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I read the headline and was prepared to support the church on this one (for once). Then I read the first paragraph of the article. I have never made a 180 on an opinion so fast. The fuck is wrong with the Catholic church and child abuse? Why is this a constant problem with them?
To be fair, lawyers get to avoid this (I assume). This isn't the same obviously, but if you view it from their frame of reference it is even more important. They must confess if they want to be "saved from God", and similarly you should be honest with your lawyer to be saved from the court.
I don't know where I stand on this issue. I obviously want them to be caught, and the religion is bogus, and the organization causes tremendous harm. However, if someone believes it's true then this is pretty significant overreach and directly interferes with religious practice. They start with the crime most people will agree with, and then it sets a precident to go after other crimes in the same fashion. I'm too skeptical of the state to trust it'll always be a good thing.
Lawyers don't get to avoid this. They need to, in fact they are forced to, otherwise the entire legal system fails. There is no justice without privileged defense. That's literally in the fifth amendment.
The desire for clergy not to be mandated reporters goes in the opposite direction from what you suggest. The slippery slope here doesn't lead to breaking freedom of religion, it leads to a religious organization hiding crimes whenever they want.
Confession requires penitance. They must confess and repent to God, but there is no reason why the penitance for Catholic confession can't involve actually fucking answering for your crimes.
It is not the opposite direction. It's the same direction in a different system. Their religious system fails if confession isn't only between you and the clergy.
I don't think we want to be in a position where someone confesses that they aided with an illegal abortion, like they're required to by their religion, and is arrested for it. Not all laws are good or just. If mandatory reporting for one crime is made, there's no reason it shouldn't expand to more/all crimes.
No, they only don't have to report confessions. They'd still be legally required to report if they discover crimes happening, like other clergy committing crimes. It'd only be things said in the confession box that are safe.
I don't like religion, and I really dislike organized religion, but I also hate giving the state power over people's lives. We bend over backwards to get revenge in our society, to a massive detriment to ourselves. We give up so much just so we can get back at someone else. We need to stop this. Freedom is important. Yes, security is nice too, but how much security does this buy for the amount of freedom it could lose?
And yet, it's effectively a universal truth that child sexual abuse is the gravest offense imaginable, and a very common result of religious secrecy is covering up child sexual abuse.
Slippery slopes are fallacies for a reason. We can all fucking agree on a law against child sexual abuse being fair and just. When it comes to anything else, we can have that conversation.
Except for the fact that there's a legal loophole in place for confession. If you subpeona a priest who saw someone commit a crime, all he has to say is "I cannot testify, it is against my religion."
Do you understand the issue? The priest can't ever say "I can't testify because I heard it in confession" because that in and of itself is a breach of the seal of confession.
So he can only say "I cannot testify" and we all have to leave it at that.
Slippery slope is a type of fallacy. It isn't fallacious always.
'in its barest bones, a slippery-slope argument is of the following form:
“If A, which some people want, is done or allowed, then B, which most people don’t want, will inevitably follow. Therefore, let’s not do or allow A.”
The fallacy occurs when that form is not fleshed out by sufficient reasons to believe that B will inevitably follow from A'
(https://intellectualtakeout.org/2016/03/not-every-slippery-slope-argument-is-a-fallacy/)
Saying that this would create a precident to include other crimes being required to be reported is not fallacious.
That's just blatantly incorrect. They're not required to report on stuff they're told in confessionals and that's all. They're still required to report on crimes they witness, just like everyone else. Do you think lawyers are t required to report crimes they witness?
Yes, just as a lawyer would have to do when questioned about a client. Anything they did outside of attorney-client privledge they must speak about, it'd be the same for the clergy. It's not an issue for lawyers, so I don't see an issue for the clergy.
In an ideal world they could hear the confessional and check up on the victim. I'm sure this won't always happen, but it may. If they're required to report it, they'll never be told, so can't act on it.
I don't like religion, and especially organized religion. However, this steps too far into a government that forcing it's way into people's lives that I don't like.
Is this intentionally bad faith, or just a deep misunderstanding of the legal system?
If a lawyer is a witness to a crime that their client committed, and is involved in proceedings related to that crime, they have to recuse themselves from representing the client. They literally cannot be that person's lawyer anymore. They keep all information already held under attorney client privilege, but any future information is no longer protected.
They also have the bar - a legal association specifically dedicated to ensuring that lawyers all comply with the law. If they break the law in the course of their duties, the association exists to prevent them from ever practicing law again.
It's not perfect, but it's something.
It's not the same for the clergy. A priest can be witness to whatever, and there's no legal obligation to stop being the person's priest or hearing their confessions. But there is a tremendous amount of evidence that clergy associations have been exclusively dedicated to ensuring that clergy never face the law at all.
Privledged information is protected, yes. Not other information.
An association of legal professionals, not a legal association. It is private.
...specifically dedicated to ensuring that lawyers all comply with the law. If they break the law in the course of their duties, the association exists to prevent them from ever practicing law again.
Sure, I'd advocate for something like that, though the clergy does have administration that regulates them also. You can argue they should be more strict, but it does exist.
Imagine if any other type of organization had this sort of systemic problem with child abuse.
“Wow, there sure are a lot of pedophile employees at Apple Computer abusing their customers’ children.”
“Dang, the US Department of Transportation sure does have a kiddie diddler problem.”
“Holy shit, what’s the deal with all the abusive perverts working at Ronald McDonald House?”
Sounds absolutely bonkers, right‽
If any secular organization was having this kind of problem at scale, we’d all be calling for their blood. Yet the church gets a pass somehow. A few complaints, a few lawsuits, some big scandals, some negative press, but fundamentally nothing ever changes.
