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Catholic Bishop In Kansas Indicted For Child Sex Abuse Conspiracy

Pinkie

Pinkie

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In charging the bishop of Kansas City with failure to report child abuse, prosecutors in Missouri have done something unprecedented in the long, troubling saga of the sexual abuse scandal in the U.S. Roman Catholic Church: hold a member of the church hierarchy criminally accountable for the alleged crimes of a priest.

What remains to be seen is whether the indictment of Bishop Robert Finn will be an isolated event or will encourage prosecutors elsewhere to investigate allegations of coverup against members of the church leadership.




Prosecutors announced Friday that Finn had been charged with a single misdemeanor count of failure to report child abuse after he allegedly learned — but failed to tell authorities — that a priest in his diocese had a laptop computer containing hundreds of images of child pornography. Finn's diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph was also charged.

"I can assure you that this has nothing — nothing — to do with the Catholic faith," Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said in announcing the indictments. "This is about the facts of this case, and this is about protecting children."Catholic bishop in Kansas City, Mo., charged in sex abuse case - chicagotribune.com
 
I just CANNOT understand how any ethical person can still be a practicing Catholic. I can't.
 
This may not be the proper forum in DP for this story, but I wasn't sure where else to put it. Please have mercy on me, Mods.
 
Pinkie said:
I just CANNOT understand how any ethical person can still be a practicing Catholic. I can't.
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That leaders are flawed has nothing to do with the belief system. I would certainly demand more accountability but being a Catholic has little to do with who might currently be running things.
 
Pinkie said:
I just CANNOT understand how any ethical person can still be a practicing Catholic. I can't.
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I'm still a practicing American, and just look at the **** our government has done over the years.
 
1Perry said:
That leaders are flawed has nothing to do with the belief system. I would certainly demand more accountability but being a Catholic has little to do with who might currently be running things.
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I disagree. Parishoners tithe, they often send their kids to parochial school, they allow their sons to be altar boys, etc.

I happen to think the entire christianity thingie is a ball of wax, and I realize Catholicism is a distinct sect. But for the love of Gawd, become an Episcopalian.....they have (almost) the same dogma and rituals, without the organized pedophilia ring running things.
 
Pinkie said:
I just CANNOT understand how any ethical person can still be a practicing Catholic. I can't.
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My mother and brother does, and both are very critical of the child abuse cases and the way the Vatican handled them.
However, they're still very faithful to Catholicism, and I see no problem with it. It's like saying that just because one Protestant killed a man, the entire religion is rotten.
 
I don't think the IHOP is Catholic. I've never seen Catholics pray in the manner pictured.
 
Pinkie said:
Uh, witty but not really analogous.
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Sure it is. Assassinations, coups, etc....Yet, I still vote. I still sing the Star Spangled Banner. I'm still proud to be an American.
 
Proud South Korean said:
My mother and brother does, and both are very critical of the child abuse cases and the way the Vatican handled them.
However, they're still very faithful to Catholicism, and I see no problem with it. It's like saying that just because one Protestant killed a man, the entire religion is rotten.
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It's hardly ONE man or woman, Proud. But yeah, I have practicing catholics in my family, too. We just NEVER discuss this subject, EVER.
 
rocket88 said:
I don't think the IHOP is Catholic. I've never seen Catholics pray in the manner pictured.
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I can't seem to copy/paste from newspapers to DP; I get more of a screenshot.

Bear with me; I'll figure it out, eventually.
 
rocket88 said:
Sure it is. Assassinations, coups, etc....Yet, I still vote. I still sing the Star Spangled Banner. I'm still proud to be an American.
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Uh, no, it is not the same. Where you worship and which country you pledge allegiance to are two different things.
 
Pinkie said:
I disagree. Parishoners tithe, they often send their kids to parochial school, they allow their sons to be altar boys, etc.

I happen to think the entire christianity thingie is a ball of wax, and I realize Catholicism is a distinct sect. But for the love of Gawd, become an Episcopalian.....they have (almost) the same dogma and rituals, without the organized pedophilia ring running things.
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We have at least as many reports of public school teachers having innapropriate relationships with students. I still pay my taxes and send my kids to public schools.
 
