Comment by lo_zamoyski
3 hours ago
> I left the church for a variety of reasons, one of which being the child abuse scandal.
What you do is your business, but you understand the fallacy, yes? One does not belong to the Church for the priests. And btw, if you want to be consistent, you should dissociate yourself from all institutions, because statistically, the rate of abuse in the Church (estimated by John Jay to be around 4%) is representative or less than the rates in all other religious or secular institutions. Public schools are notoriously bad in this regard, but you wouldn't know it, given the obsessive coverage of the Church to the exclusion of everyone else.
(I, of course, condemn all such sexual abuse, and I am critical of those who failed to deal with the issue properly. There is indeed a sense in which abuse by a priest carries much more gravity, and this is the position of the Church itself. Sexual abuse also peaked during the heyday of the sexual revolution, roughly during the 1960s-1980s. It wasn't a pedophilia scandal, as around 80% of victims were post-pubescent male teenagers. It was a homosexual ephebophilia scandal. Still terrible, but it does shift understanding of the nature and source of the problem significantly.)
> I am aware of the Catholic Church's long and often sordid history.
Sure, if you simply accept the ignorant tropes, ideological propaganda, and black legends circulating in a culture hostile to the institution since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, then maybe you'll be left with a dramatically dark picture that you describe as "sordid". But this is historically illiterate and intellectually immature.
> It wasn't a pedophilia scandal, as around 80% of victims were post-pubescent male teenagers. It was a homosexual ephebophilia scandal. Still terrible, but it does shift understanding of the nature and source of the problem significantly.
I feel like this pseudo-defence hidden in the middle of your few paragraphs tells the reader what they really ought to know. Making that distinction is enough to question your nature to be allowed around vulnerable people.
Thanks for being so charitable. It is not a defense. I explicitly said it was still terrible. It was a factual correction. You cannot accuse those guilty of wrongdoing of things they did not commit. That is still unjust.
If you don't see a difference of gravity between sexually abusing prepubescent children and post-pubescent teenagers, then I question your capacity to make moral judgements. Perhaps you'll attack someone for recognizing that murder is worse than rape, too.
And frankly, the libelous phrase "question your nature to be allowed around vulnerable people" that you directed toward me is utterly disgusting. How dare you.
But then, you've already demonstrated your comfort with false accusations.
> It wasn't a pedophilia scandal, as around 80% of victims were post-pubescent male teenagers. It was a homosexual ephebophilia scandal.
Honestly pretty unreal to come face to face with someone from a history book.