Catholics: How do you still justify going to church or being a part of the church?
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Anonymous
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I've been struggling for awhile and this abortion statement this week was another blow.
I realize i will get attacked for that, and fine, attack away. I don't expect the Church to change its position, and in a lot of ways, I agree with it. But I also know there are times when women and families have found themselves in situations they never thought they'd face and the idea that Church leadership, with all their many problems, coverups, abuses, are taking time out of their day to focus on this is just kind of beyond the pale. We've had our older child confirmed, and I suppose we'll do the same with the younger one, but to say we are lapsed is an understatement. |
Anonymous
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I simply do not understand how people can't see that one major function of the Catholic Church was/is as an organized and coordinated pedophile ring. It is simple indisputable.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of priests abused children on every continent and country. MANY more participated in the the coverup at every level. My mother left the Catholic Church in her 20s, and I'm so glad we weren't brought up in it. It's sickening how anyone can give the church a penny. |
Anonymous
So what? You’re confusing administration with substance. The Church isn’t the administrators. It is the living embodiment of Christ, continuing his presence on earth. The administrators aren’t typically the ones feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, comforting the mourning. And the priest doesn’t “lead” Mass (which, being a proper noun, needs to be capitalized). He celebrates it. God’s own mother was never a priest. But she is held in greater esteem than any ordained cleric. The obsessive focus on the externals of worldly “power” (not that the bishops have much of that these days, let alone the priests) bespeaks a superficial and completely misunderstood vision of what the Church is and how it functions. |
Anonymous
Well, the reason they can’t “see that” is that it isn’t true. You quote alleged thousands of malefactors (without citation and not specifying a timeframe) in an organization currently estimated to have more than a BILLION members. That’s just right now. It doesn’t take account of the untold number of Catholics who have been born, lived and died over the Church’s 2000 year history. The Roman Church is far from alone in having made employment errors and acted for the good of the organization when it should have been concerned with victims. As has been detailed to death in this and innumerable other threads, every human institution, and even the human part of divine institutions, is bound to have some level of corruption. Don’t the Protestants say people are subject to “absolute depravity?” In the vast majority of instances, people who promote a vision of the Church focused on the wrongful acts of a few care far less about victims than they do about consoling themselves over some doctrinal difference they have with the Church, typically without any real understanding of the doctrine in question. |
Anonymous
| Public schools have pedofiles. Should everybody quit those too and demand half their taxes be refunded from the county? Pedofiles are everywhere. Wake up. Watch your kids, protect them. It's an evil world. |
Anonymous
| Yes, there can be pedophiles anywhere, but the Catholic Church’s systematic denial of the problem, refusal to remove known pedophiles from activities involving children and placing of its own law above civil law (not reporting known crimes to government authorities), make it particularly culpable. |
Anonymous
+1,000,000. The Catholic Church is a sick organization. There’s no way around it. - Cradle Catholic whose family have all left the Church over the last 15 years |
Anonymous
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I guess I feel like I came to terms with this in my teens when I started studying World History and hearing about the many, many abuses of power within the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has had corrupt leaders within it since the Edict of Milan. Dante put previous Catholic Popes in his Inferno. Martin Luther protested very real abuses of power within the Church. The latest abuses of power aren't any worse than the previous ones. In some ways, this seems tame compared to things like the castrations performed in the 16th century.
