Catholic crackdown doing its job?

[AzureWolf]

After visiting with the pope the American Catholic cardinals decided that they didnt like the idea of no tolerance that the pontiff had suggested. Does anyone else find it incredibly wrong that someone who had sexually assaulted children be forgiven, moved to a new parish and placed again into a position of absolute trust in a community? No tolerance should be the way to go, any priest caught in misconduct of that extreme type should be defrocked and sent to jail like a common criminal. First time offenders now according to the cardinals will be given a slap on the wrist and sent along to a new area to continue their work so long as they showed "remorse". How can they so abuse society by placing someone like that back into a supposedly sansocrat place of trust?
Quite truly sickens me, I wouldn't care that they showed remorse if I knew that a previous sexual offending priest had moved into my area I would forbid my little sister to go anywhere near the place.

[ 04-25-2002, 01:23 PM: Message edited by: AzureWolf ]

[Cloudbringer]

That's odd, Az...I wonder about your info source. I'm not Roman Catholic, but the local Roman Catholic Bishop was on television last night endorsing the idea of 'one strike and out'. And my news last night showed the Cardinals all agreeing with the pontif.

Being a ...ummm unique brand of catholic [img]smile.gif[/img] I was tottally pissed off on how the Cardinals backed off the zero tolerance of child abuse and sexual misconduct by priests. I believe they are acting out of greed and self centeredness, in that they are worried that they will loose attendance if they are claimed by certain organizations to be intolerant or unforgiving.

Yeah Im totaly PO'd these old men need to examine their hearts a little more closely.

[AzureWolf]

Originally posted by Cloudbringer: That's odd, Az...I wonder about your info source. I'm not Roman Catholic, but the local Roman Catholic Bishop was on television last night endorsing the idea of 'one strike and out'. And my news last night showed the Cardinals all agreeing with the pontif.

This was on the news just before with a news conference with the cardinals back in america, and since its late night news it would have only happened in the last past few hours.

[AzureWolf]

Originally posted by MagiK: Being a ...ummm unique brand of catholic [img]smile.gif[/img] I was tottally pissed off on how the Cardinals backed off the zero tolerance of child abuse and sexual misconduct by priests. I believe they are acting out of greed and self centeredness, in that they are worried that they will loose attendance if they are claimed by certain organizations to be intolerant or unforgiving. Yeah Im totaly PO'd these old men need to examine their hearts a little more closely.

*slaps self on face*

Magik and I agree, now I'm truly frightened. [img]graemlins/uhoh1.gif[/img]

Originally posted by AzureWolf: quote: Originally posted by MagiK: Being a ...ummm unique brand of catholic [img]smile.gif[/img] I was tottally pissed off on how the Cardinals backed off the zero tolerance of child abuse and sexual misconduct by priests. I believe they are acting out of greed and self centeredness, in that they are worried that they will loose attendance if they are claimed by certain organizations to be intolerant or unforgiving. Yeah Im totaly PO'd these old men need to examine their hearts a little more closely.

*slaps self on face*

Magik and I agree, now I'm truly frightened. [img]graemlins/uhoh1.gif[/img] [/QUOTE]Hehehe ...seriously ...when it comes to kids, Im ferociously protective. There is enough heartbreak in the world without our "spiritual" leaders betraying our trust and the trust of our children!

Not to be off topic here...but Im starting to wonder if "celebate" men who have never raised a child can really know just how important our children really are....I know I did not realize it until I became a parent....I thought I did...but once I had one of my own..I realized I did not have a clue before.

[Wurm]

Very true about kids Magik

On another note...its looks like the Catholic Church is trying to blame all this on the gays....



What a bunch of hipocrites

Im not gay but Im also not stupid enough to fall for that line of BS....

