Bill Donohue and the Catholic League: Straight Talk about the Catholic Church

Maybe a few people still wonder what I really think about the recent attempts by the legal, media and entertainment industries to resurrect the dead scandal involving gay Catholic priests abusing kids. Fortunately there is now an ad written by Bill Donohue and run in the New York Times by the Catholic League which can serve as a manifesto for my position. You can read it here and after you do, you will understand exactly what I think about it. There are some really choice paragraphs in it will I will excerpt and add my own comments below.

Every time a new wave of accusations surfaces in one diocese, not coincidentally we see a spike in accusations in other dioceses. What is not often reported is that the vast majority of new accusations extend back decades. For example, for the first quarter of this year, 80 percent of the cases of alleged abuse involve incidences that occurred before 2000.

This is significant and sheds light on what a joke most accusations are. Yes, most accusations against priests are a JOKE. Want me to write it again? The people who have legitimate accusations are the ones who should be the most angry about this current situation because they are lumped in with the other lying money-grubbers.

The refrain that child rape is a reality in the Church is twice wrong: let’s get it straight—they weren’t children and they weren’t raped. We know from the John Jay study that most of the victims have been adolescents, and that the most common abuse has been inappropriate touching (inexcusable though this is, it is not rape). The Boston Globe correctly said of the John Jay report that “more than three-quarters of the victims were post pubescent, meaning the abuse did not meet the clinical definition of pedophilia.” In other words, the issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia.

Bill Donohue sounds like a broken record on this, but he has to keep saying it because the kids in the media haven't gotten it yet. Once everybody knows it and understands the ramifications I'm sure that Donohue won't feel the need to continue educating everyone.

Why are priests being singled out when the sexual abuse of minors among other segments of the population is on-going today? According to Virginia Commonwealth University professor Charol Shakeshaft, the nation’s leading education expert on this issue, “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.” We know from the work of Jenkins, and others, that there is no reason to believe that the rate of abuse is higher among Catholic priests than among the clergy of other religions. Moreover, there has been a slew of stories over the past few years detailing the extent of this problem in the Orthodox Jewish community; some rabbis still insist that sexual abuse cases should be handled internally. No wonder Jenkins maintains, “As a result of the furious investigations of the past decades, and particularly the John Jay study, the U.S. Catholic clergy are now the only major group on the planet that has ever been subjected to such a detailed examination of abuse complaints, using internal evidence that could not have come to light in any other way.”

In civil society, public teachers should be held to just as high a standard as Catholic priests. Justice is blind... remember?

The real damage done by the therapeutic approach is that it fostered the phenomenon of reassigning priests after they were treated. The exact same thing happened in the teaching profession. Indeed, moving treated teachers to new school districts is so common that it is called “passing the trash.” While moving treated priests to new parishes is no longer tolerated, the New York Times found that the practice of moving abusers around who work in New York’s state-run homes is commonplace.

In civil society, public administrators should be held to just as high a standard as Catholic bishops. Justice is blind... remember?

If I as a Catholic want to be angrier as a Catholic about the Catholic Bishops and priests screwing up one way or the other then that's fine. Maybe I get piety points for that, I don't know. In fact, maybe I'll make some targets with the US Catholic bishops' face on them to go shoot at the pistol range. That would accomplish a lot because it would show everybody how serious I am about child abuse, dammit.

There is a huge difference between an accusation, a credible accusation, a substantiated accusation and a finding of guilt. But not when it applies to priests. I once had a female reporter lambaste me in my office when I expressed my opposition to proposals calling for all dioceses to publish the names of accused priests. I then asked her for her boss’ name and phone number. Startled, she asked why. “Because I want to press charges against you for sexually harassing me,” I intoned, “and then I want to see your name posted on your employer’s website.” She got the point.

This is exactly the right way to educate these asinine prigs. Hold up a mirror—"This is what you look like."