T
Tantum_ergo
Guest
I admit I’m not exactly the most succinct writer on the forums but perhaps you missed that I specifically stated that the majority of the cases occurred at a time when not just the Church, but all other institutions including public schools, had the same ‘response’ to an offender --take the offender for treatment, do not publicize the victim’s name, and when the offender is ‘cured’ send the ‘cured’ person for a ‘second chance’.
Was it the Church who did not follow the counsel of medical and legal experts to do so? How then do the medical and legal experts, even if they in good faith ‘thought’ this an acceptable practice, not have to bear some ‘blame’ here? If you’re blaming the Church for ‘moving people around’, yet it was the medical and legal system which advocated the moving, then the medical and legal system bear blame, don’t they?
The ‘repeat offender’ means what? You need to be a bit more specific here. Are you accusing any Catholic bishop at any time of not only 'moving around somebody they knew, without a doubt, would be a repeat offender? and, are you also accusing that bishop of doing this when the medical and legal systems did NOT advocate this as the ordinary mode of treatment?
**If so, you need to give us names. Because if there is a bishop who knew, without a doubt, that a priest would be a repeat offender, and ‘moved him around’ regardless, then that bishop should be subject to whatever penalties, civil or criminal, would have been in place AT THE TIME OF THE MOVING AROUND. Of course, it might be a bit difficult to prove that a bishop could know FOR SURE that somebody 'would repeat an offense." I mean, that bishop would have to be clairvoyant, right? And again, the law of this country is such (for now anyway) that one cannot ‘retro’ a penalty. For example, mandatory reporting of abuse is required today, but a bishop who did not report an abuse case in say 1985 (prior to the institution of mandatory reporting) cannot be hauled into court and found guilty of ‘not doing mandatory reporting.’ **
I think somehow a lot of people assume that bishops knew much ‘more’ than they actually did about everything from what a priest was accused of to what the disease itself actually was; they also assume that bishops were a lot more ‘involved’, carrying on investigations with all today’s techological tools, instead of relying on testimony from ‘experts’. I remember when AIDS was just coming on the horizon and there was a lot we know NOW that ‘could have been done’ then which would have stopped the disease or lessened its impact. . .but those things weren’t done. Yet, nobody has come forward to accuse the medical society, the legal systems, or the many who contributed to the spread of AIDS, and to demand that they be ‘brought to justice’ because they should have ‘known’ that certain people would ‘definitely’ go on having unprotected sex. Unless, of course, they could ever establish a Catholic priest as one of the first AIDS carriers. Then you can be assured that it would become the fault of the Catholic Church for the whole AIDS epidemic because it ‘covered up’ the priest’s actions and led to the worldwide spread of AIDS. . .