[fable]

I posted a topic on the increasing incident of pedophilia cases attached to the RCC in the US a few months back. At the time, there was some criticism that this was possibly just a "jump on the bandwagon" phenomenon of people wanting to make some easy money off the RCC. I suspect these replies were conditioned by the lack of public awareness of the matter, since the RCC has always attempted to keep these cases quiet. But there were more than 70 accusations in a joint case brought against one priest alone in the Boston archdiocese, along with several hundred more accusations and court cases lodged against a few dozen priests there. Hundreds of similar cases have now appeared in California, in Philadelphia, Chicago, etc. And individual cases in Austria, France, and Germany have begun coalescing into largescale attacks, probably as a result of the strength drawn from numbers against the formidable might of the RCC.

I have to say that if the Americans cardinals have stated unequivocably that they don't like the Pope's "zero tolerance" policy, I'm surprised. Typically, there is zero room for manuevering at that visible and august a level in the RCC. Behind closed doors, there might be argument--but disagreement in public? I'll be looking to hear soundbites from the cardinals' response, later.

Mind, I wouldn't be amazed to find that some of the cardinals felt that way privately, however much they bowed to the Pope's will in public. For example, the Philadelphia Archbishop, Tony Bevilacqua, who's 78, is a harsh, aggressive man not known for seeing the viewpoints of others. He's lashed out repeatedly in print and aloud at accusation of pedophilia in his archdiocese, calling them as a group, sensationalist lies designed to make the RCC pay for something that never occurred.

What's also interesting is that several of these stern, stubborn, religiously arch-conservative and elderly men, all in their 60s and 70s, who met with the Pope, were appointed by him to their current positions.

Originally posted by fable: I posted a topic on the increasing incident of pedophilia cases attached to the RCC in the US a few months back. At the time, there was some criticism that this was possibly just a "jump on the bandwagon" phenomenon of people wanting to make some easy money off the RCC. I suspect these replies were conditioned by the lack of public awareness of the matter, since the RCC has always attempted to keep these cases quiet. But there were more than 70 accusations in a joint case brought against one priest alone in the Boston archdiocese, along with several hundred more accusations and court cases lodged against a few dozen priests there. Hundreds of similar cases have now appeared in California, in Philadelphia, Chicago, etc. And individual cases in Austria, France, and Germany have begun coalescing into largescale attacks, probably as a result of the strength drawn from numbers against the formidable might of the RCC. I have to say that if the Americans cardinals have stated unequivocably that they don't like the Pope's "zero tolerance" policy, I'm surprised. Typically, there is zero room for manuevering at that visible and august a level in the RCC. Behind closed doors, there might be argument--but disagreement in public? I'll be looking to hear soundbites from the cardinals' response, later. Mind, I wouldn't be amazed to find that some of the cardinals felt that way privately, however much they bowed to the Pope's will in public. For example, the Philadelphia Archbishop, Tony Bevilacqua, who's 78, is a harsh, aggressive man not known for seeing the viewpoints of others. He's lashed out repeatedly in print and aloud at accusation of pedophilia in his archdiocese, calling them as a group, sensationalist lies designed to make the RCC pay for something that never occurred. What's also interesting is that several of these stern, stubborn, religiously arch-conservative and elderly men, all in their 60s and 70s, who met with the Pope, were appointed by him to their current positions.

Right now all the media attention is focused on the RCC, however I do believe from the numbers first reported, that there are quite a few non-RCC pedophiles out there wiping the sweat from their brows and thanking the good luck they have had in having the media switch focus to just the RCC....in time the focus will go back and we will see that the RCC is not the only religious organization with this kind of problem. (they are just the ones with the deepest pocket$)

As for the Cardinals being outspoken, I didn't find their public disagreement with the Pontif at all surprising, the US cardinals have long had a rep for doing as they saw fit. This isn't new either [img]smile.gif[/img] there were many Cardinals and Bishops and Arch-Bishops in history who had....plans of their own.

[ 04-25-2002, 02:32 PM: Message edited by: MagiK ]