Pinkie said:
I just CANNOT understand how any ethical person can still be a practicing Catholic. I can't.
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I can't either. If parishoners hit 'em in the pocketbook, you'd see how fast they'd put these pedophiles out of the church...with much fanfare and hoopla. Instead, the church has taken a "see no evil" approach and, heaven help us, transferred these sick puppies to other places where they could infect a whole new bunch of children. I used to donate household and clothing items to St. Vincent DePaul -- a charity arm of the church. Now? I wouldn't give them a lint ball.
 
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MaggieD said:
I can't either. If parishoners hit 'em in the pocketbook, you'd see how fast they'd put these pedophiles out of the church...with much fanfare and hoopla. Instead, the church has taken a "see no evil" approach and, heaven help us, transferred these sick puppies to other places where they could infect a whole new bunch of children. I used to donate household and clothing items to St. Vincent DePaul -- a charity arm of the church. Now? I wouldn't give them a lint ball.
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Well, I think the fish rots from the head. I think John Paul was at least aware and did nothing (or almost nothing); Ratzinger is directly involved. As a Bishop, he covered up child abuse at least once that we know of, at a home for deaf children.
 
1Perry said:
We have at least as many reports of public school teachers having innapropriate relationships with students. I still pay my taxes and send my kids to public schools.
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This is a religious institution with a rotten core. Unless you have links to show where a slew of school teachers have been transferred to other schools and not reported to authorities when they've been caught molesting children, your opinion is completely invalid. The cover-up that's gone on for years in the Catholic Church is an abomination.
 
1Perry said:
We have at least as many reports of public school teachers having innapropriate relationships with students. I still pay my taxes and send my kids to public schools.
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For starters, no, we don't have as many such reports. Far more importantly, we have no evidence of a decades old world-wide conspiracy to recruit/tolerate/encourage pedophilia inside public schools.
 
MaggieD said:
This is a religious institution with a rotten core. Unless you have links to show where a slew of school teachers have been transferred to other schools and not reported to authorities when they've been caught molesting children, your opinion is completely invalid. The cover-up that's gone on for years in the Catholic Church is an abomination.
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I said when this was posted earlier that I have no problem with going after the rotten core. It should be encouraged.
 
Pinkie said:
For starters, no, we don't have as many such reports. Far more importantly, we have no evidence of a decades old world-wide conspiracy to recruit/tolerate/encourage pedophilia inside public schools.
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I've never saw where it's been recruited. Link? Same for encouraged. Covered up? Yes indeed.
 
1Perry said:
I've never saw where it's been recruited. Link? Same for encouraged. Covered up? Yes indeed.
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There are some who think this is the job description for recruiting priests:

Unfortunately, the job description for a Catholic priest reads like an ad for pedophiles: must be an unmarried young adult male, not interested in relationships with adult women yet not acknowledge homosexual tendencies, love working with children especially in unsupervised situations like youth groups or altar servers, and believe one has a special relationship with God such that one should be placed in a position of authority due to it.
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Of course, this is facetious. As for encouraging? When "The Catholic Church" engages in damage control rather than calling 911, that is encouraging pedophilia.
 
1Perry said:
I've never saw where it's been recruited. Link? Same for encouraged. Covered up? Yes indeed.
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I guess you hadda be there, Perry. I grew up in a Catholic orphanage and Catholic foster homes in the 1950's and 1960's. Children were recruited for the clergy as young as 9 years old, and sent to seminaries/etc. as young as 14.....far earlier than anyone healthy could make a decision about sexuality. I'd say about 50% of the nuns I encountered in the orphanage were pedophilies, and all the priests. (The ratio was no doubt extremely high because an orphanage is closed from public view.) IMO, this did not happen by accident. I think as clergy aged and developed sexual urges, they were "encouraged" to express them by pedophilia, which would be overlooked and protected, rather than by sex with another adult, which would get a person excommunicated. There was a generalized attitude, even among the foster parents, that you could do anything you liked with the children, because they "didn't count". (In a spirit of fairness, the 1950's and 1960's were a time where child sex abuse was never discussed anywhere, to my knowledge.)

