people in the US. It's not really fair to compare the two.
It also goes a long way to explain why it's so difficult to prosecute these kinds of things. Catholics figure that they are being attacked, and leap to their own defense. They rationalize so that they can keep adhering to the church (although most Catholics I know have little feeling of loyalty to Rome).
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
And that's why Catholics are bad people.
Recently my local paper did a story on a local school for the deaf. There had been a lot of abuse stories from the 60 onwards to the late 80s. Why? Because deaf kids where isolated and had trouble alerting someone about the abuse. Abusers would volunteer to work at the school and similar places. They would have access to victims while being lauded for their "teaching the underprivileged".
Priests have that combined with being natural authority figures in the community and according to the church halfway to sainthood.
While I'm not Catholic, I know a bunch of Catholics. None of them are bad people. I figure Catholics have the same spread of good/bad people as most other huge groups of millions of people.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche