The scandal is not just in the past

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@goout did you read the article? Gay cocktail parties among ordained priests are not an abuse of power. That’s just homosexuality plain and simple.
 
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If it was just secular media making this look bad, that would be one thing… but the various Catholic news outlets are also covering this heavily. Again, these issues are not just some decades old complaints, but ongoing issues. For example:

www.ncregister.com

‘What Do You Want to Know?’ The Catholic Reaction to Bishops and Sex Abuse

ANALYSIS: Anyone who finds it difficult to understand the anger and resentment of Catholics toward their bishops in recent weeks need look no further than a 2011 story involving the bishop of Allentown.
www.ncregister.com www.ncregister.com
Father David Szatkowski of the Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is mentioned in the section of the report concerning the Diocese of Allentown. In 2011, he was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a child.

In August of that year, Father Szatkowski, a seminary professor, attended an academic conference in Wisconsin. The priest, drunk late one night of the conference, approached a group of teenage girls outside his hotel, talked with them for a while, telling them that he was a lawyer and acting, in the words of one witness, “touchy.” Eventually, witness accounts and police reports say, Szatkowski forcibly embraced a 15-year-old girl and groped her breasts.

Several months later, prosecutors announced in a statement that they had dropped the charges, in “consultation with the victim about her wishes regarding the outcome of the case.”

Father Szatkowski, charged with sexually assaulting a child but not convicted, serves now on the “formation team” of his religious community, working with young aspirants to priesthood.

The priest does not stand out in the grand jury report because of the gravity of his case. Indeed, allegations against Father Szatkowski are not mentioned in the report at all. Instead, he is mentioned because, three years after facing criminal charges for sexually assaulting a child, he was permitted by then-Bishop John Barres of Allentown to serve as the canon lawyer — the procurator and advocate, in technical terms — for Father Michael Lawrence, a diocesan priest accused of sexually assaulting two adolescent boys.

In fact, Bishop Barres relied heavily on Father Szatkowski’s canonical advocacy in a 2014 letter written to oppose a Vatican plan to laicize Father Lawrence.

This extraordinary turn of events bears repeating. In 2014, a bishop allowed a priest who had been charged with criminal sexual abuse of a child to serve as the canon lawyer for another priest charged with criminal sexual abuse of a child. Apparently no one in Father Szatkowski’s religious community, the Diocese of Allentown or the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith questioned the wisdom of that plan.
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It seems many people are still trying to minimize this problem by pointing at elapsed time and percentages.

This is a real problem.
This is a problem that has been covered up, hidden and ignored.
This is a continuing problem.
This is a problem that must be addressed.
 
This can be a real problem and the secular media can still have an agenda. The two need not be separate.
 
What agenda does EWTN have? How are they reporting this that is a problem?
 
LOL. I meant how the secular media reports on the issue.

I gave an example above.

The agenda is clear.

Catholic news sources have a different approach to how they report on this.
 
AveOTheotokos said:
I think it’s important to remember that many of the allegations related to the McCarrick scandal and the problems in seminaries are not all decades old, but many are quite recent.
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Which scandal? There are two separate issues. The issue with homosexuals in seminary is recent, but it is also in direct defiance of what the Church has decreed in 2004, banning homosexuals from seminary. Yes, this is a terrible scandal, but it is just that, a scandal, not a crime.

Then the issue of child sexual abuse, with cases starting in the 1940’s forward, is a separate issue, as that is a crime, and that does extend back in history. The news, and people here, flip these things back and forth to create and illusion that nothing has changed in the Church. Again, this seminary was in secret defiance of what the Pope had ordered. Gay men are not allowed to be in seminary. Period.
Onthisrock84 said:
Hahaha all fire and brimstone about homosexuals and then this.
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You are thinking of some other Church, perhaps some fundamentalist.
 
Everything I have posted and referred to is in regards to articles from Catholic news sources.
 
Yes, and I was replying to someone who had stated the secular news has an agenda and someone else replied no they don’t.

Did I accidentally tag you or something? It’s TOTALLY possible.
 
pnewton said:
Which scandal? There are two separate issues. The issue with homosexuals in seminary is recent, but it is also in direct defiance of what the Church has decreed in 2004, banning homosexuals from seminary. Yes, this is a terrible scandal, but it is just that, a scandal, not a crime.

Then the issue of child sexual abuse, with cases starting in the 1940’s forward, is a separate issue, as that is a crime, and that does extend back in history. The news, and people here, flip these things back and forth to create and illusion that nothing has changed in the Church. Again, this seminary was in secret defiance of what the Pope had ordered. Gay men are not allowed to be in seminary. Period.
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The article I posted in the opening post details that these are not just separate issues. The McCarrick scandal and the homosexuals in seminary scandal are tied together:
All three priests told CNA that while the experience was deeply unpleasant, they had seen similar behavior in Newark’s seminary.

Seminarians and priests from ordination classes spanning 30 years, during the terms of McCarrick and Myers, reported to CNA that they had observed an active homosexual subculture of priest and seminarians within Newark’s Immaculate Conception Seminary.

