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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (106890)	1/19/2007 10:44:46 AM
From: Freedom Fighter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

>Wayne, 1. It really doesn't matter if the molested kids are male or female. Marriage makes no difference in either case. Child molesting is totally off the map for that. Most male molesters are married. < Yes obviously I know that. But the fact that it is little boys makes it extremely clear that marriage would not solve the problem. You had mentioned the abuse problem also. If priests were running around pushing themselves on adult or late teen female parishoners, those that say allowing marriage would help would at least have a reasonable case in that regard. But most people don't care much about the occasional adult male/female relationship because they are concensual and at least semi-consistent with the teachings of the religion about relationships. It's a scandal and then goes away. The core problem is one of recruitment and the inability to discuss the issue honestly from the Catholic perspective because of the political environment. This issue has been studied in depth internally. They have very good stats on why they have a male child abuse problem "specifically inside the priesthood" to such high degrees relative to the general population (the molestation issue is different in the general population). There is simply no way they can deal with it openly without getting trashed from another direction. I can spell out the stats I have heard if you want. The mistake they made was in not removing the problem priests from a position in which they could harm anyone else. They should have made sure those priests got the mental health care they needed. Then they should have been given roles that kept them away from all children. If that didn't work, they should have been thrown out and reported. In many cases they got care, but then were simply moved from parish to parish where they had a role with kids again. That was the disgraceful part. In any event, if marriage won't solve the abuse problem as some people have suggested, then it's just a matter of weighing the advantage of more and potentially more suitable recruitment opportunities for this specific religion if marriage was allowed vs. the downside of having priests with split attention between family and parish.