Sexual Abuse in Social Context: Clergy and other (Secular) Professionals.

[Fake Messiah]

Anyone who studies pedophilia in the Church soon realizes that it is not a question of a couple of priests, but that the entire organization, up to the Pope himself, participates in concealing and supporting these pedophiles to abuse children (see the documentary "Mea Maxima Culpa")

Or just take Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, who resigned in 2002 as a cardinal when it was found out that he had protected pedophile priests and let them rape children for years, but Pope Paul II did. invited him to Rome and appointed him archbishop of the basilica there - instead of punishing him and publicly scolding him for allowing hundreds of children to be raped - so it can hardly be just individuals when the whole organization is involved right up to the very top.

Or take the cases of child rape shown in the documentary film "The Keepers" (2017) or the killing of small babies in Ireland by nuns who were never punished for it.

https://youtu.be/XoulaehrD_I

these are all Catholics who suffered because they had blind and uncritical faith in the Church, even though the Church tries to create the impression that these are all some kind of atheist "attacks" on them.


Robert Orsi who studies religion on Harvard explains it:

My disgust with Catholicism has been growing for a long time. For the past ten years or so, I have been immersed in the sheer horror of the Catholic clergy sexual abuse crisis. “The sexual abuse crisis” refers to the sexual violation of Catholics by their priests, first of all, and, second, to the protection of these priests by their bishops and religious superiors, who were quite often themselves involved in illicit sexual activities. The word “crisis” for this moment in Catholic history is a mischaracterization, if what is meant by “crisis” includes any notion of the exceptional, unforeseen, or unusual nature either of the abuse or its cover-up.

Scholar of religion Mark Jordan refers to Catholicism as an “empire of closets.” Priests have been sexually active throughout the modern era (and before, but I am primarily concerned with the post-Trent period), with children and adolescents, with nuns, with seminarians, and with each other, depending on the nature of individual priests’ needs and inclinations; these sexual activities have taken place in churches, rectories, convents, and schools, in the missions, in orphanages, in mother and baby homes, and in private residences, often owned by priests’ families—basically everywhere.

Church authorities have known about all this, all along, and they have always taken a managerial attitude toward it.

Modern church authorities are generally without concern for the children, sometimes very young children, for the teenagers, or for the men and women of whatever ages with whom priests are having sex. Their primary concern has been the protection of the Church’s prerogatives, above all its political influence, property, and finances. The strategies for covering up the crimes and misdeeds of sexually predatory priests, as mandated by the Vatican and official church procedures, such as moving them around a diocese or out of the state or country, almost always resulted in further abuse, sexual, but also, collaterally, legal, emotional, and economic damage, as when church officials went after victims with high-powered and aggressive counsel or when parish workers who spoke out lost not only their jobs but the prospects of ever working in the Church again.

Disgust makes it all but impossible to fall back on the good religion/bad religion distinction. I say “all but impossible” here because I know, as I said earlier, how deeply pressed this distinction is into our bodies and minds as modern people. I want to say: but no . . . think of—[insert here the name of a good priest]. But disgust reminds me that this good priest knew what was going on with his “brother priests,” that he colluded in the discourses, practices, and privileges that turned the vulnerable into victims. But no, I want to say again, think of—[insert here the name of a religious institute dedicated to good works]. Disgust reminds me of the sexual abuse of indigenous people at the hands of Catholic missionaries who claimed a vocation to go and care for them in the United States and around the world, of those who knew about it and tolerated it in the name of something higher, and of the sexual abuse of orphans, of children with disabilities, of drug-addicted teenagers.

https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/the-stu...f-disgust/