What Is Behind The Catholic Sex Abuse Problem?

[stromboli]

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The global Catholic Church is confronting an extraordinary crisis not faced since the Reformation, which began with sharp criticisms of the Church and ended with a schism out of which emerged the establishment of a separate Protestant Church.

Today, sexual abuse allegations against priests are surging in a startling array of nations: the United States and Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, Italy, Austria, Germany, The Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Belgium, Bolivia, Mexico, Brazil and Chile. New abuse scandals erupt daily. The John Jay School of Criminal Justice estimates that, in the U.S. alone between 1950 and 2002 hundreds of thousands of children have been sexually abused by Catholic Clergy.

In fact, the Catholic Church has a 2,000 year history of sex abuse. In their acclaimed book, Sex, Priests and Secret Codes (2006), Father Thomas Doyle, with former monks Richard Sipes and Patrick Wall, used its own documents to confirm the Church’s 2,000-year problem with clerical sex abuse.

Why has the Church been plagued by so much pedophilia – predominantly homosexual? And why has a scandal regarding this situation erupted only now?
Why Pedophilia?

As to the first question, the sheer extent of homosexual pedophilic abuse within the Church prompts my speculation that an extremely patriarchal institution, combined with the all-male hierarchy’s repudiation of women as equal partners in service and governance, perhaps engenders a homoerotic internal culture that attracts homosexual men to the priesthood. However, those factors alone cannot explain the predominance of homosexual pedophilia. After all, a high proportion of nuns operating in Catholic all-female environments tend to be lesbians — but not lesbian pedophiles (See Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence by Rosemary Curb, LibraryThing).

A therapist who treats abuser priests, Leslie Lothstein, proffers another possible explanation. Lothstein implicates the sexual immaturity of priests, who by entering the seminary often as young as 14, miss a critical passage of maturation — first-time sexual experimentation — that is accessible to their non-seminarian peers. Caught in a bind of stunted sexual growth, such men may be driven emotionally to claim and possess their past unexplored adolescent territory that the rules of a celibate priesthood had placed out of bounds.

My own complementary explanation derives from working with two active priests, two former priests, and several ex-seminarians, who quit their studies partly out of disgust with the sexual abuse to which their teachers subjected them. My work demonstrated, sadly, that sexual abuse at the seminary can simultaneously initiate youngsters into homosexual pedophilia and impart the lesson that Catholic institutions tolerate pedophilia. Moreover, such abuse can also cause a victim to later appropriate his former abuser’s predatory/aggressive behavior as psychological compensation for the shame he had felt during the time he was being abused at the seminary.

Let us take note, however, as we consider these issues, that, yes, homosexual pedophilia predominates behind the Church’s walls. Priests do have greater access to males than to females within Catholicism’s sex-segregated communities — there are no altar girls. Priests take boys, not girls, on retreats and camping trips. And yes, solid evidence invites speculation that the generational reproduction of homosexual pedophilia within the Church is partly attributable to a role-reversal syndrome playing out among officials — from priests to bishops — who themselves had been child victims of abuse. All that being as it may, equally solid documentation exists to show that female children, too, are sometimes the victims of sexual abuse within the Church. In fact girls are one quarter of the victims and they are disproportionately under eight years old.

A much longer article, I highly recommend you read it.

The Catholic Church is built on a feudal model and a male heirarchy that predominates the entire culture. Women, even as nuns, are placed in a secondary role. The result is an antiquated, middle ages mindset and attitude that places undue power in the hands of a form of "royalty" in the priests, Cardinals and the Holy See. The first problem is how the clergy is seen as leadership, to be listened to but not to be denied or disagreed with.

The secong problem is that the clergy themselves go through a training period that begins in seminary with the introduction of the mindest that allows the practice of pedophilia and is always there, something thay have to deal with in one form or another. Since normal sexual expression is denied young adolescents, the availability of an outlet through pederasty and pedophilia becomes attractive, since the entire institution is geared to hide it and perpetuate it.

As was indicated in the previous thread I started
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the church takes extraordinary steps to hide the condition, not expunge it. The reason is because it is so ingrained in the religion, for 2,000 years, that to remove it would require an complete reshaping of how the church is structured, how priests are introduced into the system and so forth.

To put it simply, the church is an antiquated, backward, feudalistic system that works to perpetuate itself both in its dogma and in its secret behavior behind closed doors- FIRST AND FOREMOST, before anyother aspect of its existence. It has outlived its time by centuries and should have been dismantled long ago.

[SGOS]

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the availability of an outlet through pederasty and pedophilia becomes attractive, since the entire institution is geared to hide it and perpetuate it.

...the church takes extraordinary steps to hide the condition, not expunge it. The reason is because it is so ingrained in the religion, for 2,000 years

From my experience these two tidbits seem key to the issue.  I grew up in the Chicago area and went to public schools, but within a half a mile from my house, there were two Catholic schools  Grades 1-12, and a large proportion of my friends from the local neighborhood were Catholic and attended these schools. 

On a number occasions during my upper elementary years, my Catholic friends would joke about priests having sex with boys.  None of them seemed alarmed by this, and I took it more or less as humor.  None of my friends admitted to being molested themselves, and the jokes were always about priests and nameless other young participants.  At that age, they would not have seen it as highly deviant behavior, and were probably not familiar with the word "molested".  If you grow up with it as part of your culture, it's going to seem normal, although possibly a bit odd, the kind of thing one might joke about.

