A commenter said that I seemed to believe in some sort of “omniscience” in Catholic bishops, because in my firm opinion, every one of them was aware of boy molestation.
That is my firm opinion because a great number of bishops moved the molesters around, following Mommy Professor’s opinion back then that any crime was the fault of Society or the Church, not of the “so-called Criminal.”
I do not believe that men as smart as the average Catholic bishop would be unaware of something so well known. The point the Church makes, that this policy came straight from Mommy Professor is passed over lightly by the media and everybody else. This is a more important lesson than any other.
Another lesson here that MIGHT interest you is why I think Catholic bishops are smarter than Orthodox bishops:
In the Catholic Church, all priests in the regular rite are required to be celibate. Orthodox priests are allowed to marry, but only if they marry BEFORE they take their priestly orders. All of the few Greek Orthodox priests I know are married, and most of them finished seminary and waited a couple of years to get married before they accepted ordination.
In fact, a lot of priests in Eastern Rites who are affiliated with Rome, and are therefore Catholic priests, marry before taking their orders. There are, technically, a lot of married Catholic priests.
But in neither church can a bishop be married. So an Orthodox bishop must be selected from the smaller pool of priests who choose not to marry. So the pool from which bishops are selected is both smaller and probably qualitatively different in the two institutions
I am not as shocked as Catholics tend to be over this particular scandal, but as usual the reason I am not so shocked is not going to make anyone much happier about what I say about it. It will just get members of other denominations as mad at me as Catholics are.
Like any Bible Belter raised in a family that had a lot of people inside the churches, I was raised knowing that often those who think they know the world would be appalled if they actually realized what people get away with in the Name of God.
We found it amusing that New Yorkers thought that a Country Baptist like Jimmy Carter might be naïve about politics. We all knew that the two places where cold blooded politics and warm pretenses are most at home are in small Baptist churches, where the minister is elected, and in the Papal elections in Rome.
An occupation where one talks and worries endlessly about Sin simply cannot be a healthy place for an average human to have one’s spirit.
We all know that psychiatry is famous for producing or attracting mentally ill people and kooks, and anyone who has some experience with the world does not find this difficult to understand.
A Bible Belter who has been around a bit expects special sickness inside churches the way a city person expects it inside psychiatry. It may be necessary for someone to deal professionally with sin and for someone else to deal professionally with mental illness, but that doesn’t mean that their jobs won’t warp them.
Likewise, medicine was not discredited in the last generation when so many MDs worked themselves to death.
An institution is not what it SAYS it is. An institution is a result of survival in competition with other institutions. Every society has a religious institution, but if all you consider is its Wordist foundation with no consideration of this survivalist reality, You are living in La La Land.
If the two thousand years since the crucifixion teaches us nothing else, it makes it perfectly clear that there is nothing that has not been justified, nay, DEMANDED in the Name of Christ at one time or another.
There is nothing that has not been declared to be a Mentally Healthy Attitude by those who dictate mental health in society during that long period.
In dealing with institutions, reality has very little to do with the books they publish.
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