The Next Catholic ABUSE Scandal: Crimes Against WOMEN

[Segami]

" Coming to light are widespread reports of rapes of nuns -- young women from India's and Africa's poorest families "



We now know that the sex abuse crimes involving Catholic clergy first reported in large numbers in the United States may have been committed in equally high numbers in Europe. Amazingly, in these two relatively sophisticated places, parents, nuns, teachers and both religious and civil authorities -- Catholic and non-Catholic -- were willing to be blind to the often obvious occasion of sin. And they ignored the Catholic laity in the pews, preferring instead to make deals with Rome, or at least to respect its jurisdiction.


More disturbing, though, is that Catholic leaders continue to trivialize the growing scandal of sexual abuse in Africa and Asia. What started as a hurricane of sex scandals in the First World may well become a tsunami of charges from the Third World.


The rumblings from India and (especially) Africa, where the Catholic Church is seeing its greatest growth, are growing louder. The news from these places exacerbates our shock and concern: The sexual abuse of children by clergy is now coupled with widespread reports of rapes of nuns -- young women recruited from India's and Africa's poorest families.


Sex crimes against women by Catholic clergy may give more credence to ongoing arguments against the celibate priesthood. Daniel Maguire, a now-married former priest and a professor of religious ethics at Marquette University, has wisely observed that "enforced celibacy that is not job-related is such an invitation to pathology."


In Africa, however, where Catholic priests often have open heterosexual contact, the church's ranks are hefty with converts only a few generations removed from the illiterate, poor, uneducated innocents that missionaries first discovered living in tribal communities. Totally unaware of concepts like gender equity or criminal punishment for sexual assault, many of those locals came to a church that offered food, medical care and education in exchange for religious conversion. If there were crimes also committed around them, congregants paid for their survival with their silence.


more

<http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/04/23/next_catholic_priest_abuse_scandal/index.html>

[hlthe2b]

1. Geez... what next?

Lock up the pets, folks...:mad:

[SpiralHawk]

2. My dear gray haired, saintly (sort of) mother, now age 90, told me...

...of meeting with about a dozen women in her parish for coffee and pastry one day. One of the women asked how many had ever had a priest make a pass at them. Every hand in the room went up, including my mom's...

Sheesh. Priestly celibacy is apparently a Republicon Family Value in practice...

[malaise]

We caught the parish priest at the drive in cinema

with the wife of a well known man when we were 12 and thirteen. I was already an agnostic by then but we told everyone and the story spread faster than a bush fire during drought. The priest simply disappeared - migrated.

[Christa]

When will people realize

just how poisonous religion is, and how much religion protects perpetrators?

[Angry Dragon]

9. It is not religion that is at fault

It is the organizations that set themselves up as gods. The ones that have all the answers, put themselves above everyone else. It is the corrupt religious leaders, the corrupt politicians, the corrupt ceos, it is the people that use religion to corrupt instead of following their religion.

[Tansy_Gold]

11. But you can't have the organizations without the belief

You can have religion without churchs, but not the other way around. And that's the evil.


Tansy Gold

[Angry Dragon]

12. I agree

that you can have religion without churches but the problem lays with the ones that do not follow the religion they say they believe in. They are more interested in protecting the church than the religion.

[Tansy_Gold]

16. I don't think ANY church --

and by "church" I mean any organized social structure whose purpose is to enforce a belief system based on a religion -- can effectively follow that religion without protecting itself first.

The religion -- whatever it is -- exists without the church, because it is merely a set of beliefs. Therefore, once the believers in the belief organize themselves into a church, they MUST protect the organization. That's essentially its sole purpose -- self-preservation and self-perpetuation of the organization, none of which is needed to perpetuate the religion/belief system.

And I would distinguish churches and other religious organizations from secular groups since secular groups -- whether they are political parties or service organizations or charitable groups or even social clubs -- serve a purpose in the existing reality. While a church can serve some of those functions as well, its foundation is a belief in a supernatural, invisible, lacking-in-all-physical-evidence deity or deities that, according to that belief system, makes its believers somehow superior to anyone not believing in that system.

In other words, evil. JMHO.



TG

[Angry Dragon]

17. Thank you

for giving me something to think about

[HowHasItComeToThis]

10. RIGHT ON

[ejpoeta]

3. Jesus Christ! Doesn't really surprise me, but... I bet it's ok because somehow it's the woman's

Fault. I am so tired of the fact that people continue to participate in an enterprise that appears to condone child abuse and abuse of women.

[Berry Cool]

5. Well, OF COURSE it's the woman's fault.

Eve tempted Adam and all that. :sarcasm:

[madokie]

4. All I know is if I was abused as a child I more than likely would be incarcerated today

I'm proud of my non-religion status and guess what I'm not going to hell when I die either, nor are any of you going to heaven either.

[Klukie]

6. The rule of Celibacy is the root cause of all of the sex abuses within the church

IMO.

[bullwinkle428]

7. Wow...that's gonna make blaming "teh gays" a lot tougher, eh?

[AngryOldDem]

8. Here's more about the abuse of nuns

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/angela-bonavoglia/the-catholic-church-abusi_b_531184.html

<<"Much of this violence," he declared, "has a sexual background." Yes, let's start there. In 2001, a year before the pedophilia crisis hit the news, the National Catholic Reporter analyzed internal Church reports written by two Catholic nuns -- a physician who was a Medical Missionary of Mary, and the AIDS coordinator for the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development -- documenting the sexual exploitation of nuns by priests in 23 countries on five continents.

One of the most stunning allegations concerned a nun impregnated by a priest, who forced her to have an abortion that killed her, and then officiated at her funeral. Priests were alleged to have raped young nuns who approached them for the required certificates to enter religious orders; to have told nuns that oral contraceptives would protect them from AIDS; and to have used nuns as "safe" alternatives to prostitutes in countries plagued by AIDS -- with some priests going so far as to demand that heads of convents make the nuns sexually available to them.<<

I don't believe there has been a more corrupt institution in the history of the world, and that is not hyperbole. It is made especially more so because these are the very same people who dare to tell the rest of us how to live our lives.

[ensho]

13. in Miami a priest killed a nun over a sexual event

several years ago.

when I was a kid (long ago) people said the catholic church had places for young girls to go to have unwanted babies was really a place for nuns to have priests babies.

[Mari333]

14. shit, crimes against women been happening in the CC since forever

see
Malleus Maleficarum


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_of_witches

[efhmc]

15. When the church, all males, and God have supreme

sovereignty over a woman's uterus, one can expect no less than the power to treat females as sexual prey.