I don't understand why this particular abuse has people leaving the church. Is it just the timing? Or did you somehow not know about the others? |
Anonymous
You are kidding right? Catholic Church hides pedos condones the behavior etc.. Public does not full stop period. Nor does it have as many instances not even close If you are still Catholic at this point in time you are a hypocrite. Particularly if you have kids. Ex Catholic who will never ever go back. Horrific the behavior of the church Not to mention the political and financial crap lately |
Anonymous
You say “condones.” You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Also, what do you mean by “at this point in time?” Was there a point in time when none of the members or leaders of theCatholic Church were hypocritical, corrupt, or engaging in immoral behavior? Does that behavior mean that the doctrine is wrong? I would argue that the fact that the Church has survived despite so much effort to dismantle it, not only from without, but from within high ranking church officials, is proof of its truth, not proof of its falsehood. If it was false and without foundation, it would have disintegrated long ago. |
Anonymous
First, what time period are you talking about? Up to (and really beyond in most cases) the late 1970’s, the prevailing view was that sex abuse victims were better served by keeping the matter as private as possible, and dealing with the offender quietly. This was not true merely of the Catholic Church. It influenced the behavior of private and public institutions at every level of society. The so-called Catholic abuse scandal emerged later after a family sued the local church and plaintiffs’ lawyers suddenly realized there was a deep pocket defendant in the crosshairs, which kept meticulous records. Suing the Church for alleged abuse is now a huge industry, in no small part because the administrators sought to be “pastoral” and required few, if any, claimants actually to prove up their claims. A significant complicating factor was that until probably at least the mid to late 1980’s, clerical (and other professional) sexual misconduct was largely viewed in society and the relevant private and public institutions as a “moral failing,” amenable to spiritual reformation and, later, psychiatric treatment. It is only fairly recently that mental health professionals have pronounced such degeneracy incurable. Before that, Catholic administrators (and the administrators of other institutions) sought to remove the offender from the source of temptation and provide pastoral and, later, psychiatric care. The issue was further complicated in the case of the Catholic Church by the particular father/son nature of the relationship between bishop and priest, and by the belief that keeping a man (who cannot be unordained) under a watchful eye was better than throwing him out where he could wreak havoc completely unsupervised. More recently, the failure of mental health approaches to treatment, along with other factors, has led to a dramatic change to the Church’s approach to sex abuse claims. Accused persons are more or less presumed guilty, instantaneously suspended, thrown out of their provided housing and otherwise penalized, based solely on a standard of “credibility” that amounts to “it could have happened.” So long as an accuser does not claim that the accused sprouted demon wings and flew around the room, or make claims against an individual who can be conclusively demonstrated to have been an ocean away at the relevant time, the accused is pretty much ruined the moment the accusation is leveled. If the accused is prosecuted, the likelihood is that he will be put in the position of proving a negative, despite the legal burden of proof being lying with the prosecution. In addition to this, the Catholic Church has instituted rigorous screening requirements ranging from anti abuse and abuse recognition training and background checks to detailed psychological evaluations of seminarians. It is fair to say that today, the Catholic Church has more precautions in place to prevent, detect and react to allegations of sexual misconduct than any other institution, private or public. Second, regarding your assertion that “Public does not [have as many cases of alleged abuse as the Church] full stop period. Nor does it have as many instances not even close,” you cite no source, and even if it were true that the Catholic Church had more total accusations made against its personnel than other private and public institutions, it would be necessary to adjust for the vast disparity in institutional size, which you make no effort to do. Even a cursory reading of the daily news will prove that public school teachers are still regularly abusing students; that law enforcement officials regularly take advantage of minors in custody; that public social services routinely ignore the sexual abuse of their wards, and that all sorts of non-Catholic religious institutions are still busily attempting to conceal the sexual misconduct of their ministers (and getting caught at it). Your reference to the “political and financial crap lately” is highly nonspecific, but it sounds as if you object to the Church teaching things about morality that you disagree with because they make you feel guilty. Calling people hypocrites because they refuse to abandon their deeply held religious faith on grounds that the Church has been badly administered is hardly enlightened or charitable. Indeed, one could call it judgmental. The Church has ALWAYS been poorly administered in one way or another, hence the canard that the proof of the Church’s divine character lies in its survival despite the flaws in its leadership through the centuries. |
Anonymous
| Whatever the Catholic Church has done to improve in this area, they have only done because they were caught. |
Anonymous
Outside forces certainly had an impact; the fact remains that the Catholic Church is at the forefront in the handling of abuse claims today. None of this is about sex abuse anyway. If it were, we’d be having lots of discussion about the difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia; about whether the changes wrought by the Second Vatican Council resulted in sufficient heterosexual/celibacy-observing priests leaving their vocations that homosexual and non-celibates began to dominate; about whether this led to the rise of homosexual and/or non-celibate administrators inclined to protect fellow miscreants; whether homosexual orientation is associated with sexual abuse, etc., etc., etc. People who feel guilty about participating in behaviors the Church says are wrong are anxious to destroy the moral authority they nonetheless grant it, in an effort to feel better about themselves. That only happens when people have a deep internal conflict about their own actions. I eat pork. I’m not Jewish or Muslim and I feel no need at all to attack those faiths for prohibiting pork to their adherents. |
Anonymous
Wow. Well said. |
Anonymous
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I am a pp and am not Catholic. I have been happily married to my first husband for many years and am currently a grandmother. I have no feelings of guilt relating to behaviors frowned on by the church.
My objections to the Catholic Church come from their incessant attempts at blurring the line separating church and state. These include their history of ignoring abuse of children, as well as trying to halt distribution of birth control and working to criminalize abortion, including in pregnancies of children as young as 10 resulting from incest and in trying to force women to carry a pregnancy even at risk to her own health. It is one thing for a church to ask its own followers to adhere to its rules, it is another to force your religion down the throats of the of the rest of us. |