When abuses are uncovered at a particular school, is it also discovered that the faculty member responsible has received an all-expenses-paid transfer to an identical or better position at another school in another area?

This would be the difference in culpability.  This would be why it is necessary to acknowledge the illegal, immoral, and dangerous actions of the Catholic church, not just the specific individuals directly involved in each of the millions of cases.

It´s always astounding to have someone give such a steadfast assessment of my character from an internet comment. It must be a grand feeling to be so sure about the world and anything in it. As you have helpfully pointed out, I´m probably to naive to ever hope to achieve such unerring judgement of complete strangers.

Just to avoid any further misunderstanding on your or Antinous´ part: I don´t give a fuck about the pope and there´s no meaningful difference to me between someone proclaiming themselve “the vicar of christ” or “the vicar of Chuck Norris”.

Were there cover ups   Yes.  Should those people be brought to justice?  Yes. 

This is besides the point I have been trying to make.  All the comments are doing is saying the Catholic Church is evil.  So I ask, “Is the institution of Penn State University intrinsically evil?”

Because they also systematically covered up sexual abuse.

That is my point,  

The Church is just an institution like any other, like Penn State.  In any institution sufficiently large there will be a certain percentage of deviants abusing their power.  This is a problem of society as a whole, not particularly of the Church.  Or Penn State.

Focusing on the Church as an institution rather than tackling the problem from a general societal point of view is unhelpful, in my view.

Time for my nap.  Bye.

It’s nice that you can afford to ignore it, but as a queer woman living in Arizona, I sure as hell can’t, and won’t.

Seriously, you are spewing a bunch of privileged horseshit. Nice to live in a magical land where apathy is not detrimental to your livelihood, but I have to live with God Bot Jan Fucking Brewer as my governor, thankyouverymuch.

Let’s not prosecute the PEOPLE WHO COMMITTED THE CRIMES, let’s take the tack of blaming the institutions.

Are you being deliberately obtuse? The Catholic Church systematically covered up the crimes and transferred abusers to new venues where they could find fresh victims. If you don’t have anything to contribute but histrionics, please take a nap.

These abuses don’t happen in a fucking vacuum.

Its the demonization that bothers me.

The last two popes have campaigned against condom use in Africa, leading to millions of people being infected with AIDS. They tell poor, uneducated people that if they use condoms, they’ll spend eternity on fire. They’re mass murderers. They ARE demons. Deal with it.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/02/13/mounties-raped-abused-b-c-aboriginal-girls-rights-watchdog-alleges-in-report/

So here we have ANOTHER institution which has extensively covered up abuse.  Penn State, the Mounties, all sorts of schools…this is a grand societal problem not one of Catholicism specifically which is what I was trying to argue.

Unfortunately,gracchus, for the most part aside, nobody seems to be able to detach themselves emotionally from their disgust at what the Church has done and dispassionately argue the point here.

Let me clarify, I’ve been arguing my point as thought exercise – can an institution, in and of itself be guilty of an offense perpetrated by a small subset of it’s members and therefore be considered evil.

Gracchus, I take you point about “beige dictatorship” (most eloquently discussed here:  http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/political-failure-modes-and-th.html) and I think there is merit in that.  However, I don’t think you can call the Church as an organization, intrinsically evil any more than you can the Mounties evil.

For the record, I’m the very definition of lapsed Catholic, though I’m also not a Roman Catholic.  The Church I was born into has a married priesthood but the Church is in full communion with Rome.  I never, ever, witnessed nor heard about any abuse growing up in the Catholic School system in Canada.  

I am NOT defending the Church.  When you – gracchus – write:

“And let’s be clear, you have been doing everything you can to defend the institution: when it’s preserving itself, you laud the institution itself by saying it “thinks in decades and centuries”"

Let me add that that line comes directly from a priest who is a very good friend, happily married with three kids, holds down a full-time job as well as ministering to his faithful at weekends.  It is not meant to “laud” the Church, merely to convey it’s thinking. Anyway, I’ve had enough of trying to discuss detailed, complex arguments on this forum, it’s clearly not really possible.  Too much gets lost in translation.

Am I supposed to hate all Americans because the American govt and it’s agencies use weapons of terror (drones), incarcerate people without trial, torture suspects, and start foreign wars with depressing regularity? I can tell you that as much as I hate American foreign policy I don’t hold every single American personally responsible. And I don’t because it would be ignorant and short-sighted to do so. Plus my American friends would probably take it personally. 

So I’m all for exposing and prosecuting paedophile priests and the people who sheltered them. But I’m also aware that most priests aren’t paedophiles. 

Its the demonization that bothers me.

Cor this is one of the best non-sequitors I’ve seen in a long time. My logic is that comments display a startling ignorance of the object of their contempt. And history shows that this is dangerous.I certainly don’t believe in God in any form, nor would I wish to discuss God as I find the subject deeply boring and irrelevant. For this argument to be more that a bunch of silly game playing it would have to exist on a sounder footing. It doesn’t. 

