Ongoing religious scandals

soterpisc

zico10 wrote: »

From 'The Irish Catholic'

http://www.irishcatholic.ie/site/content/wives-and-mothers-ireland-covered-abuse-says-wexford-priest

Seemingly with the passing of time, any failures of the Catholic Church, in relation to child abuse, will turn out to have been normal practice and in line with contemporary values.
It's a curious defence, is probably the best thing that can be said about the article.

ITS WRONG. Whats more to be said.

zico10

soterpisc wrote: »

ITS WRONG. Whats more to be said.

We'll wait and see.

kylith

IMO it smacks of 'everyone else is doing it'.

If I'd wanted my...
nevermind
:pac:

tricky D

Once more the powers that be in that church display their complete lack of reputation management and damage limitation skills. How many times will they shoot themselves in the fac

The Mad Hatter

zico10 wrote: »

From 'The Irish Catholic'

http://www.irishcatholic.ie/site/content/wives-and-mothers-ireland-covered-abuse-says-wexford-priest

Seemingly with the passing of time, any failures of the Catholic Church, in relation to child abuse, will turn out to have been normal practice and in line with contemporary values.
It's a curious defence, is probably the best thing that can be said about the article.

You'd almost be led to believe that the catholic church believes in subjective morality.

kylith

It never ceases to amaze me how an organisation that claims divine inspiration and a direct line to the man upstairs gets all pissy about being held to a higher moral standard than the general population. At this stage I'm half expecting them to issue a statement that child rape was part of His ineffable plan.

mascaput

zico10 wrote: »

From 'The Irish Catholic'

http://www.irishcatholic.ie/site/content/wives-and-mothers-ireland-covered-abuse-says-wexford-priest

Seemingly with the passing of time, any failures of the Catholic Church, in relation to child abuse, will turn out to have been normal practice and in line with contemporary values.
It's a curious defence, is probably the best thing that can be said about the article.

Sadly, and heartbreakingly, it's not completely without truth, as the Church of Rome is the one who set the bar on 'values' in the little island of ours....sorry, theirs: read the Irish Constitution. Societal attitudes are not engineered at the throwing of a switch, but are a progressive and incremental process of subtle undermining of the popular mindset, by way of suggestion, allusion, manipulation, and the playing on predictable emotional tendencies that operate on unreason and fear, our strongest emotion.
Anything we have as values today were set long ago, and now we are paying the price for the following of blind and ritual obedience to the laws they have implemented and executed in the name of their imagined deity, an unseen and unknowable presence that failed to protect the 'little chidren' that Jesus the Christ supposedly commanded that none should harm. But then again, what would he have known about it? Who actually bothers to practice what they preach when to comes to following 'blind faith'? Selective blindness is a conscious choice, so hiding behind ritual acts of contrition is an exercise in hypocrisy, which was another thing that Jesus preached against. But then again, what would he have known? We, on the other hand, live in more 'civilised times', don't we? Sure we do.

According to the RCC, the episodes of child sex abuse were "isolated incidents" and they would have stuck obstinately to those self serving beliefs if no one had the balls to contradict them. If Jesus, regardless of whether he was or was not some godson, prophet or renegade anti-establishment figure, was recorded as instructing that anyone who harmed such little ones should be drowned in the midst of the sea with a millstone around their necks, then why don't his supposed followers do what their holy book tells them? Can you hear the likely response to such a suggestion? "Oh no!", we are not like that anymore. We have moved on". Really, have we?

Just the other day I was listening to the news and the subject of some findings about clerical abuse came on the airwaves, and I heard a spokesman for what I think was something called the Irish Catholic (?), who responded to questions about the issues surrounding the violence and abuse meted out to little children, aggressively saying, "It's time to move on!", as though people were like some flock of sheep or herd of troublesome cattle that just couldn't get the idea that that's all they were. Then again, maybe he is right, and that is all we have become: a dumbed-down and hand-wringing troupe of slaves who bleat and beg forgiveness from our politically and clerically appointed sheep-herds? Of course it doesn't fit in with our notions of 'Irish pride' to be seen to be other than what we might like to believe we are, rather than take a cold hard look at the facts, but then again we were never good at that, were we? "We believe in one God, father almighty....etc etc", yet we miss the point that belief is 'blind faith', but still think we can see. The Lord moves in mysterious ways.....

The RCC, plus their attendant political pets, like Brian Cowan, who, not so long ago, professed that he was "Second and Irishman, first a Catholic", set the template for, and continues to set and illuminate the double-take standards for what was considered 'normal' for hundreds of years, and, like the way they have always perverted any reasoned understanding of reality, they shaped the thinking processes behind the nation's outlook: fearful of change, inward looking, suspicious of anyone who was not one of 'us', thereby playing on mankind's most primitive tribal fears and unreasoned emotions to further their insatiable lust for power. They did this whilst all the time cloaking their selfish agenda behind the veil of fear that they mercilessly drew on by denying the liberty of the most vulnerable, or of anyone who might actually have the natural and genetic moral outlook to question, "Is this right?"

