Pope Benedict Reportedly Defrocked 400 Priests in 2 Years

[weller2]

The number of cases reported over a 50 year period was 10,000

So 200 cases per year.

When. You consider there are about 400,000 cases annually reported in the the U.S
Abuse by priests isn’t even a statistical category.

So priestly abuse was 0.05% of all abuse.
But is has 40k priests and 225M adults. So priests make 0.017% of adult population.
So **priests commited 2.9 times more abuse per capita than the general population. **

For someone of my generation the thought of a 15,16,17 boy as a sexual abuse victim was not a reality.
The scandal moved the public to include this group as a category that required protection.

Most of abuse was directed at boys aged 15 and above – this is not pedophilia, this is homosexuality. So the underlying reason is widespread homosexuality of the clergy. What has been done about this?

Instead, the actions undertaken by the Catholic Church after the scandal were mostly aimed at establishing procedures. The Church is now saying We have procedures,so this cannot repeat!. This is not true, because the people now charged with implementing these procedures are the same people who were engaged in cover-up in the first place – i.e. priests and bishops! Procedures are worthless if they are not followed. See the Cloyne scandal, where abusers were still shielded despite the procedures being in place. (And when the law enforcement became interested, the bishop quickly shipped the evidence to Vatican. Which has then denied official request from the Irish government to give back the files.)

However, procedures come in very handy when it comes to litigation, because then the diocese can say: “But it’s not our fault! We have created procedures! It’s not our fault that our priests do not follow them (i.e. do not report themselves)!”

 

[weller2]

"Do you notice anything interesting? Do you see how that red line (number of cases) and that blue line (number of priests committing abuse) both begin a REALLY rapid descent?

There’s no rapid descent. This graph has three phases:

• increase from 50 to ca. 700 incidents per year over 20 years (1950-1970, roughly)
• plateau at ca. 700 incidents per year, over 10 years (1970-1980, roughly)
• decline back to 50 over 15 years (1980-1995)

So the “rapid” decline is not much faster than the initial increase.

What is much more telling is that the entire cycle is 45 years long. 25+45=70. Rings a bell? Priests enter ministry at 25, and are sent into retirement at 70. So the graph is perfectly in line with a purely demographic change in abuser population. The decline is indeed faster than the initial rise, but this can be attributed to the fact that male potency decreases rapidly after 60.

So the graph tells us that there was a cohort of abusive priests which entered ministry between 1950-1960, did its damage, and then moved into retirement. That’s all. There’s no trace of any decisive administrative action on that graph. Oh, sorry, there is. After 2000, you have a ~50% decline in two years. Pretty impressive indeed, if it was not 40 years late.

Remember that the scandals broke around 2000 and were centered around the events mainly between 1970 and 1990.

Well, if you look closely at the year when that rapid fall begins, that year would be 1981 - two years after John Paul II is elected Pope and the same year Ratzinger is picked to head the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

This is a rather heavy-handed attempt at rewriting history:

(1) Ratzinger had no jurisdiction over abuse cases until 2001. He had to fight for years to get that jurisdiction.

(2) 1980s and 1990 are the peak period for abuser extraordinaire, Marcial Maciel Degollado:

In 1997, a group of nine men went public with accusations that they had been abused by Maciel while studying under him in Spain and Rome in the 1940s and 1950s. They described how he would feign to have an illness in his groin and claim he had been given papal permission to receive help massaging out the pain. The group, which included respectable academics and former priests, lodged formal charges at the Vatican in 1998, but were told the following year that the case had been shelved by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (on orders from Pope John Paul II), then headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict.

(3) There is no record of bishops and priests being sacked en masse under JP2. All record of decisive disciplinary action of the required scale starts under B16 (so-called “dash-2 bishops” in US).

I agree that Ratzinger/B16 gets an undeservedly bad rap in the media about the whole thing, because he appears to be the first person to actually do something about the situation (even if too little, too late). However, it appears that nobody (both inside and outside the Church) is willing to write a true story of this, because it would require implicating JP2… and I think I will stop here.

