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Gay teacher wins lawsuit against Catholic school and diocese for firing

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  • #16
    Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post

    Do you foresee Catholic priests in America being allowed to marry?
    And do you think that would impact this problem?
    I never did buy this as an excuse. I'm not saying you're using it that way, just that I've heard it used in the context of the pedo rings that were being run by the RCC (and they were definitely rings). I would buy the celibate excuse if priests were getting busted with prostitutes or with porn on their smartphones. But they went far beyond just priests expressing sexual frustrations; they're actions were outright evil and demonic.

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    • #17
      Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post

      Do you foresee Catholic priests in America being allowed to marry?
      Well, "never say never", but it seems dubious to occur under Francis's pontificate. There was, I believe, more pressure to let Amazonian priests marry than there was for American priests, and arguably better reasons (refusal to allow married priests meant people in the Amazon were lacking access to sacraments), and Francis said no. I don't see him allowing it to happen in the US if he didn't let it happen where there was more pressure and better reason. So any such change, if done, would be done by a future pope.

      And do you think that would impact this problem?
      The issue with blaming celibacy is that one can easily see these sorts of problems in organizations that have no such requirement. The Boy Scouts is the obvious example--no celibacy requirement there! Other churches, obviously with no celibacy requirement, have had their own sexual abuse scandals, but tend to get less attention due to being much smaller so they can't really aggregate in the same way; it's notable that the most focus goes on the Southern Baptist Convention, probably not coincidentally the largest Protestant denomination in the country. Similarly, schools (at least public schools, not so sure about private ones) are a haven for sexual abuse, but no celibacy requirement. Like, look at this article from the Chicago Tribune from a while ago about how there was a lot of sexual abuse in the school district that was ignored by the higher-ups (or when they did do something, they just got rid of the teacher without telling anyone what had happened):
      http://graphics.chicagotribune.com/c...use/index.html

      Though honestly, I feel the problem does appear to have been dramatically reduced insofar as that the Catholic Church did enact a bunch of new rules to create new safeguards, e.g. any accusation of sexual abuse reported to anyone has to be immediately reported to the police and the accused person suspended during the investigation. Or, at least, they did in the US--maybe that didn't happen in other countries. But, limiting ourselves to the US where they did enact such policies, it seems nowadays whenever there's a new headline about sexual abuse, it's about stuff that happened quite a bit in the past, prior to those policies being enacted, not actual new and recent cases. That indicates that it isn't a problem currently... or, alternatively, people who suffer abuse aren't speaking out about it in the same way that in the past people didn't end up speaking out about it until much later. But with the zeitgeist being so in favor of the accusers nowadays, I suspect it simply is the case that it isn't happening in the present, or at least has been dramatically reduced.

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