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Could you enlighten the heathen among us why the progressive faction has outsized responsibility for priests molesting children?
In addition to hydro's point about demographics, it also is simply a bit of ideological inevitability. One of the progressive factions main agenda has always been toleration of homosexuality, including in the priesthood. The Catholic Priest abuse scandal was, overwhelmingly, a story of homosexual pederasty and/or homosexual hazing of trainees and young priests by older men. If one's orientation is to be intolerant of those acts outside of the priesthood, there is no ideological reason for you to hesitate to punish them when it happens within.
The reason why people tolerate sexual abuse in organisations is not ideological - it is office politics. Every organisation which provides male authority figures with access to women or boys has had sexual abuse scandals. If the organisation has a culture of strong hierarchy, it has engaged in the same type of cover up. If the organisation is affiliated to a religion which says that women and boys should not publicly criticise adult men, then the abuse probably happened on an industrial scale. Why? Because once you are senior enough to be a political player, helping your colleague cover up his sexual misconduct is a cheap-but-valuable favour in the Game of Thrones. If you are cynical enough, also because people who are mutually compromised can co-ordinate better by using blackmail as an enforcement mechanism.
Even with the theoretically absolute power of the Pope over the Catholic Church, fortified by an explicit command from a God that almost everyone involved actually believes in not to do this kind of stuff, coming down on this kind of stuff once it is widespread is a political challenge. The Pope can only piss off so many bishops at once, and the paedo-enablers had become a sizeable faction. There is a fairly widespread theory that Benedict XVI resigned because he couldn't do it.
Your explanation seems to not explain the relative dearth of teenage pregnancies arising out of the Catholic church sex scandals.
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Indeed. And because this claim is a superweapon once you become weak enough for it to be levelled against you, and it will be levelled no matter how perfectly you tamp down on it (the optimal rate of sexual abuse is not zero, and your opinion on how much you should tolerate depends on how strongly into defending the Cause you are), there's actually very little reason to bother. Besides, some of the abusers can be very powerful attack dogs, so if the trans community terfed (for example) Keffals a replacement that is as effective at harassing their enemies is going to be very hard to find.
You have successfully explained why an overwhelming majority of public school personnel are obsessed with
castration and sexual bullyingtransgenderism (as that's what sexual abuse looks like when women do it).More options
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A huge majority of sexual abuse cases were of teenaged boys, which is by definition something homosexual clerics did at high rates.
The fact of the matter is that yes, there was a link between homosexuality in the priesthood and the abuse crisis. It’s a common belief that liberal priests are more likely to be gay than mainstream conservative ones, but I’ve never seen anyone present any actual evidence, even anecdata, for this, although lots of the outside the mainstream conservative priest groups have some anecdotal evidence for less homosexuality in their groups. What does seem to be true is that new priests started getting drastically less likely to be gay at some point in the 80’s. This probably reflects young gay men moving to San Francisco instead.
That being said, yes, regional corruption networks(this is what the strongman version of the gay lobby mostly is) were the real driving force behind sex abuse coverups, regardless of from the top directives or ideology. Those regional corruption networks are less powerful than they used to be because of reforms to seminary disciplinary policies and bishop selections.
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Don't public schools BTFOing the church in child sexual abuse stats contradict this part?
In addition to that, sex abuse seems to have gotten sharply worse as it became more acceptable for laypeople to criticize clerics, then a bit better as disciplinary standards coalesced during general anti-corruption drives, then much better when Benedict decided it was worth cracking down on specifically.
Not a story about the lack of power for women and boys.
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Because, due to age, they were disproportionately in charge when it went down, for one thing. Priests molesting children in the post JPII era is pretty rare; most sex abuse scandals today are ‘it has been revealed in an audit of diocesan archives that another predator priest was transferred from parish to parish in the seventies and eighties’. The people in charge from 1965-1990 were progressive within the RCC by today’s standards, and given the length of time senior clerics serve for, the current progressives are frequently direct protégés or even literally the same people(albeit they were at a lower level in 1985) of those who made object level decisions at the time. The sharply limited amount of progressive ‘new blood’ has also prevented turnover in a way that gives many more conservative factions a bit of distance from the scandals.
Also, by happenstance, senior conservatives made up most of the internal opposition to the policy of coverup and reassignment, and Ratzinger(the future Benedict XVI) personally went out on a limb to laicize predatory priests at a time when that was not the general practice. This is especially strong in recent days because pope Francis just keeps using his authority and connections to protect Fr Marko Ivano Rupnik, who molested nuns. That pope Francis seems to like senior clerics with a worse record on sex abuse issues is a common accusation; while there’s not nothing to it, I think it’s mostly happenstance and generational issues+typical South American corruption in the spotlight. The fact of the matter is that Benedict had a much better record at addressing sex abuse cases than Francis does.
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Could be an argument via Vigano?
Without getting too deep into the allegations of a disgruntled former nuncio, it is at least semi-plausibly alleged that Francis was/is allied to and relied on the support of abusers. Some circumstantial evidence bears this out - if you look at the sordid history of Theodore McCarrick, it looks suspicious.
Very short version: American cardinal slept with seminarians, this came out around 2006-7, Benedict XVI put restrictions on McCarrick's movements and activities, after Francis became pope in 2013 he removed those restrictions, this is suspicious because McCarrick was an advocate for progressive changes in the church and a potential ally of Francis.
Former papal nuncio Vigano made public accusations along these lines, Francis refused to respond but told journalists "I will not say one word on this. Judge for yourselves." Naturally the media ended up exonerating Francis and declaring Vigano a crackpot. Now, to be fair, Vigano has gone to in fact basically be a crackpot - he's a hardcore Trumpist and he alleges some kind of gay Freemason conspiracy within the Catholic Church - so it makes sense to take his accusations with a grain of salt, but at the very least, the idea that Francis ignores or lightly skips over sexual abuse committed by political allies is plausible.
There isn't a single smoking gun, but we know that the rate of homosexuality among Catholic clergy is extremely high and there is ample cause for suspicion. I don't take any of Vigano's specific accusations at face value, but I am distrustful of Francis and anything going on inside the Vatican.
I don't know if you've heard, but +Vigano (if I still get to use the + for him) has been officially excommunicated and summoned to Rome.
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