Reply to Catholics: How do you still justify going to church or being a part of the church?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=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.[/quote]

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 [/quote]

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.

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