Devout organisation?Follow

Sturgeon's Law.

Good point. There's over 46,000 Catholic priests in the United States (to say nothing of nuns, deacons and other laity) so when two of them show the weakness of human nature, it should be a reflection upon every last one of them.

The number of priests in the United States accused of sexual crimes (accused, not proven) in a span of time ranging back into the 1950's is approximately 0.6%. This is roughly the same number of teaching licenses suspended from male elementary/secondary public education instructors due to sexual misconduct investigations in the last five years (0.5%).

Mind you, I'm comparing a fifty year period of a five year period.

Catholic sexual abuse cases just get more sensational news stories 'cause people eat 'em up. Much like little kidnapped blonde girls. Hell, if you followed the news stories the last few years, you'd be convinced that every female instructor was fucking her 13 year old students. I remember I once linked to four or five of them on here in a thread. I imagine the actual number of sexual misconduct cases involving female instructors is well below 0.5% but damn do they grab the healdines.

Edited, Jan 22nd 2009 6:45pm by Jophiel

Exactly look at the statistics, not the media crazed shock value.

I'll say in Boston, it prompted the Cardinal to resign. I knew people who filed and have colleagues who just work with the "Voices of the Faithful," i.e victims of the sex scandal. The church really needed to clean house--the lack of responsibility they were taking was really disturbing and damaged and hurt people's trust immensely-- with that said, on balance, I think that the response has been adequate and eventually it should strengthen rather than weaken the church's credibility.

I grew up Catholic. I have no love for the Catholic church or its medieval doctrine, but despite that, I can honestly say that I have never been mistreated in anyway by any member of the clergy. The Bishop that performed our wedding was one of the finest men I've ever met. Prior to becoming a priest he was a physician. That wasn't quite enough service to humanity for him, so he joined the army and became a Green Beret as well. After he left the military, his wife died, and he then joined the priesthood. Last I heard he was a Bishop in the Chevaliers du Notre Dame. Anyway you look at it, he was a cool guy.

So, yeah, I'm sure there are bad apples in every barrel, but lets not forget that there are good ones as well.

[/quote]I'm not doing the research, but I'd hazard a guess that priest's by occupation, have a higher rate of child sexual abuse convictions - at least in the recent past. However, if it was a bunch of, say, general physicians, that were found to have some tendency towards a deviant illegal crime, I'd not hold the whole medical profession accountable for the deeds. I'd hope the medical profession would deal with it. Has the catholic church? well, maybe they still working on it.

To be fair, Cardinal Law was a massive douche who knew about the bad touch & moved the Priest from town to town instead of, ya know, stopping it.

"Deviancy" is such a politically loaded term.

A few hundred years ago, this would've been common practice. Not to mention during the Middle Ages. Man, the popes knew how to have fun back then.

So, really, in context, and everything being relative, the Church is getting a lot better. Slowly but surely...

Good morning Kavekk!

I have a few questions:

1) What do you do in life?
2) Where in the UK do you live?
3) Which team do you support?
4) In a fight betwen Boris Johnson and Ann Widdicombe, who would be the first to call a time out for a snack?