Originally Posted by Sensei
Still, do you want to see the end of just Catholicism , or all of Christianity?
Do you care how it happens?
Still, do you want to see the end of just Catholicism , or all of Christianity?
Do you care how it happens?
In the last several decades, between the preying on children and assisting nazis during and following WWII, I find it hard to accept the notion that the Catholic church occupies the moral high ground on any particular issue nor has the right to promulgate as if it does.
That said, I don't doubt for a moment that there are outstanding individuals within the church both among the clergy and its followers.
I'm not so sure that the one in whose name they conduct their business would be particularly enthused either, on any number of issues.
(ETA: I apologize (sincerely) if anyone is offended by my post. That is the furthest thing from my intent.)
Last edited by blues; 08-17-2018 at 11:56 AM.
There's nothing civil about this war.
The Catholic church cleanup has be at the very basic level, not mere removal of abusers. Doing without sex of any kind, even the most harmless, can affect one's mind. Priestly celibacy has to go and marriage must be permitted, and women ordained as priests.When no form of sex is allowed, all forms of sex can seem equally immoral. And if your celibacy has ever slipped, you sure don’t want to snitch on someone else, do you? - Andrew Sullivan
The Curia believes its basic tenets - repentance and forgiveness - require it to offer absolution for true confession and repentance. Under Canon, that's probably true, but pouring oil over one's soul should not prevent civil justice from exacting its own costs and would ensure no recurrence. The Seal of Confession must be altered to one of common sense - if, while forgiving a sin during confession, the priest believes there is a good chance the sin will recur and it's murder or child abuse, he must be allowed to break the Seal and discuss it with law enforcement.
The effect would be for those predatory priests to avoid confession. This would remove the tendency to coverup the crime by higher orders.
The church cannot paper this one over. If it wants to survive it must make basic changes.
Last edited by Jaywalker; 08-17-2018 at 12:07 PM.
Oh, sorry. I thought that I answered that but can see how I might have been a bit ambiguous.
My beef is with the catholic church and its pope. I think that Christianity that focuses on the Gospels is still very relevant in a positive sense to how we interact with each other as a society (although I’m far less certain that Jesus was God). I don’t have much use for fundamentalist denominations of Christianity that take literally every verse in the Old and New Testaments. I have no use for faiths and organizations that use violence against non-believers or commit crimes against humanity such as widespread of molesting children.
As for how it happens, it’s already happening. Child sexual abuse has supplanted whatever ministry the church hoped to achieve in the eye of the public. Already, people at the airport look at priests with the same skeptical eye as the Muslim cleric in traditional attire. What typically happens next is people stop wanting catholics in leadership positions or engaging catholic charities, hospitals, or schools. Basically, the world is going to squeeze the catholic church like we do Iran, Russia, or Turkey because it’s parishioners have allowed it to become an outlaw organization. It’s not what I want to happen per se; it’s what needs to happen because the laity won’t get off its collective ass to stop this shit.
I like my rifles like my women - short, light, fast, brown, and suppressed.
My priest is married. It's not common but it can happen.
If they allow women priest then the Church is over. No it's not evil like this vile crap is, but it's destructive in its own way.
Priests should also withhold absolution unless the people confess crimes like murder or child abuse to the police.
So if women become priests, God Almighty disappears in a puff of celestial smoke? Or is it that an institution created by human beings is altered in a way that you don't approve of?
This is an old question. Is your relationship 'allowed' to be personal with a deity or does it have to go through a bureaucracy?
It has been argued that the need for ritual to interact with God and that ritual is defined and managed by a priesthood is in fact an admission that you don't think your deity is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. That is unacceptable to some folks. No reason why a deity cannot pay attention to you directly. You don't need modern versions of mystical incantations for such interaction.
Humans have a biological need, some think, to fit into a dominance hierarchy as other species do. Is the necessary and domineering religious priesthood for supposed divine interaction and conversation just the remains of such earlier biological pack behavior?
To put it in a very basic way, God continually reaches out to us. He sends mission after mission after mission, all throughout our history -- the Garden, and then Noah, and then Abraham, and Moses, and over and over again, He extends the covenant, we break it, He extends it again. In Christ he broke out the tac nuke of covenants, the MOAB. Christ created the sacraments -- baptism, eucharist, confirmation, holy orders, marriage, reconciliation, and anointing of the sick -- as ways of reaching back out to us, over and over again, throughout our individual lives. In the fullness of faith, Christians use these sacraments to continually try to get back toward union with Christ (since we continually slide away). Our union isn't perfected within this life, even for the saints, but we work to get closer, and to return to closeness. As Jesus was the rescue mission sent to save the world once and for all, the sacraments are the little missions that work in each of our lives, on a daily (or at least weekly) basis.
All baptized are priest, prophet, and king (interesting discussion for another time). But we teach and believe that the descent of the holy spirit, communicated as it was in Acts through the laying on of hands (ordination), permits some people to act -- temporarily, occasionally, and under very specific conditions -- in persona Christi Capitas. That person effects the sacraments in the place of Jesus - and just as we need Jesus, we need the priest to perform that function. We need an externality. The externality doesn't need to be perfect -- they aren't, in fact, intended to be so -- but we believe that they have a small grace through the sacrament of ordination that is biblical, Jesus-derived, and necessary.