Ratzinger appears to be the person who tried to do something about the problem only to be later scapegoated by the media for failures of his predecessor.

 

[Viewer]

Most of abuse was directed at boys aged 15 and above – this is not pedophilia, this is homosexuality. So the underlying reason is widespread homosexuality of the clergy. What has been done about this?

I

No

I’m sorry, but there are two enormous flaws in this statement.

1: Unless you’re from the Netherlands or deep in the middle east 15 years old is a child. In a few territories children can become sexually available as far as the state is concerned but they do not gain recognition as adults until they are 18, 21 in even more places.

If they are under the secular age of majority, the priest is a pedophile.

1. The reason so many young boys were abused as opposed to girls was lack of access to young girls. Places where abuse was rife such as orphanages were often gender divided, with the lay brothers or priests attending to the boys, and the nuns to the girls.

If a priest had been able to get access to young girls on their own, they would have been the priority target.

I don’t doubt there was a good deal of homosexuals in the clergy, I often think there still are since in many cases it remains the only viable alternative to a heterosexual marriage.

 

[weller2]

1: Unless you’re from the Netherlands or deep in the middle east 15 years old is a child.
In a few territories children can become sexually available as far as the state is concerned but they do not gain recognition as adults until they are 18, 21 in even more places.

Age of consent in most of the world is 14-16: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent

If they are under the secular age of majority, the priest is a pedophile.

Pedophilia is a medical term, and it describes attraction to pre-pubescent children.
If you look at the data, most victims were over 15 and male. This is not pedophilia but pederasty:

Pederasty or paederasty (US /ˈpɛdəræsti/ or UK /ˈpiːdəræsti/) is a (usually erotic) homosexual relationship between an adult male and a pubescent or adolescent male. The word pederasty derives from Greek (paiderastia) “love of boys”,[1] a compound derived from παῖς (pais) “child, boy” and ἐραστής (erastēs) “lover”.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty

Pedophilia by the medical definition is, and has always been, very rare. Pederasty, on the other hand, has always been widespread in homosexual circles – just read the wiki article.

Recasting the scandal as pedophilia was convenient for the media, because writing about “gay abuse in the Church” would lead to protests from LGBT groups. Paradoxically, it was also convenient for the Church, because it precluded questions about the extent and influence of homosexual subculture in the Catholic clergy.

vanityfair.com/culture/2013/12/gay-clergy-catholic-church-vatican

History is bound to repeat itself unless homosexuals are removed from the clergy.

 

[Darryl1958]

Age of consent in most of the world is 14-16: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent

Pedophilia is a medical term, and it describes attraction to pre-pubescent children.
If you look at the data, most victims were over 15 and male. This is not pedophilia but pederasty:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty

Pedophilia by the medical definition is, and has always been, very rare. Pederasty, on the other hand, has always been widespread in homosexual circles – just read the wiki article.

Recasting the scandal as pedophilia was convenient for the media, because writing about “gay abuse in the Church” would lead to protests from LGBT groups. Paradoxically, it was also convenient for the Church, because it precluded questions about the extent and influence of homosexual subculture in the Catholic clergy.

vanityfair.com/culture/2013/12/gay-clergy-catholic-church-vatican

History is bound to repeat itself unless homosexuals are removed from the clergy.

I find your analysis to be sound and your insights to be very good ones.
Your Vanity Fair article holds out to be an interesting and informative one on a subject that it is in many people’s interest to keep covered up.

