The Archbishop of Dublin said, from the pulpit that an upcoming report on child sex abuse in Ireland “will shock us all.”
Is it even possible for us to be shocked by abusive priests anymore?
Seems like the crimes were so systematic and wretched that we’ve heard it all: priests co-abusing in a variety of horrible ways, the bishops knowing and doing nothing to remove the priests from circulation (guaranteeing that more children would be abused), known abusers being shipped off to isolated communities where bishops thought they’d never be caught, the church buying an island in the Caribbean for serial abusers who couldn’t be stopped but couldn’t be tossed into the secular criminal justice system, either. (The island was later sold because such a solution seemed “too public.”)
What fresh hell does the Archbishop have for us?
Oh, Kathy! Some of those priests hardly even touched those kids!
Why is the Catholic church trying to make it look like all priests are child molesters? Why don’t they focus on the positive? What about all the kids who didn’t get molested? Doesn’t that make it okay? Shouldn’t the thousands of molested kids think of the majority who weren’t, and get over it?
Dan has an understudy. Adorable.
Coming clean would be shocking, wouldn’t it?
think it’s “ensuring”–not actual insurance!
Why are you attacking the religious? They are only protecting these children from liberals and social activists.
I’m not shocked at all that religious people are just as human as the rest of us. Please wake me when something relevant happens.
Sad.
The only thing that would shock me anymore about this would be to find out that a pastor or bishop actually took action against one of these priests and reported them to the local police.
Dorothy Parker wrote “what fresh hell.” Inserting “new” smothers it with redundancy and melodrama. But–holy shit–it’s hard to resist melodrama when it comes to the Catholic Church, that’s for damn sure.
@6
Chris you are absolutely right. A Catholic priest, bishop, cardinal, pope has no greater insight on morality than any of the rest of us.
@ 9. Correct and corrected. 8:25 is early for me.
The Romans had the right idea.
@12 You’re referring to viniculture, right?
I think he means public water distribution via acqueducts and fountains.
@6: most of us don’t have an organization that will cover up our crimes for us.
Yeah, it’s sad that it really isn’t shocking at all. The catholic church has basically become synonymous with child molesters.
Why is it sad? It’s not as if they do anything good for the world.
It is sad that an organization whose existence is based an a ludicrous myth contunues to this day to harm innocent children.
Dublin?
You mean the one in IRELAND, right?
Well, while certainly not diminishing the severity of the crimes (and they are crimes, certainly), isn’t this just a little bit reaching for a Seattle-based weekly?
C’mon Stranger, you’re getting pretty pathetic. How is that relevant to Seattle? And if it is — then do the reporting and say-so.
In case you haven’t noticed, Catholics in this community provide a vast amount of social services to ANYONE (Catholic Community Services in Seattle had over 725,000 volunteer hours per year and 1.4 million meals in Seattle. Look it up.)….
….and yet your focus is on parishes 9,000 miles away, that have seemingly no connection to Seattle?
Let’s keep the focus on Seattle’s Archdiocese (Lord knows they still have much to answer for.) But let’s not go well (well!) out of our way to try and associate this systemic failure with the faith and life of good Catholics everywhere.
There seems to be a clear, but unsaid anti-Catholic agenda at The Stranger, and its beginning to smell a little like intolerance of all kinds.
In fact, it fucking stinks.
Heathers back.
She’s an atheist.
Heather’s been burdened by organized religion.
Yadda yadda yadda…
Keep going Heather.
We’ve heard it all before from you.
Repeatedly.
Like a broken Atheist record.
Keep going.
Yadda yadda yadda…
@19, paranoid much? This was all over the wires this morning, which–in addition to it being a recent topic of conversation around here–is why Brenden mentioned it.
I’m glad that Catholics provide necessary social services. However, that does not absolve the members of the community from either actively covering up decades (centuries?) of sex crimes against children or knowing about them and doing nothing. That makes them complicit to crime and deserving of closer scrutiny.
Yah, like, ‘cuz when Boeing outsources parts to China or Korea, that don’t got nuthin’ to do with buildin’ planes here in Seattle.
Why look at any news outside of our neighborhoods?
@20, I’ll bet your mother is real proud to have raised such an ignorant dickhead.
Once again a number of you miss the point. It isn’t “some priests are child molesters”. It’s “the Catholic heirarchy knew, and they covered it up, and they even put into place a variety of administrative programs to further the goal of covering it up, for decades, probably centuries.”
The molesting priests are common criminals and should be dealt with as such. The bishops and cardinals and popes are organized crime kingpins.
If the church was going to move me from cold, damp Ireland to a Caribbean Island, I’d touch every child I could find!
@ #19 I don’t think The Stranger ever said they only cover local stories. The Catholic Church is the one inflicting harm on otghers and itself and not those who report on that harm. It is not intolerant or anti-Catholic to report on crimes committed by priests. Perhaps you long for the days when the media defered to the wishes of religious grous. Those days are gone forever. As has been pointed out before if any other institution or group had leaders who did this sort of crime as often and covered it up nobody would complain about covering the story. Merely because it involves a church is no reason to tread lightly or hesitate for a second to report about it.
Yes, #20 I am still here. Thank you for noticing.
The ones being shipped off to communities where they would “never be caught” are only accused so far, not convicted.
I’m as disgusted as the next person, but we have a criminal justice system that is predicated on innocent until proven guilty.
