The Raving Atheist and Arthur Silber offer thoughtful commentary on Bishop Wilton Gregory’s alleged appeal to moral relativism.
Rev. Gregory, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, warned this week of “startling” data in an upcoming study on 50 years of sexual abuse in the church. He asked the public to view the study relative to other categories of potential offenders.
You may ask, How is this blog entry relevant to XGW? Exodus last year issued what I considered a blanket defense of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ crackdown on gay priests even as the bishops were protecting sexual abusers.
All moral thought, especially that of religious conservatives, involves a degree of relativism, does it not? I simply ask that conservatives be honest about it — and re-examine any temptation to change the subject when the ethics of their conduct are scrutinized.
As much as I would like to trash Gregory, who is one of the vilest Bishops in the church, he is right in that the extent of abuse of children in the church has appeared to be much worse than it is, because the church hid the truth for so long. According to some statements made during the abuse crisis, approximately 2% of priests have been accused of abuse, which some have claimed (like McCarrick in DC) is about the same as you find with school teachers and other professions with close ties to children.
In fact, I hope people do accept Gregory’s argument – it makes the conspiracy to hide abuse that worse, and the attempts to bar all gay priests even that more offensive.
What sets the RC scandal apart is that it is suppossedly a ‘top down’ system in which there is a central authority that oversees the actions of all employees. The other examples cited are difuse, uncoordinated professions. These lack the central office feature of catholocism. And in the difussed type organizations abuse is more quickly seen and dealt with.
What really sets the RC apart is the fact of serial abuse perpetuated over and over again. I doubt this will be found in any of the settings Gregory wishes to compare with. The number of teachers, scout leaders on and on who are caught and dismissed speaks clearly on this. They are not passed on within their fields.
I wonder why on earth would the RC perform such a study? I just can’t see how fifty year old data involving people many of which are retired or dead would do a great deal to improve the way the handle abuse today. I mean it isn’t like they had some magic formula fifty or even thirty years ago that was lost. I can see some value from a long term monitoring standpoint, but fifty years of data seems bit much. I think the motivations for the study may have been more political than practical.
I really don’t see how relativism plays in here. The scandal isn’t about the RC being more dangerous than other organizations. Honestly I think so but that is beside the point. The scandal is about the RC not doing enough to protect minors when abuse was known or suspected. If you could possibly come up with an objective measure of how well other organizations handled abuse claims then I could buy the relativism argument
Actually, the scandal was based on the RCCI’s knowing attempt to divert attention from the crimes of their employees.
Actually, the secular prosecutors should be held in contempt, too, because they let the RCCI get away with it.
Just to clarify – my comments reflected on the number of priests who might be singled out as abusers, not the number of cases of abuse, or the number of victims. Clearly because the abuse was not contained when it shouldhave been, and victims were paid hush money or simply intimidated into not telling their stories, the number of victims will be much higher than at any similar organization that actually took steps to stop the abuse.
As for why the RCC would issue a report – well, it might give them another opportunity to blame gay priests for the whole scandal (even though the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, an adult support group for victims, is 40 – 50 % female).
As I think about it, the 50 years begins to make sense in terms of internal catholic politics. The right wing of the RC is in full cry that the molestations and gay priests are the result of the liberalization of the church (their idea not mine) in the 60’s. If the church can show that this happened before the liberalization of Vatican II, then the conservatives are undercut. And their blame campaign is shown to be baseless. The 50 years lets us see that this is a long time, continuing fact of catholicism.