Hundreds and hundreds of years.
Appropriate username
We found out about it because those people are still alive. The Catholic church has been at this for centuries
Priest clothing vs nun clothing isn’t enough for some people?
Thousand plus years.
I don’t know exactly when sneaky catholic scribes changed up the wording to make being gay bad except when they’re being gay with children. But it’s definitely their doing.
Pretty sure there isn’t a single Catholic among them that would tell you such actions weren’t sinning…
Totally. You think they parade around at NAMBLA marches or something?
They would if they were honest.
But don’t worry. Catholics don’t have a monopoly on child abuse. Evangelical youth pastors are gunning for the crown. (They’ll never get close. But they’re trying)
It surprises me how often that point is lost… that said, of all people, you’d hope a priest would know better :(
Who cares if it’s a sin if you can confess and wipe the state clean or get an indulgence beforehand. And everybody sins, so don’t cast the first stone, etc etc. They’ll come up with some way to excuse, sweep under the rug, whatever.
Catholics did not write the scripture that says being gay is bad; that’s from the Torah - the Old Testament. Christianity came after Judaism and believes in both the old and new testaments.
You could look up the exact text for it easily. It’s basically “he who lies with a man as with a woman…” and something about him being an abomination and should be put to death or something like that.
The last decade?!
This is going on forever and people are coming forward from the moment it was possible to do so. Unfortunately it wasn’t possible for a long time.
Watch The Keepers on Netflix.
It starts out as an investigation in a cold case murder of a Catholic nun in 1969 and unearths atrocities in multitude. It shows clearly how they silenced everyone who dared to question or speak out about abuse in the church.Oh boy.
You’re gonna want to Google Sinead O’Connor and where her career went.
#sineadwasright
I heard “The Emperor’s New Clothes” on the way in to work this morning. It hits different now after everything that’s happened.
I can only speak for my lifetime and that of my parents, but in my country the church has been revealed to be a child trafficking, child abusing, money laundering, woman enslaving organisation. It has a veneer of pseudo-wholesomeness.
It’s important to recognise that while people rightly expose the church for this, they usually operate with the assistance of the local communities. In Ireland people in the community would report woman who were “impure” in some way, which the church could justify for enslaving them and selling their children if those women gave birth. This is all within the last several decades and I’m sure even before then.
That’s not just your country. That’s organized religion in every country.
I think that’s generally accepted. I wanted to qualify what I’m saying a bit more by mentioning the lived experience here and the complicity of wider society.
Everything in life is about sex. Except sex, that is about power.
Religion isn’t about a better afterlife, it is about power and control. Those high ranking priests don’t believe in god otherwise they wouldn’t sin.
They want to fuck kids and so they build structures around that.
So how long? Since its inception.
The sexual abuse of young boys has been going on for a very, very long time but for most of that time, the church and all its institutions were unassailable and infallible. So most of it went unreported at the time. The attitude that the church and by extension, the priest could do no wrong was especially prevalent here where I grew up. Which is why some truly horrible things were allowed to happen. The church committed some vile acts and they weren’t all sexual abuse and enjoyed the protection of the government all the while. Here have some fun reading.
There’s a Robert De Niro, Kevin Bacon, Brad Pitt movie from 1996 called Sleepers that is partly about sexual abuse of boys by catholic priests. The fact that such a movie actually had an audience back then tells you that this has been going on for a long time.
The movie is based on a book where the author has claimed that it is a true story from his childhood.
Also, Rational Wiki has an article on th specific topic you’re asking about https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Child_sexual_abuse_in_the_Roman_Catholic_Church
BTW, it is not just the catholic church having those issues. This happens everywhere when people have a position of power over children.
Historically, it’s been alleged that some ‘celibate’ Catholic bishops fucked women. When the resulting bastard children grew up, they were rewarded with coveted Church appointments. If anyone noticed the apparent favoritism, they blamed the adultery on their brother, saying the appointee was a nephew (it: nipote) rather than the priest’s own illegitimate son. Thus the origin of the term nepotism.
Probably some of them had different tastes and realized that fucking boys leaves less evidence.
Here in Germany it has been revealed that the church set up a whole network shuffling around offenders (or sending them away to south america) and muddling traces. It’s even been shown that the former pope knew about such cases. It’s systemic.
Basically it’s a combination of supposed moral authority, intransparency, and mutual cover ups. People are willing to look the other way a lot when they perceive of someone as having a higher mission or great social standing. That includes law enforcement. Think of Donald Trump who’s a fraudster-racist-rapist-insurrectionist and yet the MAGA crowd loves him. Maybe celibacy plays into it as well, sexual urges don’t stop just because you don a robe.
Younger people are less and less religious with each generation. So at least from that angle the problem might eventually go away.
I think people haven’t changed that much in their nature, what changed is the culture and since a few decades people have been more open and daring to talk about it in spite of any stigmas.
I could swear I’ve read Marquis de Sade saying priests very often hide all sorts of dirty secrets about boys. That was a couple centuries ago…
I don’t understand how the organization doesn’t collapse. It shows how, like so many things in society, people are inhuman scum, that they keep oppressive systems and organizations alive despite mountains of evidence of its harmfulness.
There was a gigantic scandal where I grew up in Boston in the 90s/00s… it brought a lot of claims out of the woodwork and it turns out that priests diddle a lot of young kids and it’s fucking awful.
