Why is catholicism so corrupt

In a decisive turn triggered by Francis, he has chosen to fast from Mass and to forgo the status of what was known in past years as a "practicing Catholic. Yes, step back, he urges, from "the cassock-ridden power structure of the Church and reclaim Vatican II's insistence that the power structure is not the Church.

Carroll is right to remind Catholics that the church is not essentially the hierarchy or its organizational apparatus. That is why I believe Carroll remains a Catholic to his core. Both Carroll and I heard in our seminary years the Latin proverb " Corruptio optimi pessima ," the corruption of the best is the worst. And both Carroll and I have seen the best of the church. We have seen the everyday goodness, generosity and perseverance of the people we have served.

We have ministered alongside good priests and have known humble bishops. We have been inspired by the selfless commitment of religious sisters to the poor and needy. We have deep respect for underpaid and often unappreciated lay ecclesial ministers. Aware of this goodness, the corrupt strands knotted in the very center of the institutional Catholic Church are painful to acknowledge and difficult to confront. For us and for many others, it is indeed the corruption of the best.

Carroll and I also learned that the church is " simul justus et peccator " — both saint and sinner. Both whole holy and corrupt. And now and always in need of renewal and reform. So I search for a calculus of corruption.

Like Burghardt, I am aware of my own reasonable, I hope, corruption. And I understand that all things finite sooner or later encounter some form of corruption, some form of death.

It would be a violation of his obligations if he went to the police". That appalling arrogance was bolstered by an even more sinister knowledge. Bishops and priests knew that, because of their spiritual authority, they could manipulate the victims into feeling guilty.

Kindly priests would offer those who disclosed abuse absolution of their sins, as if they were the ones who had stains on their souls. And parents who reported the violation of their children were often fearful lest they themselves be seen to be damaging the church they loved.

As a previous archbishop of Dublin, Dermot Ryan, noted in internal case notes: "The parents involved have, for the most part, reacted with what can only be described as incredible charity.

In several cases, they were quite apologetic about having to discuss the matter and were as much concerned for the priest's welfare as for their child and other children. It is that capacity to place yourself above the law and to make those who have been wronged feel "quite apologetic" that is peculiar to the church.

These are the factors that explain, not just why the institution put its own interests above those of children, but also why it succeeded for so long. The church is not alone in believing that evil could be tolerated for a "good cause". But it was unique in the democratic world in its ability to get away with doing so in case after case and for decade after decade. To cut out the source of the corruption, the church would have to attack its own authoritarian culture.

Had Benedict done so in his pastoral letter, it would have been the most dramatic moment in the history of Christianity since Paul fell off his horse on the road to Damascus. Benedict, as Cardinal Ratzinger, was one of the key figures in the Catholic counter-revolution. His career has been all about rolling back the democratic ideal of the church as the "people of God" that emerged from Vatican II and re-establishing hierarchical control. Two-thousand-year-old institutions with a billion adherents and solid growth rates in the developing world don't disappear overnight, no matter how thoroughly corrupt they are revealed to be.

Four decades ago, Ireland was among the most homogeneously and fervently Catholic countries in the world. Last weekend, three months after the overwhelming passage of a referendum that repealed the pro-life provision of the Irish constitution, Pope Francis addressed a crowd roughly one-tenth the size.

What has changed? In the intervening years, Irish Catholicism has been crushed by an avalanche of scandals involving the widespread decades-long abuse sexual and otherwise of children in the country's schools and childcare system.

Over the past few decades, similar scandals have been exposed in countries around the world. In most cases, clerics of various rank have been credibly accused of abusing usually but not always male children and teenagers, and of breaking celibacy vows with seminarians and others over whom they serve in positions of authority. When such acts have been brought to the attention of those higher up the church hierarchy, the accused have rarely been punished, often moved to new dioceses where they have frequently repeated the behavior , and sometimes promoted to positions of great power and influence in the church.

The pattern has been repeated over and over and over again. Early in the s, one wave of scandal crashed over the American church with allegations of abuse and cover-up roiling dioceses across the country, with the Archdiocese of Boston, overseen by the formidable Archbishop Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, hit especially hard. One priest in Boston allegedly raped or molested children as church officials moved him from parish to parish over decades.

In the end, a total of members of the clergy were publicly accused of child sex abuse in Boston alone. As if to underscore that the problem goes far beyond a single wayward prelate, the revelations about McCarrick, which broke in mid-July, were quickly followed by the release of an exhaustive 1,page grand jury report that identified 1, cases of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of more than Catholic priests in the single state of Pennsylvania where I live with my wife and children.

Other states are apparently preparing similar reports of their own. Here is a summary from The Washington Post of a tiny sliver of what one will find in the report's squalid and scummy pages:. In Erie, a 7-year-old boy was sexually abused by a priest who then told him he should go to confession and confess his "sins" to that same priest.

Another boy was repeatedly raped from ages 13 to 15 by a priest who bore down so hard on the boy's back that it caused severe spine injuries. He became addicted to painkillers and later died of an overdose. One victim in Pittsburgh was forced to pose naked as Christ on the cross while priests photographed him with a Polaroid camera. Priests gave the boy and others gold cross necklaces to mark them as being "groomed" for abuse.

The most common response among church watchers to this utterly sordid display has been to render moral judgment and then assimilate the facts — priests abused kids; bishops covered up for it — into pre-existing ideological storylines.

Pennsylvania 's attorney general, Josh Shapiro, told reporters last week that high church officials "routinely and purposefully described the abuse as 'horseplay' and 'wrestling,'" choosing to transfer the pedophiles to other congregations where they'd have a whole new selection of horseplay partners , or send them away for prayerful reflection before returning to duty.

Unfortunately, though, Shapiro said, the statute of limitations has run out in most of the cases, or the priests involved had died. Pity, Shapiro was implying, because if they could, authorities would vigorously pursue and prosecute and imprison not only the perpetrators, but their enablers and protectors.

Inevitably, that scale of prosecution — we are talking about inflicting severe damage to the Catholic Church in the United States — would require steadfast political will, and seriously, what politician seeking re-election wants to alienate 24 per cent of Americans, many of whom, despite clear evidence of the church's moral rot, insist on believing it is infallible? The same goes elsewhere. Revelations of horrors in all the above-mentioned Western countries here in Canada, there was documented abuse in Quebec, British Columbia, Ontario, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, where the church 's Mount Cashel orphanage was operated as sort of a prison for child sex slaves resulted in dismissals of some church officials, some lawsuits and a handful of criminal convictions, but not much more than that.

Each time, the Pope or one of his high subalterns would lament human frailty, and drone on about the sacred duty to protect the most vulnerable, while privately fighting to thwart civil suits or conspiring to keep facts from investigating authorities. Pope Francis, who enjoys the most saintly reputation of any recent pope except for John Paul II, who was actually made a saint, despite all the ugly revelations on his watch released an open letter to the world's Catholics after the Pennsylvania revelations, basically repeating the company line: gosh, sorry, that was terrible, we must do better, God bless you all, go in peace.

Noting first that "most of these cases belong to the past," don't all cases belong to the past? Of course. Let 's compare the spiritual suffering the Pope claims the revelations have caused him to that of a child being sodomized by an adult stalker in a clerical collar, a monster the boy probably doesn't think he's even allowed to complain about. The right thing for the Pope to do would be to waive his sovereign privilege he is a sitting head of state , and invite criminal authorities to freely and fully access church records worldwide, and drain the holy swamp.

He might also consider at this stage ordaining women, because women are God 's creatures too, perfectly able to spiritually guide the faithful, and, umm, don't tend to rape children.