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?
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.Give people power, and they will seek transgression as proof of that power. What’s the point of being supreme earthly authority over people if you have to just sit there and follow the rules? Rules are for little people, are you calling me a little person? Watch me prove my status by committing abominations and not getting punished!
This is especially the case when you load up the stakes with anxieties and resentments and jockeying for power with others and cognitive dissonance and all that jazz. Now they don’t just want to prove their made-man status, they need to. And that’s not even including malignant narcissism in the mix.
And the thing is, there’s a whole category of people who are legitimately impressed by this, who see rule-following as a hallmark of losers, and rule-flouting as a hallmark of winners.
See also: trump voters, cart narcs, anti-maskers, karens etc etc.
The priesthood is an absolute magnet for these kinds of people - and also a magnet for people struggling with shame, hoping to overcome it by being all holy-like, for instance, existing pedophiles.
And on top of that, corrupt power structures like this very often have a culture of mutually-assured destruction: people end up required to do something horribly incriminating themselves so they can’t blow the whistle on others - and once they start down that road, the justifications start piling up. See also David Cameron and the pig, and police in general.
Layer on a teaching that the reputation of the organisation must be protected even at the cost of people’s own children, and yeah, perfect storm.
No way in hell has this only been happening for the last few decades; it’s only in that timeframe that the church’s power has diminished enough for word to get out.
Interesting theory, but can you back it up with any credible evidence? Because amongst priests, approx 4% appears to commit child abuse. This compares to 5-7% for public school teachers for example (source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/do-the-right-thing/201808/separating-facts-about-clergy-abuse-fiction). It seems the priesthood doesn’t really attract more pedophiles than other jobs do (surveys suggest approx. 5% of the population is a pedophile).
Perhaps their offense rate is higher given the opportunities they have, but I can’t quickly find good statistics on that.
The issue is the coverups and deliberate efforts of the organisation to protect the people doing it and keep them in business.
5% of the general populace with the tendency isn’t nearly the same kind of problem as 5% of a group that has extended access to children, the power to blackmail both the victims and the parents, and the knowledge that they’ll get safely moved on to pastures greener if their stomping ground starts getting risky.
Weird guy on the corner is a risk.
Person you’re forced to spend entire days with unsupervised, and who claims the ability to have your entire family tortured forever if there’s any trouble, and has an entire global organisation watching his back, rather a lot more of one.
How about scout leaders, church youth group leaders, etc.?
There’s a possible self-selection.
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.
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.
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
The best explanation i’ve seen is this:
Places that put children under the authority of adults (schools, camps, etc) are appealing for child predators; but where most will kick them out when/if found, the Catholic Church makes it easier for them to stay in.
This is because of a religious belief that God judges men for their sins, eventually rehabilitates them, and the job of mere mortals is to forgive and forget.
I really like this explanation because it doesn’t flatter my atheist sentiment and provides a very neat and rational cause-and-effect relation, it’s a thing that’s specific about the Church compared to other institutions.
Priests also take a vow of chastity, in people’s minds they’re supposed to be above sexual desire; and they have an extra aura of authority compared to the average teacher or summer camp instructor. Both of these things makes it harder for children and parents to question them.
And once they do question them, the Church gets a similar behavior to other institutions where they’ll try to protect their reputation by burying the case. I’m not sure which positions are supposed to be held for life, i assume most of them, and so that makes firing someone (or whatever the right word is in this context) a bigger deal.
Thems my attempted explanations
Priests also take a vow of chastity, in people’s minds they’re supposed to be above sexual desire; and they have an extra aura of authority compared to the average teacher or summer camp instructor. Both of these things makes it harder for children and parents to question them.
I would imagine that the vow of chastity thing also attracts some paedophiles trying to fight it. Some of them will then inevitably give in to the temptation if an opportunity arises.
BTW, it is not just the catholic church having those issues. This happens everywhere when people have a position of power over children.
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.
In Germany there has been a court ruling that it is allowed to call the catholic church a “Kinderfickersekte” which translates to “child raping cult”.
It was only a lower court and the church choose to not object against it probably because they were smart enough to fear the additional publicity this would get if a higher court would confirm it. https://taz.de/Gotteslaesterung-ist-kein-Problem/!5067953/?t
Germans really need permits for everything.
Here we don’t need to be allowed to call them that, we just can.
With allowed it doesn’t literally mean allowed. It means being able to publicly call them that without the church being able to sue for defamation.
Free speech is a thing in Germany, you can say pretty much what you want. But if you go around and accusing people of fucking kids, there’s going to be consequences.
We say in Germany everything that is not explicitly allowed is forbidden. And this is just a little bit exaggerated, but not much.
I mean that’s completely wrong as far as laws go. Socially that’s pretty much true
I think in most countries the church would hit you with a cease and desist notice if you called them a child raping cult.
That’s not exclusively German.
If they don’t like being called that they could always… stop raping children.
I’m not defending the church in any way, merely pointing out that they are a litigious organisation and it’s probably easier to take legal action than to stop raping children.
They could try to get cease and desist all they want, there’s a constitutional right in most countries that protects such speech.
By “most countries” I’m pretty sure you mean “the United States”, and your constitutional right does not protect you from civil slander or libel cases.
Most countries don’t have a “the church”
If there’s “a” church then there’s “the” church.
It doesn’t need to be an international organisation headquartered in the vatican city. It could be equivalent to your local knitting club. If you say mean things about an organisation you can expect them to take legal action to stop you.
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…
Catholic church is responsible for the worst atrocities in history.
Honestly not sure how anyone could support them anymore with how readily available historical information is.