The Pope and bishops are primarily there to preserve the direct chain of that ordination -- they can be traced back directly to Peter -- and to preserve and defend tradition (see GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, chapter 4 "the Ethics of Elfland," for a nearly perfect description of why tradition is important). They are there to prevent the Church from changing quickly, thus to defend it from heresies of popular opinion that would destroy it. Arianism is the greatest example, but they come up all the time. Ones from outside, like Dr. Meyer's helpful observations, don't matter much; it really becomes an issue when it comes from within (as it did with Arius). We are about to go through a whole shitpile of that as a result of the McCarrick scandal, and honestly I wish we had a Pope better grounded in theology (we had one, but he was not a great administrator and couldn't hang). Francis' gift for PR probably won't make the Pennsylvania stuff go better, and I sincerely hope he doesn't say something dumb about McCarrick.
Men and women are equal, but different. Men and women preform different roles better/worse. Yep, it's generalization, yep there are exceptions.
Maybe I am looking at things too simplistically, but I believe the answer to that question is a resounding, "No".
As a species, we seek places of comfort, called 'indoors', merely to satisfy the physiological need for warmth, protection from the elements, even to foster social interaction with others, mainly due to the Aristotlean appetitive faculty which is responsible for our emotions, physical needs and desires. Those physical needs/wants of a tangible location from which to worship are what drive us to the fixed religious structures. If I were to argue the point further, I'd say that anywhere on the entire planet is adequate and that no human organization can match that.
Last edited by the Schwartz; 08-17-2018 at 05:56 PM.
''Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity.'' ―Albert Einstein
Full disclosure per the Pistol-Forum CoC: I am the author of Quantitative Ammunition Selection.
I’ve mostly kept to myself throughout this thread, because, not my circus; politics and religion in polite company.
That said, I feel so moved to offer a few observations. BLUF: while the Catholic church has weathered all manner of scandal over the millennia, and soldiered on through the centuries to outlive and outrun each and every internal challenge to it’s survival, the church has never done so in the modern age of social media and instant information. This abuse pandemic is uncharted territory in this day and age for the church, and the bankruptcies, wholesale ceding of the moral high ground, and decline in numbers entering orders are all symptoms of an unprecedented day of reckoning for the institution.
Two, while it is true that predators will go where the prey are—making public schools, sports, and other activities with high levels of youth involvement all fertile targets—it’s both the tacit and overt support and protection of offenders, what commonweal called the "winking," that puts the church into a category of it’s own.
To wit: I’ve had a front row seat for the experience of watching a high-profile priest at a high-profile institution get raided, arrested, tried and sentenced for procuring and possesing child porn. By this, I mean, I was there; the clergy in question was my ostensible boss at the time. As it happens, I’m also friends with the high-profile lawyer hired to defend him, as in, been to his house for thanksgiving. Mas would almost certainly know the lawyer too, since they’ve been on the same side for the defense of police officers in UOF incidents. Point being, I know in rough terms what a billble hour is worth, and I know that a lot of hours went into getting sentencing that bypassed the federal minimums. The amount of money and energy that the order spent on his defense is probaly a down payment on a *very* nice house in my region. As well, this individual is still in the order, and still housed somewhere, after having been moved around from place to place during the investigation and trial. Moreover, this priest spent a reported $1,650 on underage boy porn in a 2-year period, using an institutional credit card issued in his name. As a clergyman, he didn’t pay those card bills; someone else would have handled that, and no questions were raised until hard men in windbreakers with letters on the back charged past the secretary to serve the warrant. How does a sitting priest use a credit card to spend 800 bucks a year buying porn, and nobody questions it? That’s the sort of question the church is stuck answering, over and over, in this modern environment. The case in question start dates to 2013, btw, so this is an absolutely current concern.
Going on, I have to comment about the sheer scope of the issue here for a sec: The amount of people I know, personally, who are past victims of clergy abuse numbers well into double digits. Keep in mind that A) as a performing artist, I meet a lot of people in a wide variety of social (and social justice) settings—including well-known columnists in my region who were among the voices coming forward publicly and B ) my local diocese was bankrupted over abuse settlements—lots of them, with admission of guilt comming from at least one perpetrator. This is widespread, real, and covered up by the church for ages.
Can you imagine a school district moving, housing, shielding and, ultimately, paying 5-6 figure fees for defending a teacher accused of sex offenses? I mean, apart from NYC, who has the "rubber room" (I also know a rubber room guy through the arts, go figure...)
One final anecdote that is apropos of very little in this thread, save for the tiered regulation of the church: One of the watches in my collection is an early-1960 Bullova accutron, gold inlays. Accutrons went on sale at the end of 1960, so this would have been rare at the time. I inherited the watch from my grandfather, who inherited it from his best friend, a Catholic Priest. The Priest—who was a great guy—was the heir to a chain of lumber yards, so a deal was reportedly struck that he could access his lifestyle if he willed it to the church upon his death, which he did, minus leaving the house and a large lump sum of cash to his "live-in house cleaner" of 30-plus years (a delightful lady). This would be harder to do today, I’m surmising.
Point is, the church has had covert practices for centuries, but covert is a hard thing to cultivate in today’s world, so the clarion call is clearly for potentially the most massive changes to the church in centuries.
JMO.
”But in the end all of these ideas just manufacture new criminals when the problem isn't a lack of criminals.” -JRB
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