This is not JMO, but of course, I can't prove all of these allegations. Nobody can, because the Vatican and the RCC has fought like a tiger to keep all such records completely sealed. I don't think it suddenly started in the 1950's nor do I think it's over....I think it's been embedded in RCC culture for centuries. But THAT, we may never know.
 
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Five myths about the Catholic sexual abuse scandal
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica] 3. Sexual abuse is more pervasive in the Catholic Church than in other institutions.
[/FONT]
Sexual abuse of minors is not the province of the Catholic Church alone. About 4 percent of priests committed an act of sexual abuse on a minor between 1950 and 2002, according to a study being conducted by John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. That is roughly consistent with data on many similar professions.
An extensive 2007 investigation by the Associated Press showed that sexual abuse of children in U.S. schools was "widespread," and most of it was never reported or punished. And in Portland, Ore., last week, a jury reached a $1.4 million verdict against the Boy Scouts of America in a trial that showed that since the 1920s, Scouts officials kept "perversion files" on suspected abusers but kept them secret.
"We don't see the Catholic Church as a hotbed of this or a place that has a bigger problem than anyone else," Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, told Newsweek. "I can tell you without hesitation that we have seen cases in many religious settings, from traveling evangelists to mainstream ministers to rabbis and others."
Part of the issue is that the Catholic Church is so tightly organized and keeps such meticulous records -- many of which have come to light voluntarily or through court orders -- that it can yield a fairly reliable portrait of its personnel and abuse over the decades. Other institutions, and most other religions, are more decentralized and harder to analyze or prosecute.
 
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Pinkie said:
In charging the bishop of Kansas City with failure to report child abuse, prosecutors in Missouri have done something unprecedented in the long, troubling saga of the sexual abuse scandal in the U.S. Roman Catholic Church: hold a member of the church hierarchy criminally accountable for the alleged crimes of a priest.

What remains to be seen is whether the indictment of Bishop Robert Finn will be an isolated event or will encourage prosecutors elsewhere to investigate allegations of coverup against members of the church leadership.




Prosecutors announced Friday that Finn had been charged with a single misdemeanor count of failure to report child abuse after he allegedly learned — but failed to tell authorities — that a priest in his diocese had a laptop computer containing hundreds of images of child pornography. Finn's diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph was also charged.

"I can assure you that this has nothing — nothing — to do with the Catholic faith," Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said in announcing the indictments. "This is about the facts of this case, and this is about protecting children."Catholic bishop in Kansas City, Mo., charged in sex abuse case - chicagotribune.com
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Someone already beat you to the thread.
http://www.debatepolitics.com/break...eltering-abusive-clergyma.html#post1059873416
 
jamesrage said:
Five myths about the Catholic sexual abuse scandal
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica] 3. Sexual abuse is more pervasive in the Catholic Church than in other institutions.
[/FONT]
Sexual abuse of minors is not the province of the Catholic Church alone. About 4 percent of priests committed an act of sexual abuse on a minor between 1950 and 2002, according to a study being conducted by John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. That is roughly consistent with data on many similar professions.
An extensive 2007 investigation by the Associated Press showed that sexual abuse of children in U.S. schools was "widespread," and most of it was never reported or punished. And in Portland, Ore., last week, a jury reached a $1.4 million verdict against the Boy Scouts of America in a trial that showed that since the 1920s, Scouts officials kept "perversion files" on suspected abusers but kept them secret.
"We don't see the Catholic Church as a hotbed of this or a place that has a bigger problem than anyone else," Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, told Newsweek. "I can tell you without hesitation that we have seen cases in many religious settings, from traveling evangelists to mainstream ministers to rabbis and others."
Part of the issue is that the Catholic Church is so tightly organized and keeps such meticulous records -- many of which have come to light voluntarily or through court orders -- that it can yield a fairly reliable portrait of its personnel and abuse over the decades. Other institutions, and most other religions, are more decentralized and harder to analyze or prosecute.
Click to expand...

Yeah I would definitely agree that the Catholic Church is perceived to be an institution pervaded by sexual abuse simply because it's reported by the media so much, giving the public a distorted view of the Church as a whole. Doesn't diminish the egregiousness of their actual crimes though, and the fact that leadership often tried to cover it up and sweep it under the rug.
 
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