Comment by webmobdev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by webmobdev | Hacker News Reader

Given the prolific pedophilia in the Catholic church, revealed in so many countries around the world, I am absolutely convinced that there is an active and thriving pedophilia club in the Catholic church / Vatican. There is no other explanation of why these priests are allowed to continue in service, while churches use coercion and or bribes of thousands to millions of dollars to buy silence from the victims!

And yes, I know about the whole concept of forgiveness / acceptance that is ingrained in the catholic belief system that is used to explain why pedophile priests are given a "second" chance.

I understand it. But the way it is practiced is flawed - why are pedophile priests allowed to continue in service? Condemn the sin, not the person, forgive them, accept them into the community - but why cover up the crimes and let them continue to be priests? Spirituality and theology apart, at some point the nature of the disease shouldn't be ignored. We don't encourage an alcoholic to become bartender, do we?

It is this insistence of the church to allow pedophiles continue as priests that absolutely convinces me that there is a very active lobby of pedophiles in the Catholic church / Vatican, who find comfort in the secretive community they have formed. We have seen how the internet nurtures echo chambers in its social media. It is easy to accept that an actual community or club of paedophiles within the Catholic church would find similar benefits and solidarity from other "understanding" members, and why they would attract such kind. It isn't at all surprising to learn that every fourth pedophilia suspect in Poland is a priest ( https://www.rt.com/news/530345-poland-priest-pedophilia-chur... ).

I can see why you're getting downvoted, but sadly (as a Catholic-sort of) I think you're right. It now seems to me that the Catholic Church's hierarchy is catastrophically flawed. I see this as quite separate from lay Catholics, who somehow aren't outraged by all this, but I guess more due to cognitive deficits than actual acceptance.

Catholic Church has an intransparent, rigid hierarchy built on secrecy and obedience, and apparently severely lacking in the morals department. It has a lot of trust and a high cross-section for interaction with the general public (in Catholic countries at least), in particular children. Celibacy (a social, not biblical concept), probably doesn't help. In Poland, which you quote, the majority of priests found to be sex offenders against children, were not found to have paedophilic tendencies in subsequent psychiatric evaluations, rather chose children as easy victims.

Controlling for all these features, I remain unconvinced that there is something particularly wrong about religion itself in this organisation. Abuse of children and other weaker members of the society has sadly been a hallmark of large organisations (e.g. abuse by Oxfam employees in Haiti), it's just that most organisations lack either the reach, or the rigid structure of CC.

As an aside, I wouldn't use Russia Today as a source for anything meaningful, certainly not when it's about Poland; if ever there was an axe to grind, surely it's there.

I didn't think anyone would interpret my text as an attack on catholics or christianity, but I can see how some may be perceiving it like that. Yes, ofcourse, this isn't a religious problem of Christianity or Catholicism but due to the current structure of the Vatican. It's not as if Protestant churches, or Hindu ashrams or Muslim Jamaaths don't have such incidents. But the absolute scale of it in the catholic church is a clear indicator that there is something very wrong with their organisation.

> I see this as quite separate from lay Catholics, who somehow aren't outraged by all this, but I guess more due to cognitive deficits than actual acceptance.

Survivorship bias. Most of the Catholics who are outraged about this probably stopped being Catholic. Those who are publicly outraged and still believe are probably in the minority.

Most of the Catholics who are still 'practicing' that I know are fully outraged as well, and work to improve the lay boards and civil integration in legal processes.

The outcomes today are vastly different than 15-20 years ago. Priests being shuffled around quietly while a bishop settles with the family was a frequent occurrence just a couple decades ago. Nowadays that is suicide.

Sadly, not all parts of the Church/world are there, but at least in most corners of the US/Europe, it is that way. Incidence of abuse has been extremely curtailed, and all these studies showing the opposite are reaching back into the 50s-80s, where abuse was rife.

Unfortunately the Catholic Church's attitude towards dealing with past mistakes is still one of hostility.

I used to write software and optimize advertising for personal injury & mass tort lawfirms. The one that I worked at was building a major class action case against the Catholic Church. The volume of inbound leads that we had from all across the United States was enormous. A good six-digit number of them were qualified. There were priests in my Catholic Schools that had been on the accused list. One was even from a classmate of mine.

The Catholic Church was ruthless about negotiating down the damage. Basically their position was that they would fight every case in the US or they would settle all cases in the Archdiocese of New York that took place in Manhattan (a pitifully small number but an area in the US where the Church has a lot of money). It was purely about the money. The law firm took the easy way out for the amount of resources that they wanted to commit.

