"Pride Goes Before the Fall."

The more we find out about the way the Catholic Church has dealt with pedophile and abusive priests through the years, the greater our indignation. It has been revealed that, in 1997, the Vatican wrote to the Irish bishops expressing some doubts about the practice of referring abuse cases to the civil authorities, in other words, let's keep this to ourselves as much as we can.  The official reasoning was that, in doing so, the Church would avoid the possibility that their actions against the priests would be overturned by the "appellate" forum within the Church.

Clearly, this is a lame excuse for not doing what everybody is legally and morally bound to do: report a crime. Instead, the Church chose to treat this as minor offenses that could be swept under the rug and dealt with internally, thus bypassing the criminal justice system in every country.  I suppose that the mindset that comes from believing that theirs is a "kingdom not of this world" led them to put themselves above the law.

"Pride goes before the fall", indeed.

Comments

  1. Hiram Sánchez MartínezJanuary 20, 2011 at 11:47 AM

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  2. Hiram Sánchez MartínezJanuary 21, 2011 at 9:32 AM

    That is to say that the Catholic Church is Holy because of Christ, in spite of the sinners in its ranks and hierarchy.

    ReplyDelete

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