Webs’ Random Ideas

A movie that shows the dark side of the Catholic Church.

The director of this movie followed the story of a Priest, Father O’Grady, that raped many children in California. And you would think after the Bishop in charge of said Priest found out about the first incident he would put an end to it right? Nope. It continued on for around 20 years. Boys, girls, and parents (parents were abused to get closer to the children). And to make matters even worse O’Grady didn’t discriminate against the victims’ age and apparently had a victim 9 months old.

For twenty years he continued to destroy the lives of families and children. Meanwhile the Bishops in charge shuffled him from Church to Church. And the last church he was at was in an area were no Bishop has control over the area. Meaning O’Grady was left to govern himself. But it doesn’t end there. To keep O’Grady from having to testify in civil court (once he got out of jail, which would have forced out some catastrophic info) the church moved him to Ireland (where he lives a free life). Apparently he only had to serve 10 years in prison for what he did.

What makes it even worse is that an estimated 80% of child abuse victims do not come forward. For various reasons, but I can only imagine what it would be like to tell my parents. But this number puts estimates in the tens of thousands for actual number of abuses in United States alone. Other countries are starting to have cases pop up.

And the Priests, for whatever reason, are being hidden under the cloud of the entire Catholic organization. Essentially making it impossible for prosecutors to go after the abusers. Which is why there are a lot of civil suites going on. And most of those civil suites are solved out of court because if they weren’t the Church would have to divulge some pretty devastating information. And the money being used to settle the cases comes from… that’s right, the abuse victims that gave money to the parish when they attended church and were being abused.

The whole issue of Priests abusing children stems from a variety of issues but one of the key ones seems to be in how the Church views sex. Sex, in Catholicism, is generally viewed as evil (especially before marriage). And because of this the church views all forms of sex as evil, there are no varying degrees of evil. So sex with a child is just as evil as sex between two men, just as sex before marriage. So naturally the bishops deal with sex with a minor as a sin, and go from there.

But the obvious problem here is there is a difference between having sex with a 9 year old and a consenting adult. From a medical and psychological perspective, it’s a widely accepted difference.

With this issue as with most issues of religion, the problem isn’t with the Catholic Religion itself. I know plenty of good Catholics, ones that would never rape a child or do other terrible things. The problem is how the Religion is run. With power coming down from the top and filtering through lower levels. It allows for many terrible things to happen because faith is blindly accepted from top and forced down to others. And an outside looking in viewpoint is neither accepted or used by those toward the top.

I consider myself atheist but I do not write such posts to go off on a rant about specific religions. I leave that job to PZ Myers and other atheists. I do not believe that abolishing religion would solves the world’s problems because there is no easy way to abolish religion. When you are reasonably happy, loosing your faith can be a terrible thing and I don’t wish that upon anyone.

I think instead the world would be a better place if people learned to truly love themselves and others. And stopped trying to use religion to explain the universe and instead used it to find solace in their life.