One priest ordained in the early years of Archbishop McCarrick’s term in Newark said that “a lot of people lost their innocence in the seminary.”

He told CNA that there were two distinct groups of students.

“You had the men who were there because they had a deep love of the Lord and a vocation to serve his Church,” he said, adding that those men were the majority of seminarians.

“But there was a subculture, with its own group of men, that was openly homosexual and petty and vindictive with everyone else,” he explained.
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This McCarrick scandal is directly related to the ongoing and continuing homosexuality scandal in seminaries.
 
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Gotcha.

As the OP, I saw your reply that didn’t seem to be a reply to someone else, so I thought it was directed at me.
 
Sorry, I’m really bad at this forum thing! Still learning. Didn’t mean for the confusion.
 
AveOTheotokos said:
The article I posted in the opening post details that these are not just separate issues. The McCarrick scandal and the homosexuals in seminary scandal are tied together.
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And by post three, pedophiles was brought into the discussion. Furthermore, you used a definite article “The” which should not have been used. It assumes a specificity that does not exist, if you are going to talk about the current issue with homosexuality in seminary. Think about it. If one speaks of “The scandal in the Church,” do you think seminaries come to mind for most people, or child sexual abuse?
 
pnewton said:
And by post three, pedophiles was brought into the discussion. Furthermore, you used a definite article “The” which should not have been used. It assumes a specificity that does not exist, if you are going to talk about the current issue with homosexuality in seminary. Think about it. If one speaks of “The scandal in the Church,” do you think seminaries come to mind for most people, or child sexual abuse?
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I apologize for any confusion caused by my “the”. It was in specific reference to the specific cases noted in the specific articles I have posted and been discussing.

I don’t speak for most people so I am not sure what comes to mind for them, but to me, “The scandal in the Church” is the failure of priests to live up to their vows of chastity, no matter what form that occurs in, and the bishops coverups and failures to address these issues.
 
AveOTheotokos said:
I don’t speak for most people so I am not sure what comes to mind for them, but to me, “The scandal in the Church” is the failure of priests to live up to their vows of chastity, no matter what form that occurs in, and the bishops coverups and failures to address these issues.
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Chastity is tough issue for all; a struggle that is endemic to the human condition. If we screen out most homosexual priests, there will still be those that fall for some woman and create scandal that way. As to cover-ups, I would hope that we as a Church learn that openness is part of this brave new world. We all now live in glass houses.
 
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In this week’s issue of the Catholic Herald, Fr. William Dailey focuses on the bishops’ responsibility for the great harm they have done. Some excerpts:

Would a mass resignation of bishops hurt the U.S. Church? Quite the opposite

Time and again victims were not believed. Time and again their silence was purchased and civil authorities were not notified of their crimes. Time and again victims and their families were given false assurances that the abusing priest would no longer be in a position to harm children – when in fact he had been sent to a new parish who had no idea a wolf had just arrived. The anger was and is justified. …

… What was needed then [at the 2002 meeting in Dallas] was the resignation of any and every bishop who had mistreated victims or enabled abuse. Some bishops, including Cardinal Law, said that they offered their resignations and Rome refused. Maybe so, but if there had been a dramatic press conference in Dallas where genuinely contrite bishops – 50? 100? 200? – admitted their own individual failings and announced their resignations, I suspect Rome would have acquiesced. …

… Bishop Robert Barron has wisely and courageously called for an outside investigation by skilled lay investigators. But that presumes there are bishops who cannot be trusted to do the right thing – to tell the truth – until forced by the press or outside forces. And these are supposed to be shepherds after the model of the Good Shepherd, who was willing to lay down his life, not just his job, for his sheep.

Rev. William Dailey, C.S.C., is a member of the Congregation of Holy Cross and currently serves as the Director of the Newman Center for Faith and Reason in Dublin, Ireland. Father Dailey previously served at Notre Dame Law School as a Lecturer in Law.

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/com...ishops-hurt-the-us-church-quite-the-opposite/
 
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BartholomewB said:
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Maverick:
… not in a manner to try to maximize the damage to the church’s image.
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Maximizing the damage to the church’s image is a pretty good summary of what those bishops did when they chose to cover up the crimes of sexual abuse of minors by clergy.

Except it wasn’t only the Church’s “image” that they damaged. It was the Church Herself.
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True, but most of them are dead and the rest long retired.

What @Maverick is saying is that the MAJORITY of the current Bishops were not involved back then and have been doing a good job these last 15 years.

That’s the fact that the news is neglecting to say. They are acting as if the CURRENT bishops were all involved with the cover-up, however, most of them were not bishops back then.
 
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Maverick said:
The secular media is not covering this in a fair and honest manner. They want to damage the church and they wanted to do that long before the latest news broke.
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Hogwash! The leadership of the Church are the ones who have done the damage. The “secular media” have simply focused a big, bright spotlight on it.
 
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