Australia archbishop: Church culture tied to abuse

[Brooklyn]

"The Roman Catholic Church’s culture of discretion and focus on “sin and forgiveness rather than crime and punishment” were among ingrained factors that ultimately led to the child sex abuse scandal and cover-up surrounding the church today, a pre-eminent Australian bishop said Monday.

Coleridge said as a young priest in the 1970s, he regarded pedophilia cases as “tragic and isolated.” Coleridge’s view shifted when he was called to serve at the Vatican as chaplain to Pope John Paul II during a five-year period that ended in 2002. While there, Coleridge came to regard child abuse in the church as “cultural.”

“There is no one factor that makes abuse of the young by Catholic clergy in some sense cultural,” Coleridge wrote. “It seems to me a rather complex combination of factors which I do not claim to understand fully.”

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Less than 2% of priests have been guilty of this. How is that cultural? With bishops like this, who needs The New York Times?

 

[WetCatechumen]

In the spirit of Christian charity, I think we should take the His Excellency’s words in the best possible light.

There is definitely a cultural phenomenon in the Roman Catholic Church that sin is a private matter to be dealt with in the confessional and forgotten as soon as possible. There was also a universal behavior of bishops forgiving the abusers and returning them to positions of authority as normal.

As for the abuse? Apparently, pretty much everyone in high authority knew about the cases of abuse and while they responded in the culturally appropriate way, they didn’t respond in the morally appropriate way, and that was universal.

I don’t think the good Archbishop is trying to say that Catholic priests, in general, are much more likely to abuse children than the rest of the population.

 

[Brooklyn]

In the spirit of Christian charity, I think we should take the His Excellency’s words in the best possible light.

There is definitely a cultural phenomenon in the Roman Catholic Church that sin is a private matter to be dealt with in the confessional and forgotten as soon as possible. There was also a universal behavior of bishops forgiving the abusers and returning them to positions of authority as normal.

As for the abuse? Apparently, pretty much everyone in high authority knew about the cases of abuse and while they responded in the culturally appropriate way, they didn’t respond in the morally appropriate way, and that was universal.

I don’t think the good Archbishop is trying to say that Catholic priests, in general, are much more likely to abuse children than the rest of the population.

I’m afraid I have to disagree. For the bishop to say this is “cultural” in the church is to condemn the church. The Church is all about forgiveness, and he says that is a major factor contributing to this “culture” in the church. I will agree that the Church didn’t understand that those involved in the sin needed to be taken away from those “occasions of sin”. I don’t think the church realized that evil had inflitrated the church. But I don’t think that the forgiveness offered was what led to this problem. That is just wrong.