 

[josie_L]

Speaking as a victim of this crime although not related to a priest, the church and society HAVE NOT handled this abuse/crime on the innocent well. It needs to come out publicly to deter offenders and send a clear message to society that this type of behaviour is unacceptable. The reason it has gone on for centuries is because it has been swept under the carpet. “When good men say nothing evil flourishes”. Did not God put the church the head of society even if society does not accept the fact. The church is the role model leading society, as it has done in the past with schools, health care etc. I feel it now has the responsibility to lead (guide) society in how to protect the innocent from this crime that effects it’s victims with a life long trauma. These offenders come from society into professions where the innocent are most at risk. I would like to see the church take the offensive not defensive position. I would like it to be honest, open, transparent and pro-active not secretive and protective. I would like the church to set an example to society, by God’s grace and wisdom, on how best to deal with this crime.

This is a wonderful post, God bless you for your witness and your courage!

 

[pnewton]

There’s no rapid descent.

If you say so. I personal a decline of 69% in 30 year, and 99% in forty years to be significant, even if it is not conducive to network ratings or homosexual agenda.

 

[Darryl1958]

http://www.ncregister.com/images/uploads/johnjayreport_(1).jpg

"Do you notice anything interesting? Do you see how that red line (number of cases) and that blue line (number of priests committing abuse) both begin a REALLY rapid descent? Well, if you look closely at the year when that rapid fall begins, that year would be 1981 - two years after John Paul II is elected Pope and the same year Ratzinger is picked to head the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

“Even though the CDF won’t streamline the process and gain sole jurisdiction over abuse cases until 2001, the chart shows that the minute Ratzinger became the head of CDF, someone, somewhere started shutting these abusive priests down. By 1995, most of the rat holes had been closed.”

Read more: ncregister.com/blog/simcha-fisher/benedicts-peculiar-record-on-pedophile-priests#ixzz2rUAVkyYU

I missed this post the first time around.
I think it is worth the bump.
The good news of this graph is that the spike of the seventies, for whatever reason it was there, has fallen to where things are now at a pre-1960 level.
More than that, these numbers are more real now than in 1960 because there now exists full openess about reporting such events, which used to be considered too shameful to air out in public.

A couple of reasons for the spike in the seventies may be on the negative side of the ledger a permissiveness to all things sexual that permeated that era, and on the positive end of the ledger, the rise of a feminist consciousness that switched the stigma of sexual abuse away from the abused and onto the abuser. People have been more inclined to report after that.

 

[weller2]

If you say so. I personal a decline of 69% in 30 year, and 99% in forty years to be significant, even if it is not conducive to network ratings or homosexual agenda.

You miss the point. 69% decline in 30 years is not indicative of administrative action, but of demographic change. The rate of decline is comparable to the rate of initial increase.

This graph from John Jay report tells it all:



So here’s what happened: a large number of homosexuals have been ordained in 1950s and 1960s. Then ordinations of homosexuals dropped – either because seminaries started to filter them, or because homosexuals decided to pursue other lifestyle options (likely a combination of both). But nobody did anything about homosexuals already in the priesthood. So some of these homosexuals started to engage in pederasty with underage boys. This is nothing shocking about this, it’s pure statistic: in any sufficiently large population of homosexuals, you’ll find enough persons with a taste for teenagers. The victims kept silent for 20, 30, 40 years, so by the time the scandals broke (2000), the problem has already solved itself, as the age cohort responsible for abuse was already dead or retired from active ministry.

 

[ProVobis]

So here’s what happened: a large number of homosexuals have been ordained in 1950s and 1960s. Then ordinations of homosexuals dropped – either because seminaries started to filter them, or because homosexuals decided to pursue other lifestyle options (likely a combination of both).

Actually the number of ALL priestly ordinations dropped during the last 40 years. I have yet to see the statistics on whether there were more or fewer heterosexual men proportionately deciding against pursuing the priesthood than before.

 

[pnewton]

You miss the point. 69% decline in 30 years is not indicative of administrative action, but of demographic change. The rate of decline is comparable to the rate of initial increase.

This graph from John Jay report tells it all:

That is an opinion, for sure. It has been said a thousand times, correlation does not equal causation. This graph doesn’t even correlate cause. That stuff you are saying is just made up out of conjecture and opinion. I could just as logically credit George W. Bush for solving the problem.