Catholic League's ad in NYT (or, this is SO going to backfire)

So, the Catholic League just put out a full-page ad in the New York Times (reprinted here) trying to counter perceptions of the church as being a hotbed of child molesters. For perspective, this is a good example of the sort of responses op-ed writers have been giving. This is gonna be a fun one to watch . . .

I disagree with your topic title. It is not going to backfire. Now, it's not going to do them any good, but by and large on this issue the battle lines are pretty firmly drawn and you're not going to see much movement one way or the other.

It's between people who see the "glory" of the Catholic church as being sacrosanct and those who don't.

The latter tend to be more numrous than the former.

Oh no doubt. Even among American Catholics, I'm sure.

Edit: But I do think that's the essential divide here. However, I'd say that in America, one reason why the whole idea of Catholic glory isn't so strong is that they buy into the concept of Christian glory as a whole instead.

edited 14th Apr '11 3:19:26 PM by Karmakin

There are some valid points to it, and some bullshit.

Trying to blame it on homosexuality, for instance, is bullshit and ignores how many cases are against girls as the commentary mentioned. Comparing it to schools being way worse and getting almost no comparative exposure or attacks against its entire leadership instead of direct perpetrators though (despite the perpetrators sometimes being tenured and protected under the radar), is entirely valid and has been for some time. IIRC the study that showed school sex abuse being orders of magnitude more frequent than in the Church was sometime around 2004.

edited 14th Apr '11 3:20:52 PM by Pykrete

But that would require the state punishing one of its own organs, so enjoy some anti-clericalism instead.

That article was total BS. When I read it, I even wrote one of my professors an e-mail with a link to the article 'cause he showed us a piece by some US Air Force chief about gays in the military, and the similarities were so striking that I though my professor might enjoy this text. I'll go find my e-mail, just a tick...

I would like to see proof of the latter, proof of the former has been demonstrated.

And Rott, if you are going to try and bring your reverence for dogma into a discussion about Child abuse I think it might be best to stop and think before doing so.

Which article was total BS?

edited 14th Apr '11 3:33:12 PM by Wicked223

Here's the e-mail I sent (I omitted parts of it, but here's what I said about this text - including a reference to the earlier text to create context):

I found this ( http://www.catholicleague.org/nytstraighttalk.php ) text and read it just now, and it immediately brought to mind the text you had us read about openly homosexual people serving in the US armed forces. Just like that article, this one is full of facts, analysis and history, and constantly moving from one argument to the next without really making a consistent point in the process. In other words, like the article you gave us, I'm giving you an article that seems to have been written with the sole purpose of causing confusion.

This text was written by Bill Donohue, of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. It seeks to assess the bias with which media has handled the sexual abuses crisis that the Catholic church has had to deal with recently. In its analysis of the reports that different types of media have given about the subject, this text does find a more or less believable trend in media reporting - mainly that sex abuse cases by priests receive more press than abuse by people in other professions, such as teachers.

What Donahue fails to do is seek the reasons that the public views abuse by priests more harmful or press-worthy than that by others. In addition to completely missing the point, he also makes several quite unnecessary distinctions, sometimes leading to uncomfortable implications. He seeks to prove that the "myth" of the Catholic priests raping children is not based on reality - because instead of raping children, the priests simply "improperly touched" adolescents. Before we get to consider the significance of this great revelation, he says that most instances of sexual abuse by priests on minors were homosexual - citing a study that apparently found that 80% of the abuse was male-on-male.

So as you can see, I think the article by this Donahue person was total BS. The other article linked in the OP was spot-on.

edited 14th Apr '11 3:39:54 PM by BestOf

@Bugman: Can you refute the point that sexual abuse by public school teachers is orders of magnitude more common while carrying a like violation of minors' trust?

What organisation calls itself the Catholic League, anyway? History fail!

The name of the organisation that the writer of this piece heads is not the biggest case of fail in the text.

Here you go.

PS: about 2/3 of the linked report is bibliography*

Page 53:

edited 14th Apr '11 4:00:13 PM by Pykrete

No, I can't, because I don't have any stats at the moment.

Thank you Py.

