Charles Lewis Oct 14, 2011 – 9:45 PM ET It would seem to be the ultimate in bad taste to look for a silver lining in the dark cloud of the Roman Catholic Church sexual-abuse crisis. To do so would be, in the minds of many, to minimize the damage done to countless children and teenagers who were betrayed by the “holy people” they trusted.
But for some of the scholars meeting this weekend at McGill University in Montreal, the abuse scandal offers something more than just despair: It is a chance for a broader society plagued with child sexual abuse to learn from the mistakes of the Church and the solutions it found to try to end the abuse.[TRY HARDER, MOTHERFUCKERS -PSUSA]
Dan Cere, a professor of religion, law and ethics at McGill, and one of the organizers of the conference, said the Church crisis now stands as a “case study” that secular society should pay careful attention to.
No other institution, he said, has produced as many reports and done as much analysis on the problem of abuse. [Oh for fucks sake look at the spin doctoring. NO other institution has perpetrated this kind of abuse and used their power to cover it up -PSUSA]
The conference, called “Trauma and Transformation: The Catholic Church and the Sexual Abuse Crisis,” will see 20 presenters take stock of what the Church has done to date to confront the crisis, how effective those measures have been and what more is needed. [What is needed is to stop trying to fuck little kids -PSUSA]
They will discuss the Church’s attempts to move from a culture of concealment to transparency, improvements made on the report of abuse to civil authorities and the attempts to screen seminary candidates to weed out potential abusers.
They will also look at clericalism — a form of cronyism and cloistered political environment in the Church — that led to cover-ups and a desire to protect the institution instead of the victims.
The news on Friday showed the Church still has a long way to go. The bishop of Kansas City and his diocese were indicted for failure to report an allegation of child abuse.
This comes a decade after the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops made it mandatory to report suspected abuse to civil authorities.
Still, despite the failings, insights the Church has gained can help guide secular society, Prof. Cere suggested.
“The Catholic Church has been the main focus of media and public attention, and there has been more study on abuse in the Catholic Church than on any other institution in society,” said Prof. Cere. “But if you stopped every clerical abuser tomorrow, the vast majority of kids in the world will still be abused by other people. The clerical abuse issue is a small part of a much larger global problem. [What unmitigated bullshit! Oh, look over here! Others are doing it too! So we're not so bad! In fact, we're here to help" -PSUSA]
“Even in the Catholic community the vast amount of children that will be abused will be by extended family, teachers and coaches. So if our fundamental concern is about the protection of children, ending clerical abuse doesn’t get us very far along the path to that goal.”
In a 2010 landmark study on the U.S. abuse crisis, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York found that between 1950 and 2002, 4,932 priests, or 4% of all U.S. priests, faced allegations of sexual abuse. Over that same period there were 10,667 incidents, many of which likely involved more than one child. [Well, the catholic church hasn't been exactly forthcoming about their kiddie diddling priests, have they? So their numbers don't mean shit]
Statistically however, said Prof. Cere, that is a sliver of the greater problem.
Child Help, an Arizona-based group that studies child abuse, says a report of child abuse is made every 10 seconds in the United States and more than five children die every day as a result of abuse.
It noted 90% of juvenile sexual abuse victims knew their perpetrators. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found 83,000 reports of child sexual abuse in 2005 alone.
“Child sexual abuse is very prevalent in institutions where there is interaction between adults and children and adolescents, particularly in environments where there is a mentoring and nurturing relationship between adults in children,” said Karen Terry, professor and acting dean at John Jay and the main author of the 2010 report.
“The information the Church has gathered is applicable to schools, other religious institutions and especially sports groups — where there is often a strong bond between a coach and an individual player.”
A key issue that the Church has tried to grapple with was the way it put its priests on a pedestal, said Sister Nuala Kenny, who is also a pediatrician and the former head of the department of bioethics at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
She said the more exalted the priest, the more likely that no one would believe he was capable of doing harm, which in turn affected the way abuse allegations were dealt with.
But this problem of power is not unique to the Church, she noted. Clericalism, she said, can infect any organization big enough to develop structure and authority.
“Many people experience ‘clericalism’ from doctors,” she said. “How many times have you heard, ‘I’m the doctor here!’ [I haven't heard it one single solitary time to my recollection -PSUSA] The medical profession is as hierarchal as the Church because the characteristics are the same: power over people who are vulnerable by reason of position.” {I have no fucking idea what the medical profession has to do with this, other than as an attempt to distract -PSUSA]
Poster Comment:
Religion. It sucks.