RE: Damned Catholics
June 13, 2021 at 12:23 am
(This post was last modified: June 13, 2021 at 12:27 am by Fake Messiah.)
Church still incapable of saying there is no excuse for a priest abusing a child
They may have attracted positive PR for the Church, but the new measures for dealing with clerical abuse are a million miles away from being good enough.
I don’t believe it is possible to read the most recent changes to canon law — the law of the Catholic Church — without feeling utterly let down by Pope Francis. The Pope who promised so much, but has changed as little as possible.
Bear in mind that although the penalty can include removal from the priesthood, it doesn’t explicitly say anywhere that the priest involved can be sent to jail (it is implied in some sections of the document).
But there is another clause, and it undermines everything else in the document.
There are a number of laws which deal with how penalties are to be applied. One of them — Article 1324 — says that penalties must be reduced if the perpetrator was drunk, acting in the heat of passion, or was “gravely and unjustly” provoked.
How is it possible in any sane world for a Pope and his Church to seek to command authority when, on the one hand, they are claiming to have strengthened canon law to protect children from abusers and, on the other, they write in so many get-out clauses to protect the abuser?
There is no court in the democratic world where a person accused of abusing a child can admit the offence and still escape punishment by claiming to have been under the control of alcohol or responding to provocation by the child.
How do you claim provocation? How do you deny it? How is it even possible for a priest, with years of training and experience, to be “provoked” into committing an abusive act against a child? How can language like that be allowed to stand in a document that has allegedly taken the best minds of the Vatican a decade to prepare? How is it not possible for the Church to say, in its fundamental law, that there is simply no excuse whatever for the abuse of a child by a priest?
If this is really the best the Vatican can do, despite the spin when it was released, it’s a million miles away from being good enough. It proves only one thing. Where the Church is concerned, nothing ever really changes.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/co...08185.html
They may have attracted positive PR for the Church, but the new measures for dealing with clerical abuse are a million miles away from being good enough.
I don’t believe it is possible to read the most recent changes to canon law — the law of the Catholic Church — without feeling utterly let down by Pope Francis. The Pope who promised so much, but has changed as little as possible.
Bear in mind that although the penalty can include removal from the priesthood, it doesn’t explicitly say anywhere that the priest involved can be sent to jail (it is implied in some sections of the document).
But there is another clause, and it undermines everything else in the document.
There are a number of laws which deal with how penalties are to be applied. One of them — Article 1324 — says that penalties must be reduced if the perpetrator was drunk, acting in the heat of passion, or was “gravely and unjustly” provoked.
How is it possible in any sane world for a Pope and his Church to seek to command authority when, on the one hand, they are claiming to have strengthened canon law to protect children from abusers and, on the other, they write in so many get-out clauses to protect the abuser?
There is no court in the democratic world where a person accused of abusing a child can admit the offence and still escape punishment by claiming to have been under the control of alcohol or responding to provocation by the child.
How do you claim provocation? How do you deny it? How is it even possible for a priest, with years of training and experience, to be “provoked” into committing an abusive act against a child? How can language like that be allowed to stand in a document that has allegedly taken the best minds of the Vatican a decade to prepare? How is it not possible for the Church to say, in its fundamental law, that there is simply no excuse whatever for the abuse of a child by a priest?
If this is really the best the Vatican can do, despite the spin when it was released, it’s a million miles away from being good enough. It proves only one thing. Where the Church is concerned, nothing ever really changes.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/co...08185.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"