Deliver us from Evil
Wall stressed that about 10% of the graduates of one of the major Catholic seminaries in the US have been convicted as pedophiles (sorry, I don’t recall the name of the seminary). 10%! As Wall rightly points out, if Yale had a similar disgusting track record, it would’ve been shut down! Yet, the Catholic church manages to survive. They’ve paid more than a billion dollars in fines and reparation. There are at least 100,000 victims who have come forward – this is an estimated 20% of the real number of victims. Yet, the Catholic church goes on. How can an institution not loose all its credibility when there is such an extent – both in numbers and in time – of a problem that is systematically covered up? Doyle even blames the very essence of the Catholic hierarchy for this. A priest is considered more valuable than a child, so it is logical to cover up for the priest rather than to protect the child. And if all sex is considered bad, as Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea explains, it is difficult to distinguish child sexual abuse from adult consensual sex because it’s all bad. The Catholic hierarchy had lost their moral compass – that how Frawley-O’Dea puts it. And after that, they still have moral credibility left? That seems more mysterious than the conversion of a cracker into a piece of flesh! How much has to happen before people will stop trusting sexual advice from people who have pledged not to have sex? How much has to happen before people will stop following moral doctrines from a deeply immoral hierarchy? Only if the priests lose their supposedly god-given power will they stop abusing it.
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Great post. I think that the Catholic Church is starting to lose some credibility, at least in my circle of friends (in Canada). I know that when I was a kid (in the 1970s and 80s) it was much more common for people in my world to go to church – my family did and a lot of my schoolmates did. But now I am in my thirties and I find that most of my friends do not go to church. Maybe like 1 in 10 people that I know goes to church. So I do think that the whole process of losing credibility is starting.
This is my opinion only so everyone calm down if you disagree: In my opinion only, I think that the southern U.S. and Latin America / South America seem to have a larger “hard core” religious following in general than other places like Canada, Iceland, Norway, Germany, etc. I look at the “hard core” Jesus Camp people and the evangelical Christians as kind of “crazy”, whereas I see the ahteists and science-oriented people (like believing the Earth is actually millions of years old) as more “normal”. I think that view is shifting overall, or at least there is a significant rift building between Evangelicals and more science-based people. I think it comes down to wanting to believe rather than actual evidence.