I probably listened to hundreds of calls where grown men were crying talking about how absolutely shattered their lives were. Only for my employer to turn around and say "sorry, we can't help you.".

I no longer do work for PI/mass tort firms and as a direct result of this.

>but why cover up the crimes and let them continue to be priests?

Because very few men are willing to spend ~8 years in higher education to make ~$30,000 a year for a job where you're on duty 24/7 with a private personal life forbidden to you. Many of the people willing to do that job are going to be flawed somehow, and firing any one of them causes the Church lose out on the huge amount of money they spent on training.

There's a lot of things wrong with the Catholic Church, but their actions can be explained without a need for some child abuse ring running the whole organization.

I don’t think it’s because of the money that the church refuses to fire pedophile priests. I think a lot more of it is about saving face. The church wants to maintain a veneer of holiness, one that is poorly tarnished now, and sweeping problems under the rug is easier in the short term to maintain said veneer. Of course, this strategy does not work in the long run.

There’s also the darker possibility that yesterday’s pedophile priests became today’s pedophile bishops who do not see this abuse as a problem to be corrected.

> [...] very few men are willing to spend ~8 years in higher education to make ~$30,000 a year for a job where you're on duty 24/7 with a private personal life forbidden to you.

That's a rather ascetic view of what it's like to be a Catholic priest. They do have free time, and while yes, working on Sundays and holidays is part of the job, weekdays are relatively free.

> There's a lot of things wrong with the Catholic Church, but their actions can be explained without a need for some child abuse ring running the whole organization.

I used to think that, but the scale of cover-ups found in the Polish CC convinced me it cannot be the case. A number of bishops have now been found to ignore and bury accusations against sex offender priests, with written evidence available. All continued to have the full support (material in particular) of the Church. The scale of the tragedy is inexplicable. Protests by various groups to Vatican have also achieved literally nothing. You had paedophile priests pampered and protected by the CC like they were martyrs for the greater good (some were in fact called that).

As Napoelon said, never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence. But what's happening there is beyond any humanly possible incompetence.

Calling their studies “higher education” is being very generous.

As a general rule, priests are required to have a bachelor's degree before entering or finishing seminary.

So, your explanation is that the Catholic Church would rather help cover up the crimes of an unfathomable number of paedophiles because it's easier than hiring some new ones? I don't think that's the case, because there seems to be an endless supply of paedophiles signing up to be Catholic priests, presumably because they know it's the safest place to commit their crimes. The Catholic Church is basically the Mafia but for nonces.

I’m not sure if a pedophile ring is running the Catholic Church, but perhaps the power and authority attracted pedophiles, who rose in power and protected others and this attracted others to join the church.

It’s the same pattern to corrupt any organization.

Treating them as some kind of business organisation is a very cynical view of the Catholic Church. Worse still is beleiving that only flawed individuals would be interested in such profession. History is testament to how many men and women of strong character have sacrificed their whole life for their religion while contributing to their community.

>Worse still is beleiving that only flawed individuals would be interested in such profession

I said "many of the men interested in the profession would be flawed," I purposely made sure I didn't say all, but it's undeniable there are many scumbags too. For example, the topic being discussed.

And the Catholic Church does also have to act as a business. People are going to be mad at the Church if there wasn't a priest available for their grandparent's last rites, or if their local church has to schedule mass at an inconvenient time.

I think you have backwards. The priesthood became entirely too revered and thus a status symbol. Within that framework, there were people who could go into the priesthood as a means of papering over their glaring faults and achieving a respectable image. Along the way, enough of those people have promoted into positions of power from which they try to shelter the priesthood at the expense of the church.

The Jesuits are mostly this same phenomenon; the order's brand became too coveted, the value was mined out of it, and now it's used by too many as a shield. It's like private equity for holy orders.

You're seriously misrepresenting reasons for vocation in the previous century. And they did have a private life.

You make it sound like priests are just bad at maximizing their income, so they must be damaged somehow. But putting it in economic terms like that is silly. Priests aren't in it for the money or an easy lifestyle. Similarly I don't think the church is so worried about optimizing their training costs that it could be a plausible root cause. Reducing everything to a dollar amount is some weird sigma shit.

