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

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (108406)	7/15/2007 7:28:54 PM
From: Freedom Fighter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

skeeter, I've expressed my view on this a bunch of times, but I don't want to be misunderstood. So I'll say it again. I am not defending the Church on this issue. A lot of terrible things were done and some inexcusable mistakes were made. I am saying that the number of "bad" Catholic priests is no higher than for any other group, religion or institution. By definition, that means it's not a huge problem among priests even though that's the impression one gets from the media. The Catholic Church is being singled out because it is so large (with large numbers come many cases) and because it has many powerful and vocal political enemies that do not agree with some church doctrine. Those enemies want to discredit and destroy the Church in any way possible by spinning the truth, lying, attacking it financially etc... This is just one example. IMO, a small percentage of bad priests and bishops does not justify the destruction or smearing of an entire church when it overwhelmingly does good for its communities and others around the globe. Yet that's exactly what the enemies of the church are trying to do. To begin with, there is a difference between pedophilia and homosexuality. One is about pre-pubescent children and the other is about sex between consenting adults. One is a clear cut crime and the other (in this case) often gets into grey areas of law that I don't understand well... They should be dealt with differently by both the law and the church. Many of the cases against the church have been about homosexual priests having consensual sex with teenage boys that were also either homosexual or confused/immature about their sexuality. Yet all the cases are categorized as pedophilia in the media to maximize the damage done to the church's image and eventually it's financial well being. The pedophilia cases should have been reported to the law by the pastors and bishops in charge once they found out about them. Those priests should have been tossed out of the priesthood immediately and either put in jail or a psychiatric hospital (handled as these crimes are usually handled). Hiding these cases or moving the priests around was a monumental inexcusable error in judgement and all Catholics should understand that (and do). The consensual homosexual cases are a lot tougher to deal with because age 16 is often grey, 17, 18, 19 is usually legal, relationships are often handled differently than one time affairs etc... These cases were all immoral by church standards, but in some cases they weren't illegal. Most of these cases were also handled privately, but it's not clear to me how they should have been handled. They certainly shouldn't be painted (or tarnished) with the same brush as the pedophile cases. IMO, the solution is having better recruitment standards, but there are some obvious problems for the church along those lines when it get into the homosexual priest aspect of this. Damned if you do, damned it you don't. This is probably the only unbiased article I have ever read on the subject. The only aspect of this he leaves out is that the enemies of the church are more than willing to use the movies, TV programming, news sources, and financial destruction in their efforts to damage the church's image and advance their own secular agenda. Some people disagree with me on that, but personally I think you have to "blinder than a bat" and "dumber than a rock" to not see that there are political agendas of all sorts aimed against Christians (and specifically the Catholic Church) that are not about open and honest discussions of doctrine and the church's role in society. They are not about the mistake the church made in these cases. They are "attacks". And IMHO, the people that implement these agendas are "evil" because they are willing to destroy a lot of good to advance their own self-interest. post-gazette.com