But it occurred to me that some of the verbiage being spewed here was no better than blind faith in God. It’s just some shit people believe and act on. How is that different. 

So my point is not about the church per se, but about the quality of the debate. 

But you are going to offer a critique then how does your ignorance of the thing you are critiquing differ from the false premises of religion? It the ignorant criticising the ignorant. 

Have you ever thought that maybe teenagers of the same age that were helping the resistance had themselves been brought up to do just that?

Not sure why a Calvinist is supporting the Pope.

They used the power of Touchdown Jesus to lure Manti to Northwestern Indiana, gave him a prime spot as an inside linebacker for four years, and then pulled the rug out from under him once he didn’t win the Heismann.  Elements inside the Papacy were involved, I am certain, but the Pope could claim plausible deniability since he never actually ordered Lennay.

There’s more to this than meets the eye 

THIS IS THE FUNNIEST SHIT THAT I HAVE EVER HEARD:

I’m just saying it’s not the institution itself that is guilty. 

WOW.

As much as I’d love to see that, the Pope (if you believe all the fairy tales) is meant to be “the vicar of christ” and not “the vicar of Chuck Norris”. 

“ I´ll take your heroic declarations with a grain of salt.”

Not my heroism, and I know exactly where you stand now as you obviously don’t seem to be up for any self sacrifice. You know what there are plenty of examples of 16, 15, 14 and younger to this very day making plenty of self sacrifice. None of which the current “vicar of Christ” has shown much of. The fact that you think a 16 year old can’t possibly show any self sacrifice just shows up your own naivety. 

Sometimes an institution itself is so dysfunctional and corrupt that it is indeed culpable. It’s well understood and not particularly controversial that, after a certain amount of time, any institution’s primary goal becomes self-preservation — even if that also means preserving the problems it was meant to solve, or sweeping other problems that emerge from the institution’s infrastructural systems under the rug. If those systems are outdated or severely flawed to begin with, the situation is worse.

The institution begins demanding exclusivity in its members and leaders, codifying it or integrating it into institutional culture. In cases where there are severe flaws as described above, organisation’s leaders understand that to reach that position of power and to serve the institution they have to act unethically or even immorally as a condition of the job. They may not admit it to themselves, they may come up with rationales to explain it away, but that’s what happens — especially in highly hierarchical institutions.

I was discussing this the other day regarding the manifesto of the fugitive ex-cop in California which — despite its clear reek of mental derangement — brings up some very real problems with the LAPD. But that institution is so fundamentally dysfunctional, so suffused with violence and corruption that even whistle-blowers are twisted by the organisation’s culture and by their despair at changing things. When they finally do express themselves in public, they are so damaged and (in the case of this person) deranged that they do so in a way that makes it easy for the organisation to discredit their legitimate points.

So yes, you may very well say that the institution of the U.S. Presidency bears some blame for extra-judicial murder, because the institution demands that its leaders do everything they can to preserve the institution. In the case of the Presidency, there are checks and balances and a degree of public accountability put on it — not on Obama himself, or on any individual President, but on the Executive Branch.

There is no such accountability with the institution of the Roman Catholic Church, which has behaved in this case precisely as one would expect of an ancient and fundamentally bent and extremely hierarchical institution that’s managed to preserve itself for almost 2000 years.

The Roman Catholic Church as an institution has demanded that not one but several Popes and hundreds of other officials cover up child abuse, because not covering it up would have meant calling into serious question some of the core mechanisms meant to preserve the institution.

And let’s be clear, you have been doing everything you can to defend the institution: when it’s preserving itself, you laud the institution itself by saying it “thinks in decades and centuries”; when it demands its leaders do evil to preserve it, though, suddenly it’s not the hierarchy and leadership but “the People” who are to blame and the layperson is just as guilty as the successive leaders who’ve carried out these policies over decades. As always, the defenders of religious institutions want to have things both ways.

Stop making excuses for this rotten institution.

What would Jesus have done? Now you´re making me laugh. What would Chuck Norris have done?

Anyway, I´m sure each and every one of you commendable people would have gladly given your life to make a point in his place, especially being an impressionable teenager who had been indoctrinated with Nazi values as long as he could think.

Have you ever thought that maybe teenagers of the same age that were helping the resistance had themselves been brought up to do just that?

As long as I don´t see any of you gladly giving your lives for a cause that 90% of your peers wouldn´t call a good one, without the benefit of a late birth to have the proper perspective, I´ll take your heroic declarations with a grain of salt.

Btw this has nothing to do with the whole pope BS which I couldn´t find more contemptible or the atrocities the Nazis committed. It has only to do with how much self sacrifice a 16 year old kid is capable of and can be blamed for not making.