Ofc another problem is the fact that sexual abuse is hard to proove, damaging and disasterous for all parties. I don't have the expertise to deal with it/comment on it atm.

edited 14th Apr '11 3:59:42 PM by JosefBugman

Easy fix: rewrite the official scrolls, or whatever, to make confessional off-limits to kiddy-fiddling priests.

I would so make a badass pope.

The point that most priests have done nothing wrong and that most of these abuse cases are old is legitimate, but some of the things he says (like "there hasn't been 'child rape', there's been 'inappropriate touching of adolescents', which is totally different") seems pretty pedantic. Attempting to paint the church as the victim ("people are extorting us for cash settlements!") and blaming gays (even if it was gay people, it was gay priests, so it's a church problem rather than a gay problem), and pointing out that other institutions are as bad or worse ("Non-Catholic priests are perverts too, and teachers are even bigger perverts!") is exactly the wrong tone to take. It reeks of blame shifting and refusing to accept responsibility, rather than acknowledging the problem and seeking to redress it. It also completely fails to address the problem of Catholic church policies to deal with accusations within the church structure rather than publicly — most of the criticism I've seen against the church has been against their reaction to the issue, not the fact that the abuses happened in the first place. No one can have a 100% perfect record, but how you deal with these things when they do happen is extremely important, and the Catholic church doesn't have a great record as far as that goes.

^Also the hypocrisy. In our society we take a very very dim view of hypocrisy. To be honest, I'm not convinced if this is a good thing or a bad thing, however, it is what it is. And as such, the Catholic church takes more flak for this sort of thing because they present themselves as a beacon of morality.

And yes. The problem is their reaction to the abuse, and not the abuse itself.

edited 15th Apr '11 7:22:55 AM by Karmakin

The average damages in standard sexual abuse cases in Canada, for instance, is something like $125,000. Going by this, the average amount in the cases against the Church was about $691,500, well over five times that. So yeah, there is a disproportionate response to a degree.

Now like you said, that doesn't mean they're not still horribly in the wrong, but it also shows a kind of feeding frenzy behavior that isn't present in some other cases such as the schools, even when institutionalized protection and rug-sweeping such are pretty much identical, and frequency is actually worse.

Yeah, pretty much.

edited 15th Apr '11 4:07:41 PM by Pykrete

Oh, certainly, I'm sure some people try to take the church for whatever they can get. The problem is that saying "it's not our fault, people are just trying to take our money!" when there has been actual abuse does not make you look good, even if some people are just trying to take your money.

When you have an image problem as major as sexual abuse has given the Catholic Church, I don't think running a wall of text in a newspaper is going to help, even though they have some valid points to make.

RE: The valid points-

I don't think you get any more sway for your particular argument by raising valid points that are completely irrelevant to the issue at hand. Saying "but he's worse" is neither an excuse nor a reason, it's a deflection. Hopefully we can get to him next, that sodding bastard.

Similarly, the price of the settlement being higher than average could just as well reflect normal low-balling of abuse cases, rather than them being unfairly targeted. Not saying I'm ruling out the latter, but the former is as much a valid possibility in an absence of evidence. Particularly in the face of the fact that many people will undoubtedly have neither the time nor the money to prosecute the case fully, leading to low averages.

RE: Valid points, again-

If you shoot with a shotgun, you're bound to hit something.

Which brings me to my final point-what was his point, other than "wahhh stop picking on us?"

"Waahhh stop picking on us" was exactly his point, however poorly argued.

And it's a quite valid one when an entire profession gets unfairly stigmatized for things it's no more guilty of than the population as a whole, and less guilty of than other well-respected professions people have little problem entrusting their children to.

Which doesn't explain why cases levied against the Church have amounts consistently so far above the average — especially when they're decades old and by all logic less likely to stick due to lack of evidence.

edited 15th Apr '11 4:16:49 PM by Pykrete

Is that really a thing that is happening, or is it a persecution complex?

You decide.

Edit: Actually, wait, you are right. There is a stigma now, easily visible in all the "lol priest pedophilia" jokes. It's not fair to lump all priests in the same category *

The solution, however, is not to try and downplay the seriousness of the events that have occurred, nor is it to paint the church as blameless, nor is it to try and point fingers at other groups, etc. etc. etc. Nor is the solution to "blame the media for making a big deal" (because it is a big deal, because it's been going SO DAMN SLOW *

edited 15th Apr '11 4:27:32 PM by deathjavu