Don’t be a doosh, no matter how gross those apparent crimes may be.
@28, it’s a lot harder for the prosecution to make a conviction when they’re going up against a massive, international cover-up operation (where many of those involved with the cover-up may not have even known their own role). Also, there’s that tiny problem of the statute of limitations.
I am not a “doosh” for knowing that sometimes abuse is not easily provable. Or do you think OJ was innocent because he was never convicted of murder? In that case, well, you’re going to need a whole lot of good luck to survive out there in the world.
@28: That’s all well and good, but the Church took these priests who had been accused of horrible crimes and, instead of notifying the authorities and letting them investigate an accused CRIME, removed them from the jurisdiction and put them in another parish (with no warning to the new pool of victims), thereby not allowing due process. If it can be proved — legally proved — that the Church did this intentionally, it should be broken up as a criminal enterprise.
The Catholic Church is the very definition of EVIL! It will never stop it’s vile behavior. When the truth is known, children all over the world will be witness to the EVIL of it’s priests and Pope. I suppose it won’t be long before they start to murder people who call out the truth. They always have!
Whatever, lily.
If it can’t be proven it must mean he or she MAY have done it, which means they DID!
pfffffffft
I kind of like the island idea, like a modern day leper colony.
@17, what Heather @18 said.
It’s sad that it’s non-shocking that kids get molested constantly by priests.
Whaaaaa! the Stranger posts shit on it’s blog about the Catholic leadership and it’s systematic cover up of child sex crimes within its clergy. They must hate Catholics to be pointing this stuff out. This argument is as sound as the fox-news drones accusations that those who question and are critical of the conservative elements within the government are guilty of hating America. If the well-intentioned local Catholics can’t disassociate themselves from the catholic leadership enough to allow for that leadership to be held responsible and ridiculed for its crimes then I think they are enabling the continued existence of a religious culture that places itself above the laws of man and are therefore complicit in the cover up and crimes that stem from that attitude.
@32, Hey, if the Catholic Church and its congregation would offer up the accused priests to a court of law–which they have refused to do–and there was no evidence of abuse or a cover-up of alleged abuse, I’d rethink my stance. However, a) the Catholic church doesn’t give a shit what I think, which is understandable considering my background within the church; and b) there is so much evidence to the contrary that there is no way it’s possible to convince me that there is neither abuse nor a cover-up.
Good journalism is about timeliness, proportionality, context and relevance.
The Stranger is sorely lacking on these with respect to the story of sex abuse, by clergy, over in Ireland, in the past.
Where is The Stranger on the story of sex abuse (and coverups) by teachers against kids. It is FAR more prevalent, with THOUSANDS of cases, with complicity by the unions and school districts.
But no, it’s far easier to go after religion than it is the left-leaning institutions from which The Stranger journies finds much comfort.
The Catholic hierarchies behavior has been insanely stupid, and criminal. For that they should be prosecuted. But The Strangers silence on the issue of sex abuse by teachers, and administrative jockeying to cover it up, points clearly to an anti-Catholic bias.
Nobody is trying to deny that the priests involved are innocent until proven guilty. Part of the problem is that when a priest was accused the church would ship them off to another location which the priest saw as an oppourtunity for fresh meat.
I think we can go with a presumption of guilt on the part of the church for enabling the molesters and then covering it up.
If people would stop granting the priests some special status and stop buying in to the mystique around them there might be some justice. Unless that happens the happiest outcome would be for the church to have a deep schism and get scattered to the four winds.
Prove it. Most importantly, prove that there’s been a vast conspiracy to cover up these cases on even remotely the same scale as the Catholic Church.
@28, @32: that is exactly what I am asking for: fair trials. And that is EXACTLY what the church is stonewalling against.
Once again, until you get it: the crime here is not child molestation.
The crime is a conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice.
When a priest is accused of molesting a child, the matter should be immediately turned over to the police. Instead, the church is adjudicating the matter themselves, which is AGAINST THE LAW.
Let’s have these trials you are asking for. Let’s see all the church documents out in the open. Let’s see some more trials, too, of church officials, for RICO violations. What they are doing is no different than the Bonnannos and Gottis.
Are you kidding?
There’s a dozen teacher cases a WEEK in the media.
According to a major 2004 study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education – the most in-depth investigation to date – nearly 10 percent of U.S. public school students have been targeted with unwanted sexual attention by school employees.
Titled “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature,” the report says the mistreatment of students ranges from sexual comments to rape. In fact, says the study’s author Charol Shakeshaft, professor of educational administration at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., the scope of the school-sex problem appears to far exceed the clergy-abuse scandal that has recently rocked the Roman Catholic Church.
Comparing the incidence of sexual misconduct in schools with the Catholic Church scandal, Shakeshaft notes that a recent study by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops concluded 10,667 young people were sexually mistreated by priests between 1950 and 2002.
In contrast, she extrapolates from a national survey conducted for the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation in 2000 that roughly 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a public school employee between 1991 and 2000.
The figures suggest “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests,” said Shakeshaft, according to Education Week.
Indeed, more than 4.5 million students are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade, says the report.”
And as for the cover-ups
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008…
After reading (in the Stranger) about the Jesuit priest raping the old lady on her deathbed while her husband was outside the door, I’m afraid I’ll never be shocked again.