Psalehesost said:
Laura said:
And they accuse US of being a cult??? (The catholics behind it!) ??!!
Of course - anything they declare to be reality is because they say so.
Here's the church's latest declaration of reality, OSIT:
Perhaps Jarvis found himself emboldened by that recent report from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops? The Church's latest declaration of reality? It lays the blame for pedophilia squarely on non-existent shoulders: the permissiveness and “deviant” behaviors of the Sixties and Seventies.
Hypocrisy number 1) One wonders why the Roman Catholic Diocese of Plymouth even bothered to hire him since the USCCB's report implies that pedophilia is clearly not related to any individual's responsibility for moral behavior.
Hypocrisy number 2) The reader's awareness of pedophilia is being constrained to the 60's and 70's, while Lloyd DeMause and other psycho-historians have clearly shown that pedophilia goes back to the beginning of religious, educational and political beginnings. Indeed, the abuse was even out in the open in the decades long before the 60's and 70's.
Hypocrisy number 3) Considering the geographic distribution and activities of the catholic churches during the 60's and 70's, is this report also a confession that the church was completely impotent as self-appointed moral leaders during this time?
Hypocrisy number 4) The report not only indicates that the church was unable to prevent the supposed prevailing attitudes of the time, but they were also completely unable to prevent these attitudes from supposedly infecting their employees, or to put a stop to behavior which results from the pedophile infection.
A commenter on one blog post I read had this interesting question that begs an answer:
To paraphrase Stephen Fry, if the Church is as subject to influence from the moral zeitgeist as any other entity, instead of providing a moral beacon in times of moral darkness, what the holy f*ck are they FOR?
Another commenter asked:
Even if this utter BS was true, is it not the job of a priest to say it is wrong and try to put a stop to this immoral behaviour?
About that report:
A worthless and dangerous report:
[In May, 2011] the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) released a report called “The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010” (.pdf), a companion to their 2004 report, “The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, 1950-2002“.
...this report is something of a whitewash, for it pins the pervasive sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests not on the priests themselves, but on the permissiveness and “deviant” behaviors of the Sixties and Seventies. But it’s even worse than you thought. [...]
The three things that horrified me the most (and there are many things to criticize) were these:
1. The report seems to have been almost entirely financed by the Church itself or by Catholic organizations.
[...]
2. If the priests weren’t to blame, what was? As I said, the report implicates the wild and wooly Sixties and Seventies.
[...]
3. To minimize its malfeasance, the report simply redefines pedophilia as sexual abuse of a child 10 years old or younger. But the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the “DSM,” which is a handbook used by mental-health professionals to diagnose problems—sets the cutoff age at 13. Granted, any such age is somewhat arbitrary for diagnosing a disorder, but what’s rankling is that the Bishop’s report otherwise relies on the DSM for recognizing the symptoms of pedophilia!
By arbitrarily lowering from 13 to 10 the age at which child abuse is considered pedophilia, the report manages to lower the percentage of “pedophilic” acts from nearly 73% of total abuse to only 22%. That’s nothing other than a blatant manipulation of data to make the Church seem less culpable. It’s disgusting.
_http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/surprise-catholic-church-whitewashes-priest-pedophilia/
Miranda has a thorough (but not overly long) analysis here:
_http://mirandaceleste.net/2011/05/24/a-worthless-and-dangerous-report/
[quote author=MirandaCeleste]
In the hope of counteracting some of the report’s detrimental effects, I want to offer some summary and analysis of its methodology, data, and conclusions. The report itself is very long (143 pages), but you can get an overview of its findings by reading its brief “Executive Summary” and/or The New York Times‘s recent article (_http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/us/18bishops.html?_r=1) on the report.
[/quote]
