Ohio Priest Arrested on Sex Trafficking Charges

[MNathaniel]

I don’t live in the States, but obviously mere prayer is not “Catholicism’s answer.” The Church has been responding to this crisis with concrete actions, not just prayer, for years.

I get the anger and I get the ferocity in favour of protecting victims from abusers (see my own initial response way up-thread), but if you’re actually going to ask bad-faith rhetorical questions like that, then at this point I’m going to presume you have dishonest intentions here, are just out to accuse the Church regardless of actual evidence, and I’m not going to bother engaging with that.

 

[MNathaniel]

Marriage and a wife would do nothing to solve the problem: see statistics of child abuse by married men.

Witnesses: as you’ve been told this already happens.

Body cams: don’t be ridiculous. When? In confessional? Absurd, that would violate the rights of the penitent. During Mass and other sacraments? Unnecessary because of witnesses. During what: every waking moment of a priest’s life outside the sacraments? Every brunch with a friend? Every counselling appointment that the person seeking counsel wants kept private?

 

[Tis_Bearself]

at this point I’m going to presume you have dishonest intentions here, are just out to accuse the Church regardless of actual evidence, and I’m not going to bother engaging with that.

^^^^^ this

(we have also read your other posts, atjar1)

 

[MNathaniel]

MNathaniel:

at this point I’m going to presume you have dishonest intentions here, are just out to accuse the Church regardless of actual evidence, and I’m not going to bother engaging with that.

^^^^^ this

And yet I got sucked back in, haha.

Stepping out again now.

 

[MNathaniel]

Marriage and a wife equals less predatory behavior against adult women.

If you think a woman should marry a predator to keep him from preying on other women, that’s insane. Think about what you’re saying.

Either a man is a predator — in which case no woman should have to be the sacrificial lamb who ‘takes one for the team’ and marries him.

Or a man is not a predator and celibacy won’t make him one.

Are you male, @atjar1? If so, are you seriously telling us that you require a sacrificial victim-wife to keep you from abusing others?

 

[MNathaniel]

if I have a healthy married relationship with a wife, most likely I won’t need to cheat my vows. .

There’s no such thing as a “need” to cheat.

And “most likely”?

Wow.

 

[TMC]

As I have said a hundred times, and will unfortunately have to say a hundred more - the Church has a very serious and long standing problem. This has been a problem for centuries. It cannot be solved with a pronouncement or two or a committee report. It will take a serious and long lasting effort to root out the source of these issues and make real changes to get at this issue and hopefully resolve it. It is not over; it is not a problem from the past; it was not caused by a few bad apples, or a single poorly formed generation. Until we can admit these things to ourselves, we will not be able to permanently resolve this problem.

 

[MNathaniel]

I’ll be honest.

As a woman, this conversation is making me more and more happy to be single, and less and less interested in ever marrying.

What if I ended up with one of those husbands who apparently so little possesses himself, that he could not restrain himself from abusing others unless I were an ‘outlet’ for him to use?

Entirely repulsive as an image of marriage.

(I will say, I thankfully don’t believe that @atjar1 represents the full male population, and certainly not the practicing Catholic population, so I’m not actually rejecting the possibility of marriage over this. Still, wow. The ugliness of this rhetoric is astounding.)

 

[MNathaniel]

Weeding out candidates rigorously is a solution.

Let me be clear about one thing, @atjar1: you and I are agreed on this one point (if no others).

I am 100% in favour of extremely rigorous weeding-out of priestly candidates. No one is entitled to be a priest. Better to have a few rock-solid ones than many poorly-formed ones.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

The Church is probably not going to be able to guarantee that no clergy and no one else it ever hires for a paid or volunteer position is ever going to commit a serious sin of abuse again. No institution or employer can guarantee that.

The Church can, and in USA is, taking significant steps to prevent harm and dealing with occurrences in a much quicker, more public, and more ruthless manner. It should continue to build on this path.

 

[Dr_Meinheimer]

You literally have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to celibacy. There is zero evidence for the silliness you keep suggesting.

Porn abuse is rampant among married men. Why? Being married should have taken care of that. Sexual abuse occurs in great numbers percentage-wise with married men and women - why? Why do teachers abuse students, when they have no prohibition on celibacy? Why do coaches abuse players when, they have no prohibition on celibacy? Why do politicians abuse those beneath them, when they have no prohibition on celibacy?

Do you ACTUALLY want to stop predatory behavior from anyone? If so, that’s a good thing. Let’s suggest things that will actually make a difference. Associating celibacy with the problems where there is no evidence it has anything to do with it is simply using a crisis to take aim at something you apparently oppose.

 

[TMC]

The solution needs to be multi-faceted and address the underlying cultural issues. No one policy change will fix this.

 

[TMC]

The Church is probably not going to be able to guarantee that no clergy and no one else it ever hires for a paid or volunteer position is ever going to commit a serious sin of abuse again. No institution or employer can guarantee that.

