T
Tantum_ergo
Guest
Going a little off topic, aren’t we?You know as well as I do that the Church has taught Catholics that there is a Limbo of the children for centuries. She is now beginning to unravel that disgusting doctrine. Being dishonest in the service of “loyalty to the institution” is not doing God’s work. it is indeed what caused the disgraceful child abuse scandal, where many bishops covered up the physical and sexual abuse of children as young as three, out of a misguided loyalty to the institution. The Church needs to acknowledge her sins and errors and not lie about them!
“DISGUSTING DOCTRINE”?
The Church did not err. INDIVIDUALS erred, and not necessarily all of them with malice, either. You aren’t old enough, probably, to know that in the 1960s and 1970s and even early 1980s when MOST of this abuse happened, the AMA and the APA speciifically (experts) told not just the Church but the general public that PEDOPHILIA COULD BE CURED and that PART of the cure would involve letting the ‘cured’ people have a FRESH START with no ‘prejudice’.
IOW, it was doctors and lawyers and psychiatrists who TOLD the bishops (and everybody else in the U.S. and world) that this course of ‘coverup’ --that is, moving around and a ‘fresh start’ was part of the TREATMENT and CURE of a pedophile.
What were the bishops to do? Miraculously know that 20 years on the AMA and APA would be shown to have been WRONG? Go against the EXPERT JUDGMENT of thousands of doctors and psychiatrists? Gee, imagine the hubbub today if any bishop just ‘ignored’ a doctor, psychiatrist, etc. Because NOW, of course, the AMA etc. is Right. (And it pretends it was never wrong back then).
I’m not saying that the abuse was right. (It wasn’t). and in the very RARE cases where somebody ‘in charge’ knew that abuse was gonna happen or knew it had happened but made a stupid personal decision for god knows what reason and did not follow the protocol AT THE TIME, this is certainly wrong.
But it is also wrong to deliberately ignore that the EXPERT TEACHING at the time of the abuse supported the bishops’ actions in sending off these ‘cured’ people without letting the ‘new’ parish know. It was that EXPERT TEACHING not just in the case of the Church but EVERYWHERE. I don’t know why so few doctors or psychiatrists or journalists ignore that it was their ‘wrong’ understanding of the disease and their wrong expert advice which caused much of the trouble.