Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
This page gives a basic starting point for what the Church has done in the US. As someone who has gone through safe environment training, I feel like Catholic institutions are among the safest places to leave your kids now.
Repentance is a difficult thing for a topic like this. Have abusers as individuals repented? Most haven't. Most went on to die in peace or sob in prison. Same with people involved in a cover up - most were abusers themselves. Is there repentance to be found there? I don't think so, but lack of repentance is the least of their crimes.
Has the Church as a whole repented? The Church as a whole feels like the sheep getting eaten by the wolves (and I don't mean how upset the rest of the world gets on the topic.) When members of the Church (priests, religious, laity) hear about abuse, they don't identify with the abuser, they identify with the victim. It's not, "I could have been that rapist," it's "I could have been that child, that vulnerable seminarian, that cloistered nun, that could have been me." So the Church as a whole responded like victims, and implemented protocols to protect themselves and their members from abuse.
As a whole, the US Conference of Bishops has apologized, "As bishops, we have acknowledged our mistakes and our roles in that suffering, and we apologize and take responsibility again for too often failing victims and the Catholic people in the past. From the depths of our hearts, we bishops express great sorrow and profound regret for what the Catholic people have endured." Individuals who have had specific failings have apologized (though not all, and it's not surprising to me that terrible human beings who rape children don't apologize.)
But apologies aren't repentance. What would repentance look like here? To a Catholic, repentance is an unexpected and undeserved (for the repenter, the victim deserves justice) act of grace that allows someone to feel true remorse for a personal fault they have committed. What do people mean when they ask for repentance from a group of 1.3 billion people? That is a question a lot of people have wrestled with and I don't think anyone has come up with any satisfactory answers.
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