If you were instead to ask something like, “Would you have hidden jews in your house during the holocaust?” then you might expose me as someone as courageous as I would like to be, because I can’t say I would have actually risked my life rather than be cowed by the state.

But would I protect someone who has no extraordinary powers of life and death over me after they sexually abused my children in order to save face in my community?  Absolutely not, and if I did I would welcome being charged with obstruction of justice, conspiracy and/or aiding and abetting.  I would deserve it.

Still, we never know until the moment arrives…

Catholic priest child sex abuse files

For a second I thought the headline said, “Catholic priest files against child for sex abuse” and I had some cognitive dissonance until I re-read it again.

In hindsight, we like to think of ourselves as courageous and and protective, but when the reality hits – what do you do?

I knew a couple other priests on the list. One of them killed himself after being exposed. 

Archdiocese of Los Angeles has been all kinds of fucked up for a pretty long time.  

I think you’re confusing anti-Catholicism with anti-Catholic.  Growing up in the RCC I’ve seen plenty of the former, and none of the latter.  I also remember the nuns telling us to hold our breath as we passed the Protestant church “because the Devil lives there.”  Each group of leaders disses the competition because they’re all feeding from a finite trough of available local cash. Butts in pews means dollars in the basket.

Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.

Adios, dental dam!

These records only specifically name people that the court system has very strong reasons to believe are guilty of crimes.  Other names are, as you note, redacted.

By contrast, the BSA dumped files naming everyone ever accused, regardless of the plausibility of the accusations.

Thanks for pointing out my mistake.

The situation is not analogous to the BSA one; I have overstated the similarities. but I’ll leave my previous comment stand so as not to scramble the thread.

I know a man who was accused by the BSA.  During the time period that he supposedly committed crimes against young men, I spent a good deal of time alone with him.  I was 14 years old or thereabouts; the age he was supposedly molesting.  I met him because I was riding my bicycle home from school, and saw him using an old nail for a welding rod to patch a hole in a once-beautiful antique Mercedes.  I have always been intrigued by that sort of thing; classic cars and clever engineering hacks.

I helped him rebuild that car completely over the course of several years, and during that time I don’t remember him every making any sort of advances towards me, despite the Boy Scouts’ later insistence that he could never safely be left alone with a child. I remained friendly with him for years, until I moved away, and my parents knew him long after.

Apparently this man is gay (I had no idea – my gaydar is terrible) and since the Boy Scouts are incapable of distinguishing between paedophiles and homosexuals, when another scout leader accused him of being unmanly, the BSA national organization asked him to defend himself in a private kangaroo court.  When asked directly, this gentleman stated that he was indeed gay, but that he had no age inappropriate relationships with any boys in or out of scouting.  The BSA promptly banned him from scout leadership for life, and made an entry in their famous files stating that he was unfit to be in the presence of children.  Because of the secret nature of the proceedings of the BSA he was tried and convicted without proper evidence – and without any child making any accusation against him.

What I’m trying to say is that these organizations are provably untrustworthy, and provably abusive of children, and one of the many evil things that will come from all this is that any who were falsely accused will never remove the stain from their reputations.

You, of course, are free to make your own decision of who is a trustworthy source.

She has since been kind of vindicated

As in ignored because she admitted that she has bipolar disorder? And because she’s actually a New Age Christian nutbag.

and yes, the cover up is even worse than the abuse. 

that is all.

http://cdn-www.cracked.com/articleimages/dan/parasites/tongue.jpg

But take a step back and the Pentateuch is about 500 pages of bragging about committing genocide.  The one redeeming quality of it is that it’s all lies.  If any of it was true it would be a catalog of some of the worst atrocities committed by man before the machine age.

So I guess I’m saying it’s a weird choice to start off the book of the religion of love.

But nobody’s going to care; everyone will line up to lynch the falsely accused right alongside the vicious predators.

I know a fellow who was in the Boy Scout’s “perversion files”.  The men who accused him are dead, and no minor ever made accusations against him, but he is now considered to be a child predator by millions of newspaper readers.  The local Gannet rag ran a front page headline “LOCAL MEN IN BSA PERVERSION FILES” which named him and published where he lives, with no prior warning.

We may claim that we don’t trust or believe in the Catholic Church, but how many of you are willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to the people named in these lists without any other evidence?

The people who will suffer from this despite having done no wrong are victims, too.  The Catholic Church (and the BSA) had a policy that not only harmed children, it harmed many others in the community, and now that includes the falsely accused who can no longer clear their names.

EDIT: the released files only name persons plausibly believed by the court system to have committed crimes, either child molestation or conspiracy to cover it up. These are not like the BSA file dump was; my mistake for firing off a post without following the links first.