The Church can, and in USA is, taking significant steps to prevent harm and dealing with occurrences in a much quicker, more public, and more ruthless manner. It should continue to build on this path.

Yes, but it goes much deeper than that. If you look at the history of this, the Church has been plagued with this problem for at least 1,000 years. People from many walks of life commit similar crimes, but there is an institutional problem here. Maybe other institutions also have similar issues, but that does not mean that our institution should not fix its problem.

Continuing to build on the initial steps that have been made will help. But I constantly here on this forum that this problem is in the past, that passing a protocol fixed it, or that it is all due to the sexual revolution (which is not only wrong, but frankly backwards). I also see an attitude of allowing the clerics to handle it. Those ways of looking at it are not only wrong, they are dangerous. Much more needs to be done, and the laity needs to be involved.

 

[ReaderT]

I also see an attitude of allowing the clerics to handle it. Those ways of looking at it are not only wrong, they are dangerous. Much more needs to be done, and the laity needs to be involved.

That will be a very long time coming as long as the clergy view themselves as the sole guardians of the faith, and therefore the sole administrators. It’s not that way in the East: everyone from grandma to the Patriarch has a job in protecting the faith - we are all “interested parties” - and more than once we’ve thrown a Bishop into a river.

 

[TMC]

That will be a very long time coming as long as the clergy view themselves as the sole guardians of the faith, and therefore the sole administrators. It’s not that way in the East: everyone from grandma to the Patriarch has an equal job in protecting and promoting the faith - we are all “interested parties” - and more than once we’ve thrown a Bishop into a river.

I think it will come. There is a growing understanding that the same is true in the West - we just need to remind some in the clerical caste of that fact.

 

[goout]

Clerical culture is ill. Reform it!
Jesus was not an abstract intellectual theologian who held to concepts for their own sake. Jesus is real, and as such he proposes real and practical solutions to problems. Jesus brings incarnate solutions to human sin and sickness.

Holding rigidly to our current celibate clerical culture for abstract theological reasons is abdicating responsibility. And that’s not what Jesus would do.
The Church needs to consider all permissible solutions in a sober and serious way, and do real reform no matter how uncomfortable it makes us.

And if the call for radical Christian reform doesn’t move your heart, consider a business analogy:
Any manager that tolerated this culture without reforming it from the bottom up would be thrown out into the street looking for work. The perpetuation of this clerical culture is inexcusable when there are legitimate options available.

 

[goout]

There is zero evidence for the silliness you keep suggesting.

In light of the article in the OP, and the repeated instances over decades, and the specific nature of the abuse, I find your observation hard to take seriously.

 

[stpurl]

But it is not celibacy which engenders pedophilia. It is not celibacy which engenders sexual abuses of any kind.

In order to address the abuses we need to go to the root causes of the abuses. And celibacy is NOT a cause any more than marriage is a cause. The reasons for sexual abuse of any kind don’t have anything to do with whether a person is married or single, so advocating that the Church ‘reform the current celibate culture’ to address pedophilia is like asking us to reform the current obesity epidemic by forbidding people to diet, by claiming that ‘forbidding food’ causes people to overeat.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

If you look at the history of this, the Church has been plagued with this problem for at least 1,000 years.

Can you please explain to me how the Church is different from virtually every other large, powerful institution in this regard? Society as a whole really only got serious about crimes of sexual abuse within the last few decades. I am not excusing the Church, but rather suggesting that as an institution, it evolves along with the rest of society.

The only difference in the case of the Church is the history of not having priests prosecuted by civil authorities, which back in the centuries of political intrigue in Europe made some sense as the prosecutions would be for political or state power reasons, but does not make sense in the modern era. And the Church now hands priests over for prosecution, at least in USA.

As for “allowing the clerics to handle it”, as I said there are protocols in place now. What do you expect lay persons to do other than

• be angry and upset when this happens (as we all are)
• report any incidence they see
• educate the victims to speak up and take them seriously when they do?

I don’t plan to quite the Church or stop going to Mass or stop donating because one clergy person or one staff member was an abuser, that’s just shooting myself in the foot. And I can’t follow the priests around all day.

So what more do you want us to do?

 

[goout]

But it is not celibacy which engenders pedophilia. It is not celibacy which engenders sexual abuses of any kind.

In order to address the abuses we need to go to the root causes of the abuses. And celibacy is NOT a cause any more than marriage is a cause. The reasons for sexual abuse of any kind don’t have anything to do with whether a person is married or single, so advocating that the Church ‘reform the current celibate culture’ to address pedophilia is like asking us to reform the current obesity epidemic by forbidding people to diet, by claiming that ‘forbidding food’ causes people to overeat.

No of course it’s not celibacy, per se, that causes anything.
You might have missed the point.

Culture. Culture is always a stew of factors.

Look at the offenses. Look at clerical culture, all the factors. It’s impossible not to see how one dovetails nicely with the other.