They told us to believe that priests were 'above that kind of thing', that they were acting on behalf of a deity named 'God', an imported god that was developed thousands of miles away by men of a similar bent and predilection towards violence and bloodshed, and we were trained to accept without question that this was so.
In order to deal with the increased demands of the populace at large for an education for their children, along with the development of fledgling democracy towards the latter decades of the 19th century, the RCC initially passed what was known as the Anti-Modernist Oath under Pope Pius X, which had to be sworn by all priests in defending itself from any change in its flock's outlook.
When they realised that the continued demands for education and democracy could not be avoided, they did as the rulers of the old Roman Empire always predictably did: they made sure that they alone took charge of the by then expanding, fledgling educational systems so that they could expediently use them to influence what was taught and what was not to be taught, thus merging their own selective agenda via an 'education' system that was to be funded by the public purse but essentially controlled by the Roman Catholic Church.
They also involved themselves in the laying out of an 'ethos' (propaganda), so that potential dissenters and freethinkers could be identified and weeded out at an early stage, by way of threats of physical violence and ostracisation by the fearful populace who feared the disapproval of the local priest, who could drop in and 'visit' then at any time, to make sure that they kept to the 'straight and narrow' dictates of the overall Church rulership.
After all, children were needed to keep the industrial schools open, with any child who ran away from the brutal regime of the school system being sent to correctional institutions such as Letterfrack, Co. Galway, and a plethora of other slave camps around the country, all making money for the Church and its priesthood and providing fresh meat for their sexual needs. Even the babies of unmarried mothers were sold to wealthy Irish American (Catholic only) families, for hundreds of pounds, which in the 1950s was the price of a small farm in Ireland. So much for the idea of human life being 'sacred'. If our society is ill today, it seems that it comes from a virus it was infected with a long time ago, but then again, belief is sacrosanct, despite any reason for following it blindly.

robindch

Northern Ireland is opening the lid:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0929/breaking44.html

Arcus Arrow

Northern Ireland announces an investigation into child rape and torture by the Catholic Church. Buy shares in shredding machines.

Galvasean

Since when was hiding your crimes from the law considered 'bungling'?

robindch

The Vatican's been circling suspiciously around a Milan hospital where, apparently, $1.5 BILLION (!) has vanished:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-mysterious-suicide-that-has-rocked-the-vatican-2364712.html

CiaranMT

Will be very interesting to see what happens come the 10th.

magicbastarder

this is hovering somewhere between hilarious and pathetic.
the argument appears to be over the 'roman catholic church; satans worldwide peadophile army' banner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVj8tBe1rpM

audio is NSFW

Delirium

Bishop charged for not reporting child images on priest’s laptop.

A Catholic bishop has been charged with not telling police about explicit images discovered on a computer used by a priest who now faces several child pornography charges.

Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City pleaded not guilty to one misdemeanour count of failing to report suspected child abuse. Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said Finn and his diocese, which also was charged with one count, had “reasonable cause” to suspect a child had been abused after learning of the images.

Finn has acknowledged that he and other diocese officials knew for five months about hundreds of “disturbing” images of children that were discovered on a computer used by the Rev Shawn Ratigan, but did not take the matter to police.

Full story on journal.ie

Delirium

Just when I thought I couldn't be shocked any more by what religious organisations get up to, this story from Spain shows up in my news feed

Catholics Stole 300K Babies From Mothers

A secret network of priests, nuns, and doctors have stolen up to 300,000 of babies from mothers in Spain and sold them to other parents, a BBC documentary shows. Their scheme: Tell the mother her baby died in childbirth, and sell the newborn to a more devout and wealthy couple. The practice started in General Franco's dictatorship as an effort to rob politically "dangerous" families of their children, but continued into the 1990s, the Daily Mail reports.

Hundreds of families who lost babies in Spanish hospitals are demanding investigations, but no coordinated probe is underway—so regional prosecutors are plowing through 900 cases. "The situation is incredibly sad for thousands of people," one journalist says. "There is very little political will to get to the bottom of the situation." Among the horrors revealed so far: exhumed baby graves that contain animal bones, and an ice-cold baby corpse—kept by Catholic nurses to show grieving mothers after childbirth.

Source

philologos

I can very easily imagine why many people would never step foot in a church again to be brutally honest with you.

Penn

koth wrote: »

Just when I thought I couldn't be shocked any more by what religious organisations get up to, this story from Spain shows up in my news feed

F*ck....

Penn

koth wrote: »

Just when I thought I couldn't be shocked any more by what religious organisations get up to, this story from Spain shows up in my news feed

Actually, how the f*ck is this not a bigger story? This is beyond scandalous, this is downright despicable and vile. Disgusting. Absolutely f*cking disgusting, and most of the media don't seem to care because a) it happened in a country where they speak another language and b) no celebrities were affected.