There was something about the humor that puzzled me.  Why jokes about priests, but not public school teachers?  Why were the jokes a common part of their culture, but not mine?  While this may or may not be explained by rampant sexual abuse imbedded in the culture of Catholicism, in the end, the jokes proved to be related to something that was actually happening, and no doubt in the Chicago area.

As powerful as he Church is/was, it would be hard to hide an atrocity like this for 2000 years, but it would be easy to let it slide, if not outright ignore it.  Indeed, the Church did in fact do just that.  My guess is that my friends knew it was part of the culture, and their parents probably did also, but were "letting it slide."  Perhaps not ignoring it outright but convincing themselves that the abuse was mostly rumor, and that actual events were rare.

In retrospect, I look back now and believe the abuse had been ignored as a crime, because while not openly embraced by the flock, it was tolerated and ignored, giving the Church a great opportunity to ignore the problem at an administrative level.  When society changed, along with these accusations becoming proven, the Church was caught short, and found themselves in a new environment over which they had lost control.  No doubt this caused a scramble at damage control in the Vatican, but most of the energy was consumed by the scramble, which for a change, could no longer result in control.

It's the way the Church has constantly dealt with reality.  The Earth remained at the center of the universe, until that dogma was removed from the authority of the Church by outside forces.  In other words, the Church is not self correcting.  It is only corrected by pressure from outside when the church is dragged kicking and screaming into admitting they are in error.  It's energy is directed at preserving it's status, not in growth, and as such, it is a brake on progress.

[Solitary]

Good posts by both of you!  Solitary

[stromboli]

I can't find the source and I have tried, but supposedly there was an edict written centuries ago by a pope that basically allowed for sex with boys of a certain age. To say that the concept is built in to the culture is almost a given, considering that it has become so ingrained in one way or another. Any institution so massive, so powerful and so self perpetuating would almost by default do what they are doing, simply because it is by their standard normal.

And SGOS is exactly right, any change is not going to come from within. The church does indeed generate its own internal dynamic apart from the rest of the world. As surreal as it sounds, the church operates in a world of its own creation and its own set of rules that in their minds allows for behavior that has been practiced so long it is normal to them. The more you look the weirder it gets, like having a great bloated whale on the beach that is rotting internally, until finally the stench leaking out becomes too noticeable to ignore.

[Solitary]

The fact that they also castrated little boys to sing in the choirs says a lot too, as does Opus Dei. Solitary

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Opus Dei, formally known as The Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei (Latin: Praelatura Sanctae Crucis et Operis Dei), is an institution of the Roman Catholic Church that teaches that everyone is called to holiness and that ordinary life is a path to sanctity.The majority of its membership are lay people, with secular priests under the governance of a prelate (bishop) elected by specific members and appointed by the Pope.Opus Dei is Latin for Work of God; hence the organization is often referred to by members and supporters as the Work

Founded in Spain in 1928 by the Catholic priest Josemaría Escrivá, Opus Dei was given final Catholic Church approval in 1950 by Pope Pius XII.In 1982, by decision of Pope John Paul II, the Catholic Church made it into a personal prelature—that is, the jurisdiction of its own bishop covers the persons in Opus Dei wherever they are, rather than geographical dioceses.

As of 2012, members of the Prelature numbered 91,960. Lay persons, men and women, numbered 89,909, while there were 2,051 priests.These figures do not include the diocesan priest members of Opus Dei's Priestly Society of the Holy Cross, estimated to number 2,000 in the year 2005. Members are in more than 90 countries. About 70 per cent of Opus Dei members live in their private homes, leading traditional Catholic family lives with secular careers while the other 30 per cent are celibate, of whom the majority live in Opus Dei centres. Opus Dei organizes training in Catholic spirituality applied to daily life. Aside from personal charity and social work, Opus Dei members are involved in running universities, university residences, schools, publishing houses, and technical and agricultural training centers.

Opus Dei has been described as the most controversial force within the Catholic Church. According to several journalists who researched Opus Dei separately, many criticisms against Opus Dei are based on fabrications by opponentsand Opus Dei is considered a sign of contradiction. Several popes and other Catholic leaders have endorsed what they see as its innovative teaching on the sanctifying value of work, and its fidelity to Catholic beliefs. In 2002, Pope John Paul II canonized Escrivá, and called him "the saint of ordinary life."

Criticism of Opus Dei has centered on allegations of secretiveness, controversial recruiting methods, strict rules governing members, elitism and misogyny, and support of or participation in authoritarian or right-wing governments, especially the Francoist Government of Spain until 1978. The mortification of the flesh practiced by some of its members is also criticized. Within the Catholic Church, Opus Dei is also criticized for allegedly seeking independence and more influence.

In recent years, Opus Dei has received international attention due to the novel The Da Vinci Code and its film version of 2006, both of which many prominent Christians and non-believers protested as misleading, inaccurate and anti-Catholic.[

[Shol'va]

Ever since I was a wee little lad, I very well understood that Orthodox priests were okay because they were allowed to marry, and to basically treat any celibate male such as Catholic priests with utmost suspicion.