Mudcat Café message #3488626 The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #149850   Message #3488626
Posted By: Joe Offer
10-Mar-13 - 06:20 AM
Thread Name: BS: Catholic religion response to 'today'
Bonnie says: They go on having marriage-straining babies they neither want nor can afford, sometimes at the risk of health.

How many families do that, Bonnie? In our parish of 800 families, the number is exactly two. Both are ultra-conservative, legalistic Catholics. The other large families in our parish have adopted their children. It's the same in other parishes I've belonged to - one or two very conservative families have scads of miserable children, and the rest have two or three kids. So, don't you think you're overdramatizing the effects of the ban on birth control? Most priests I know don't go telling people not to practice birth control, and I have never heard a priest say anything against birth control from the pulpit. For that matter, I have never heard a priest say anything against homosexuality from the pulpit.

Jim says: the earliest recorded case of child abuse by a cleric took place 1,700 years ago.

So, Jim, when did the earliest recorded case of non-clergy child abuse take place, and when did the first coverup take place? I don't deny that far too many cases of sexual abuse by clergy took place. But in a church with a billion members, hundreds of such cases are only a small percentage. In the county where I live, dozens of cases of child abuse are reported every year - but there is no record of a single case of child abuse by a priest in this county ever. There have been ten cases in the next county over in the last century, but none in this county. My point is that while the crime is horrific, you cannot condemn the many for the crimes of the few.

And in Milwaukee, where there was a priest next door molesting dozens of children, I was living with 25 priests who were not. And yes, there was one bastard, but he was just a mean bastard, not a molester.