Though I agree... there's probably no coordinated conspiracy of abusers covering for other abusers, just a pervasive culture of secrecy and willingness at all levels to do anything to protect the clergy. And seriously, who thought it would be a good idea to sexually stunt young people with religious indoctrination, get them to swear to a vow of chastity, and then go their whole lives without sex or porn, and think it'll just be fine to trust them absolutely in situations of incredibly significant power imbalance? Like organizational reform aside, this doesn't seem fixable for the church. It's too fundamental to their whole model. They'll keep going because they have so much momentum, but more victims are going to keep getting hurt.

>. Priests aren't in it for the money or an easy lifestyle

Right, which immediately rules out like 95% of Catholic men from even considering the occupation. There aren't a lot of applicants to the job.

>Similarly I don't think the church is so worried about optimizing their training costs that it could be a plausible root cause.

Each priest has received 4-5 years of training that the Church paid for. Basically every other industry would also bend over backwards to save their ~$100,000 investment when they already have the hiring problem I mentioned.

I don't disagree with the rest of your post, Catholicism has a lot of problems. Even without those problems, they act like a lot of other companies that make similar choices of overlooking abuse because it's profitable to do so.

> It is this insistence of the church to allow pedophiles continue as priests that absolutely convinces me that there is a very active lobby of pedophiles in the Catholic church / Vatican

Except that in the USA, a single credible accusation against a Catholic priest is treated as proof of guilt since 2003 and the priest is removed (a much lower standard than in the criminal justice system that requires proof beyond reasonable doubt or even civil cases that require a preponderance of evidence).

This review is done by a board of laymen, not priests, and the process was approved by the Vatican which you accuse of having a cabal.

Regarding historical cases where priests were given a second chance, keep in mind this was not limited to the Catholic Church and other institutions had the same behavior. It’s not necessarily evidence of a cabal, just that people back then didn’t understand the danger as much, or didn’t care.

Expanding that out. Epstein had lots of powerful friends, and I don't buy that Weinstein acted alone. Jerry Sandusky molested kids for decades, the administration of Penn State knew and did nothing.

The Taliban certainly has it faults but they don't allow boys to be raped under their watch. The US gave Afgan allies Viagra so that they may better do so.

It seems anywhere you have people with power, you also find child sexual abuse. I don't know why but it's consistent across time and cultures. Power corrupts is a fact as proven as gravity.

Joe Paterno did not molest kids. You are referring to Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant coach.

You are correct, my bad. I misremembered.

Any time conditions exist for someone who doesn't care about others to get what they want, that person will try to get what they want. That's not particularly insightful on its own. That's like the one-sentence synopsis of the entire field of critical theory. Go read Marx, or feminist theory, or critical race theory, or something. This fixation on child sexual abuse as an inevitable consequence of power seems like some weird right-wing conspiracy stuff, especially unironically using the words "The Taliban certainly has its faults but."

Taking my comment as right wing is interesting to me. Personally I have found that it transcends the left and right wing labels and applies generally to those in power, that is why I included things like sports and the Catholic Church was previously mentioned. Is it your observation that it occurs more in what you consider left wing organizations?

No, it's my observation that conspiracy theories about organized child sex abuse are largely a right-wing narrative. For example:

> QAnon (/ˌkjuː.əˈnɒn/) is a far-right conspiracy movement centered on false claims made by an anonymous individual or individuals, known by the name "Q", that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles operate a global child sex trafficking ring

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

It plays into classic themes of degeneracy and a need to return to traditionalism, and is designed to shock and whip up passions among the family-values crowd.

But it's the comment about the Taliban that really showed your hand. The meme on the right is a grudging admiration for the Taliban because of their highly conservative social ideology; i.e. commitment to traditional gender roles, forbidding abortion, persecuting trans people, etc.

Hitler was a vegetarian atheist, ergo most vegans are Nazis? You should try to separate the idea from the mind who holds it. Calling me alt right because I've noticed that many powerful people where friendly with a convicted pedophile after his conviction does nothing to refute my argument.

Nope the Taliban will only admit to raping girls, never boys. But of course it’s not “rape”, it’s “marriage” and everyone totally consented especially the parents of the kids who had guns to their heads as they signed the papers…

Of all the organizations that you could’ve used as comparison couldn’t you have found one with a better reputation?

I said they have their faults. I find it much worse that the western world enabled that behavior. We are supposed to be more enlightened. Soldiers are claiming to have PTSD from having to hear the screaming of little boys in the next room. That only happens if you know it's wrong. I don't blame the soliders however this was a foreign policy choice.

You don't have to resort to QAnon thinking about cabal's and secret clubs when institutional protection is plenty motivation all by itself (which is what happened in my school with a pedophile priest).

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