Good afternoon to you, Poet
The Catholic Church will pay dearly for its sins and misplaced priorities. How far up in the hierarchy this goes, and how many are to be blamed, remains to be seen. The Church has been guilty of arrogance in the past, and there many disaffected people who are ready to condemn it in the most scathing of terms long before the full story is known. If members of the hierarchy acted to protect their own, and thereby knowingly placed children in jeopardy, they deserve condemnation. In many cases it is likely to have been more of a blind denial than an evil intent, similar to the cases where families rally around their own who have done bad deeds. Most of the abuse cases that we know of occurred ten years or more ago, and one must remember that attitudes toward pedophilia were different in past decades than they are today -- focusing more on treatment and "curing" of offenders, than on punishment or confinement.
The homosexual aspect is not going to go away, either. The Shanley case is the worst I have seen to date. This former priest appears to me to be truly despicable, and in my opinion his craving for boys totally overwhelmed whatever moral standards brought him into the priesthood in the first place. If his predatory behavior was covered up and enabled by higher-ups, I would not be the least surprised to find that those officials may have been gay themselves, which influenced their attitudes toward Shanley. There is still support within the gay male community for legitimatizing man-boy sexual activity, and I think it is likely that this insidious attitude reached within the Church. If this turns out to be so, it will be the ugliest aspect of the whole affair as far as I am concerned. |