To hell with the church.
You mean like the Boy Scouts?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_Scouts_of_America_sex_abuse_cases
They do affiliate themselves with Christianity - maybe not Catholicism specifically, but the Catholic Church is hardly the only denomination of this cult that can’t keep their hands/mouths off of kids’ genitals.
Frankly if I ever had kids I’d have a gaggle of drag queens babysit before I let any even slightly religiously affiliated group near them.
I think Boy Scouts have done a better job reforming than the Catholic church.
Recently maybe, but there was decades of abuse before that.
Yup, that's what reforming means
Do the Boy Scouts have a legally protected mechanism to talk with each other about their child fucking that I’m not aware of?
Like a Signal chat? Wtf are you even asking?
I’m talking about how Catholic priests can legally refuse to report child abuse revealed to them in confessional in most states, the subject of this post.
That’s affiliated with the church so it’s probably ok.
I mean, you joke, kind of, but a massive, MASSIVE amount of QAnon bullshit that drives current rightwingers in the US is literally nothing but inventing fake demonic pedophile cults and putting anyone they don't like in these made up cults...
All so that they can demonize others, and what this functionally does is give these nutjobs an infinite well of whataboutisms to either shift a conversation about pederasty and child abuse in any christian church/sect ... over to 'the even worserer badderer people'...
...or just do something akin to a 'no true scotsman' and claim that anyone in any church who is a pedo or child abuser... well actually they're not a real christian, they're a secret demonic cult member who is embedded in the organization to both commit evil and also to discredit the church when they are exposed.
The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it claims to do.
These people invented what is essentially their own new religion, a religion dlc, which entirely serves as a mechanism to avoid and make impossible discussions of actual child sa, abuse, going on in the institutions they revere.
I don't want to derail the discussion, but Churches aren't the only organisation attracting/raising child sexual abusers. Sports clubs are an example for secular organisations facing a similar problem.
Sports clubs on the other hand don't have this kind of power and history as organised religion.
Sports clubs would simply be banned, but try to ban the Catholic Church in a place with a Catholic majority.
What about the CIA and the pentagon?
The entire religion is based on shame and fear. The clergy take advantage of both.
This isn't just Catholic church thing. It's rampant in any religion, organization, hierarchy, etc. where the person on top of the totem pole demand obedience, they are insulated from outside accountability, and there is a culture of secrecy.
Go probe Ultra-orthodox Jews, Amish community, Quranic Schools. It's rife with sexual abuse.
It's a constant problem because its a cult that wants to protect its cult members. It finds no issue with indoctrinating kids, to the point where nobody batted an eye when they recently (like, in the past 10 years) decreased the age at which children go through the sacrament of Confirmation. The same sacrament that is meant to affirm your adulthood in the church, where you say, "I may have been told to practice this by my parents before, but now I'm an adult now and choose to practice it of my own volition."
They do this when children are thirteen years old. Thirteen.
When I was fifteen I did not have the capacity to make this decision for myself. Now I have to live with the fact I'm on a list somewhere as an adult in the church. The Catholic Church is an evil institution that uses trauma for the purpose of coercion.
For a century now, the option has been at some point between 7 and 16, at the diocese's discretion. I received mine around 16; 13 sounds like an outlier, to me.
Personally, I think it goes back to the Catholic Church's special status as its own sovereign country. They didnt just elect a Pope this week. They elected an absolute monarch. Even though that monarch's territory is only .5 sqkm, it used to be much larger, and the Church literally has outposts everywhere indirectly subject to its rule.
And a key thing to understand is that the Church doesn't use confession to hide crimes from just anyone. If some random Catholic confessed to a priest that he was diddling kids, you can bet that as part of the penance, the priest would tell that person to turn themselves in to the authorities. But we know what has happened when the confessor was a priest.
The Church was always super arrogant when it came to transgressions by its own people. To them, subjecting a priest to civil law makes just as much sense as subjecting an Italian to Australian law. When a priest confessed he was diddling kids, they would handle it in their own manner, without getting the local authorities involved.
That's the real reason why this law is written the way it is. It's to keep the Church from hiding its own people. The Church, as an institution, has proven over the years that it can't be trusted on that front.
I haven't read the law, but it would be interesting if it explicitly allowed a "mandatory reporter" to satisfy the requirement by facilitating the transgressor to turn themselves in. That is a clear way out of this problem, keeping the confidentiality intact while keeping the local government's jurisdiction over crimes as well.
This is the thing that's bugging me. People are taking the Catholic church's history with priests committing child abuse, then making a blind logical leap that Catholics in general are child abusers (or a significant number of them). It's twisting the feelings about Catholic priests and targeting them at a wider group. What's happening here is insidious.
How many Catholics are child molesters, and how many of them are confessing in church, and what penance were they given?
Here's a link to the law as passed.
It doesn't seem to explicitly allow what you are suggesting but I supposed the "or cause a report to be made" clause could be interpreted that way.
Oh yeah, my bad for not including what it's about. I'll edit that back into the post.
I agree and I agree. However, as a being that was indoctrinated and abused by the church, I still have to point to the ”Sacrament of Confession”, which… yeah… evil bastards.
Is it a constant problem? How many child molesters are confessing in church? How many Catholics are child molesters?
The Catholic church's history with child abuse is to do with Priests and the church covering for them. This is new spin, suggesting that Catholics as a whole contains a lot of child molesters, but I've not seen any evidence showing that.
Because that is what they are.