Hieronymus
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User ID: 419
Hieronymus
5d ago
I am not sure whether you are asking about the problem or the fix, but I don't think the confessional is involved in either case. As far as I know, most states exempt the confessional from their mandatory reporter laws but not pastoral advice.
Hieronymus
5d ago
Everyone is trained as a state mandated reporter.
I understand why a Catholic would draw that particular line in the sand. The bishops demanded discretion and then abused the heck out of it at the expense of the children under their care. The obvious fix is to deny them that discretion.
But this raises church-state and child welfare issues that are not theoretical. For example, spurious child welfare investigations are a real harm, and the mandatory reporter system guarantees them. (They are not on the level of clerical pederasty, for sure, but those who have been through them do not trivialize them.) Trust is another casualty: If you know a father whose temper shows too much in the discipline of his children, would you encourage him to talk to his pastor? If his pastor is a mandatory reporter, you probably shouldn’t; maybe this is less of an issue for Roman Catholics, where priests are rarely family men, but it is an issue for Protestants.
Hieronymus
7d ago
Point taken.
“Values differences” is an interesting phrase, and I think the way you used it here suggests some differences in deeper underlying ideas, but I can’t quite get at them yet. I’ll think on it.
Hieronymus
7d ago
How many priests are Right Wing Icons?
There’s Marcial Maciel, but he’s an outlier.
I was going to leave well enough alone, but I want to partly push back on your post and partly on FtttG’s. I am working from memory and partial understanding here, and I welcome corrections.
It’s important to note that a supermajority of Roman Catholic sex-abuse cases were sexually active gay priests canoodling with underage teenage boys. There were other cases and other victims, but those set the tone. So part of the coverup came from networks of sexually active gay priests, and some sexually active straight priests, who were already accustomed to covering for each other, and whom an investigation might implicate in adult but compromising sexual activity.
The other factor I can see is the social mores downstream of Roman Catholic ecclesiology. Rome teaches that, ordinarily, salvation is mediated by the church defined by properly ordained hierarchs in communion with Rome. To their credit, many of the hierarchs seem to take this seriously; it’s not just an excuse to gather power. One of the consequences of this is that anything with the potential to alienate someone from that hierarchy is a threat to his soul; even the R.C. bishops not involved in sexual immorality sought to lesson the scandal, in both colloquial and theological senses, and that often looked like a coverup. When Pope Benedict tried to restrict Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s public activities, McCarrick defied him, because – well, what could Benedict do without exposing his misconduct?
To be clear, this does not contradict R.C. ecclesiology, which would take a biblical or theological argument and not a pragmatic one. But I think the scandal is a strong practical argument against clerical celibacy, which led to such an overrepresentation of gay men in Catholic ministry, and which is a discipline imposed by a decision of the Roman Catholic church and not a dogma it is bound to.
It would be straightforwardly consistent with R.C. doctrine for pope and councils to allow the ordination of married men, as is routinely done in the Eastern Rite Catholic churches and occasionally done for married Lutheran and Anglican pastors who convert. I suspect that Rome could also allow already-ordained priests to marry without any change in doctrine, although I am not certain of this, and it may be unwilling to accept the hit to ecumenical relations with the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches. (To my outsider’s eye, Counter-Reformation statements on marriage played pretty fast and loose with the distinction between illicit and invalid, and I am hesitant to draw too many conclusions.)
If pastors preaching chastity can get handsy, it's not the values being taught, it's the power and the hierarchy.
I think it’s just normal human sin. I don’t know the base rate, but as I recall pastors are significantly less likely to abuse children than school teachers.
That list was a weapon in the culture war. There are some progressive (by evangelical standards) people and organizations whose M.O. is to ignore base rates, ignore any exculpatory evidence, and accuse denominations or institutions of being shot through with sexual abuse, then demand checks and balances that subvert the denomination’s polity. The people they want to grant new power over doctrine and practice are consistently from the progressive wing of the denomination, and they always think that the right way to address sexual abuse is by moving the denomination closer to the broader culture.
Hieronymus
18d ago
But you see a lot of people with an agenda trying to defang the war effort or get it cancelled or whatever.
It would be helpful if you could give much more specific examples for those of us who haven't been following domestic political developments as closely as you have.
But, that said, I think the tendency to rally political opinion around the flag in wartime is generally far too strong. If it's been counterbalanced by modem partisanship then that's worrying, but worrying for what it says about partisanship rather than for any other reason.
Hieronymus
26d ago
Customers do not like you asserting your ideology over their needs.
I don't share historic OpenAI's or Anthropic's concerns about being paperclipped by an accidental AI god, so I disagree with many of their positions on AI ethics. But both Microsoft and the DoD made business agreements knowing and agreeing to respect the other party's principles, and both reneged the moment it was inconvenient to keep their words. I can't really respect that, any more than I can respect the business leaders who appealed to their people's ideals as long as it was convenient and then sold them out for money.
I think Fire tablets are pretty popular with parents, because they are cheap and able to be locked down. My understanding is that there is kind of an uncanny valley of restriction though – that there is a mode appropriate for very young children (with individual books and such managed by parents as shortcuts on the home screen) but that the step up from that is too big a jump.
I am not a parent, so I don’t have that experience myself, and I don’t envy parents having to find the intersection of what is wise and what is reasonably possible.
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