The scandals in the church has been a MUCH discussed topic around here. Well, in some cases, it is isn't actually a discussion. My dad and I are just shooting links to each other in otherwise blank e-mail messages and letting those proxies fight our battles for us. It is safest that way. Maybe I'll send him Henry's response to Douthat.
I'm also watching Henry on BloggingHeads discusss the WikiLeaks video.
I love this house. I'm going through a paint-everything-white phase. In a couple of weeks, after I finish selling all of our crap on Craig's List, I show you what we've done to the basement.
BlogHer 10 will be in NYC on Aug. 6 and 7th. I might check it out.
Tesla was the electric genius.
Apt. 11d 
Whoa. What? Are you implying that your dad is trying to DEFEND the Church?
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Here are some more good links on the catholic priest sex scandals:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/pope-vows-to-get-church-pedophilia-down-to-accepta,17201/
And this old one:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/pope-forgives-molested-children,101/
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Wendy,
I think the discussion is probably more along the lines of whose fault is this exactly and how do you fix it? Laura has already mentioned her preferred fix: women priests and allowing priests to marry (rather than ordaining married priests). I expect her dad has different ideas.
The thing to remember in assigning culpability for Church handling of abuse is that the Catholic Church is generally very, very, very slow, and not just in this area. Everything moves very slowly, both for good and for bad. You can see this even in very small things. I always say that in Catholic institutions, it’s always 1973. This is reflected in church music (which is just barely starting to get out of the guitar-and-flute folk ensemble rut that Thomas Day described in “Why Catholics Can’t Sing” (1992)). This time warp has its brighter side, though, for instance in education, where it means that Catholic schools miss out on at least some stupid education trends and are able to keep doing things (like teach handwriting) that a lot of public schools just stopped doing at some point.
30 years ago (and remember what I said about it still being 1973), I don’t think anybody was very good at handling sex abuse cases. If you google something as innocuous as “boy scouts 1980s,” the first page is about coverups of abuse cases. Even this week, I see that two school administrators have had to resign from our local public school district because they sent a pre-K teacher back into the classroom while he was being investigated for molesting a student. This is one of those issues where people keep reinventing the wheel and getting it wrong.
To give you an idea of the slowness of church reform, Martin Luther published his 95 Theses in 1517. Nothing happened. In 1527, Rome was sacked and devastated. There was finally consensus for reform. The Council of Trent was held from 1545-1563. It covered a lot of ground and a multitude of reforming religious orders sprang up and transformed the face of Catholic life. Trent was a huge big deal, so it’s hard to do it justice, but to give a small example, before Trent, you used to be able to buy a diocese and collect the income from it while living elsewhere, much as you would buy an annuity today. It took a long time to get to the Council of Trent, but by the time it happened, people were ready for it and the reforms actually stuck.
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This is reflected in church music (which is just barely starting to get out of the guitar-and-flute folk ensemble rut that Thomas Day described in “Why Catholics Can’t Sing” (1992)).
We are one in the Spirit.
We are one in the Lord.
If they used the freaking organ,
Songs could have more than one chord.
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Yes, Laura, you should send along Henry’s post.
The Catholic Church does not seem to think (as much as one can say that a large institution thinks at all) that it collectively, its lower-level full-time people or its senior hierarchy must answer to civil authorities in these criminal cases.
I haven’t followed the US trend too closely recently, so maybe this has gotten better in recent years. Maybe pushing a few dioceses into bankruptcy has had a salutary effect. I was able to find a call from 2003 for RICO prosecution of the Catholic Church: “Imagine a large, wealthy, and hierarchical organization that persists in believing it is above the law. Over many decades, the organization has employed a tradition of blood brother secrecy to keep its illegal actions from being analyzed or criticized in the press, or prosecuted and punished by legal authorities. It employs powerful, adept, and highly-paid lawyers, and resists judicial process whenever it can.
“Meanwhile, the organization’s leaders are united in a secret bond that requires them to do whatever it takes to protect the organization from scandal. For them, the cover-up of serious crimes is a way of life, a feature of their everyday business.”
Think that might focus some minds on ending cover-ups?
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