PBS Show Sex Abuse (church, priest, faith, bishop)

[ted08721]

“The Silence,” a 30-minute program documenting one of Bishop Donald Kettler’s journeys of atonement across the Fairbanks Catholic Diocese will be the lead story on Frontline, PBS’s public affairs program, at 8 p.m. Tuesday

Fairbanks Daily News-Miner - PBS TV show Frontline covers Alaska clergy sex abuse

[ted08721]

You can watch it here if you were unable to watch it last night


The Silence - Video | FRONTLINE | PBS

[ted08721]

It's a shame that it took the bishop eight years to admit the abuse, and then only after a court order to admit wrong doing and forced by the court to go apoligize to the victims.

And then we have those Catholics that post here that claim to be the only faithfull true Catholics that have been telling us that the victims such as the ones in this film are only out for the money and that they were probaly never abused.

[Smedskjaer]

The court ordered him to admit wrong doing? Then the admission is worthless.

[Thomas R.]

I've never felt the victims are all liars or out for money. I admit I've been generally less shocked or upset than many Catholics.

I read something like 20-30% of women and 10-15% of men were sexually abused as minors. It might be comforting to think all that abuse is happening by just a couple serial pedophile, but it doesn't seem that plausible. The percent of men who are sexually abusive toward minors is not high, but it's probably higher than what we'd like to believe.

In addition the priesthood is an exclusively male organization that places men in the company of children. In much of our society we've become concerned enough about sex-abuse that increasingly men having any connection to non-related children is deemed suspicious. Elementary school teachers are mostly women and I think pediatrics is one of the most female specialties in medicine. Boy Scouts is one that goes against this, men are in contact with non-relative children, but I wouldn't exactly say they've had no problem.

Still the priesthood is different than Boy Scouts in that it likely has a greater "esprit de corps", a kind of "Collar Wall" like cops have a "Blue Wall." These are men who feel they have a shared vocation, much like cops or soldiers. And much like cops or soldiers a desire to "protect your own" probably almost naturally develops.

Still taking all this into account the priesthood is not worse, and in some ways better, than the public school systems. The state needs public schools and secular media has no reason to tear them down as they can service journalism to some degree as well. The Catholic Church is in some ways an irritant, maybe even in a Catholic nation, as it's a trans-national organization that is not precisely necessary for the state or the media. May even be critical of both.

That being said it does bother me. The Catholic hierarchy should be better than ordinary human males in a fraternal order setting. More importantly encyclicals going back to the eighteenth century make it clear priest-candidates are to be vetted to assure they are safe to be around children. The victims are certainly real and the Church's response was often clumsy. Still if we had the kind of liberal outlook of the Episcopalians or the Old Catholics it probably would have happened as well. (Particularly as it did and does happen. Anglicans have had child-sex abuse issues since the Edwardian era going by what I know of history) Rembert Weakland was one of the more liberal bishops we had and he wasn't great on this issue. And the "golden age of liberal Catholicism", more or less, from John XXIII to John Paul I wasn't exactly great either on this.