Everyone involved with this in the past 50 years should be jailed. Simple as that. Possibly 300,000 babies? This wasn't a small network, this was a f*cking operation.

robindch

This story first surfaced in A+A back in March, when the number of faked deaths + kidnappings was lower at an estimated 1,000.

The figure of 300,000 sounds nuts to me and it's only noted as such on the Daily Mail's web page and not on the BBC's page on the program (refers to "hundreds of thousands"), nor on the Guardian page to which the Beeb links (261 families):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016d7hz
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/27/spanish-babies-stolen-clinic/print
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2049647/BBC-documentary-exposes-50-year-scandal-baby-trafficking-Catholic-church-Spain.html

Given that the DM is involved, I'd be inclined to reserve judgement until the documentary airs tomorrow evening at nine and see what the BBC is actually reporting, and hopefully also find out how it's arrived at this this frankly insane estimate.

If the figure of 300,00 is accurate, even only in its order of magnitude, then I'd have thought that this could credibly be interpreted as the most cold-blooded policy enacted in Europe since the Second World war.

optogirl

koth wrote: »

Just when I thought I couldn't be shocked any more by what religious organisations get up to, this story from Spain shows up in my news feed

similar to the babies that were born into the Magdalene Laundries - a lot of them were sold to American couples and all records of who their real mothers were have been destroyed. Truly awful stuff

robindch

optogirl wrote: »

similar to the babies that were born into the Magdalene Laundries - a lot of them were sold to American couples and all records of who their real mothers were have been destroyed.

It's happened in my family.

One now-elderly relative became pregnant during the mid-60's; the pregnancy was hushed up and the kid carted off to the USA, never to be heard from again. All we do know is that the kid was almost certainly placed with a family with catholic religious beliefs. The mum, my relative, went on to be unhappily married, unhappily divorced, achieved reasonable fame as an author, hit the fags and the bottle, blew all the money from the books, and having dried out a few years back following the suicide of her first (known-about) son, is now suffering from emphysema. The situation was not made easier by the fact that another relative was offered the mid-60's baby, but who chose to refuse to take him/her in, something that's pursued the latter for the last ~45 years and perhaps contributed to their drink problem.

I would love to speak with some of the heartless animals who engineered this process, but I suspect they're all long dead at this stage.

MrPudding

Penn wrote: »

Actually, how the f*ck is this not a bigger story? This is beyond scandalous, this is downright despicable and vile. Disgusting. Absolutely f*cking disgusting, and most of the media don't seem to care because a) it happened in a country where they speak another language and b) no celebrities were affected.

Everyone involved with this in the past 50 years should be jailed. Simple as that. Possibly 300,000 babies? This wasn't a small network, this was a f*cking operation.

yeah, but it was only a few bad apples in he organisation. This is no reason to think badly of the whole church.:rolleyes:

MrP

Delirium

More about the story on the Huffingtonpost

They have a clip from the BBC show, and it states that 30,000 children were taken from parents under General Franco's dicatorship.

robindch

That documentary is on this evening at nine:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15335899

Penn

MrPudding wrote: »

yeah, but it was only a few bad apples in he organisation. This is no reason to think badly of the whole church.:rolleyes:

MrP

You're right. I mean, more people worldwide do bad things than priests do, so I think we can forgive them for it.

Delirium

robindch wrote: »

That documentary is on this evening at nine:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15335899

It seems that article also has the 300,000 number in it

Penn

robindch wrote: »

That documentary is on this evening at nine:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15335899

Was going to watch Layer Cake tonight (heard Michael Gambon doing a voiceover on Grimefighters at the weekend and couldn't get his speech in Layer Cake out of my head), but I'll watch this instead

CiaranMT

So how did it go?

Penn

CiaranMT wrote: »

So how did it go?

As horrible as can be expected. Healthy babies taken away from the mother as soon as they were born. Nurse/Doctor returned a few hours later to say the child died. Parents told they couldn't even see their dead baby in most cases, and if they did, it was a frozen corpse of a child they could only see for a minute. Childrens fake graves filled with stones, other bones (like leg bones) or in some cases, a different baby altogether (male child but female child body in grave etc). Alive children then sold on to couples who could legally put their own names on the birth certs due to some laws they had at the time meaning most of the children, now adults, have almost no way of finding their real parents, and vice versa for the mothers. Other children sent to group homes run by the Church and basically brainwashed by the Church and ruling government.

They also had one woman and her daughter looking for her son who she was told was dead at birth but was most likely alive. Then a guy looking for his real mother after his parents admitted they bought him as a baby. Turned out there was a strong resemblence between this guy and the woman's husband who was the baby's father, so after meeting (He couldn't speak Spanish and they couldn't speak English), they went for a DNA test.

They weren't related, and both parties looked absolutely crushed. Goes to show how the effects of what happened are still around today with the struggle of so many trying to find their real family.

Shocking programme altogether. I liked how it kinda stayed away from religion, but this was what an organised group of religious people did. Didn't try and exaggerate anything, just showed the facts and eye-witness accounts.