Canada Needs an Adult!

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11843792

Seems a bishop in the Orthodox church has been charged with molesting kids. Given how this sort of scandal has hurt the Catholic Church in recent years do you think the Orthodox church will react in a more open fashion or could we be looking at the tip of the iceberg in a similar but whole new scandal?

Comments

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

Citation please?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

http://www.stopbaptistpredators.com/article08/southern_baptists_consider_database.html

I guarantee you this would not have been passed over if this had been Catholics.

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

Not really the best source for an objective viewpoint.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the problem with that is that the leadership ignores the issue entirely. The only ones who point out the emperor has no clothes are in fact the ones advocating to deal with the problem in the first place, like the earliest stages of the Catholic sex abuse scandal.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

Yeah, not surprisingly I hadn't heard of that. I know that even if they had equal media attention, though, I'd still know more about the Catholic abuses just because of the confessed abuser who worked at my high school.

On the other hand, though, some of the more easily scapegoated (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2010/03/11/2010-03-11_1m_to_fight_hasidic_sex_abuse_sits_unused_since_2009.html) religious groups have their own problems with abuse, so I'm not sure that your larger point that this is anti-Catholicism really holds up. There are just a lot more Catholics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Religion) in the US than there are most other unified religious groups. When it's discovered that they've been misbehaving, odds are it touches a lot more people. After all, Catholics are Catholics, but Baptists who believe in Landmarkism aren't necessarily going to identify a problem in the SBC as a problem with "their" Church.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The problem is that there are still quite a bit more Protestants than Catholics in the United States, and that the Southern Baptists are just one example of this issue. Nobody, however, claims with a straight face that all Southern Baptist youth ministers are pedos. Where the corresponding claim about Catholics is a regular cheap joke on this community, along with one of the resident Your Premise On Drugs types focusing on Catholics despite that the Catholic terrorists are only an issue on the other side of the Atlantic.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but Protestants aren't monolithic like the Church is. I dunno, I can see it being influenced by anti-Catholic sentiment (FSM knows too many people read Jack Chick) but I don't think that's all of it, and IMO it's less than 50% of the issue. The other problems were the hierarchy's shuffling of individuals with known problems back into contact with children, failure to warn people, etc. The type of systemic corruption that the Catholic Church enabled, by the existence of its hierarchy, simply can't happen in decentralized faiths.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The Church is monolithic? First of all that's entirely in the eye of the beholder, as 1,000,000,000 people are *never* monolithic. Second, yes the problems with this in centralized denominations are obvious. De-centralized ones often choose to pretend it's Someone Else's Problem instead of actually dealing with it.

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

You've got a guy living in Vatican City who is called "the leader of the world's Catholics." Monolithic is fitting.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

They call him what they will, for most of Church history the Church's rules have been honored in the breach, not the observance.

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

You're going to have to expand on that comment because I don't get what you're driving at.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The most spectacular example is a Medieval one, of a noble who wanted beef on Friday when it was already prohibited so he threw a cow in the lake and called it fish. Essentially what the Church says is one thing, what Catholics IRL do is quite another. Always been that way, always will be unless they develop full-fledged mind control.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

And the top professional baseball division of the USA and Canada is called The World Series.

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

Which isn't relevant in any way.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

I think it is. The logic here is that a group of people could call their leader whatever they want, which still doesn't make him what they want it to mean. Alternately, a group of people might be calling themselves whatever they want, which still doesn't necessarily make them automatically what they claim to be.

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

The World Series is just a name. The Pope IS the leader of the Catholic Church. Catholics are members of the RCC and thus the Pope is leader of the Catholics.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Point taken. Catholics, then it is.