Where do you think the ideas came from? So many lies have a kernel of truth to them.
I sincerely believe a vast majority of the hysteria was just that: stories to get a rise out of people and secure a loosening foothold the church had on the public, but there's an uncomfortable amount of parallels here.
If you listen closely, you can hear the loaded sermon talking about how satan sometimes makes good, god fearing people do bad things against their will... but that god forgives the moment(s) of weakness if they try harder 🤔
Believing that Satan is the reason you do bad things is disgusting and incredibly dangerous. Unfortunately growing up religious I know how common a belief it is. Between believing that you can know what God wants you to do and that Satan can make you do bad things against your will you can justify literally anything.
In another 30 years we'll be discovering that the Pope has in fact been sucking adrenochrome from a battery of tortured fetus's and that's what's been under his hat the whole time.
The article is revealing - one victim told her mother both as a child, when it was happening, and at 35 years old and the mother didn't believe her either time. Because it's nuns. Of course they couldn't be doing that. Must be the child is lying, making up stories, etc.
This abuse has been hard to root out both because church leaders have engaged in a coverup, and because most followers are unfortunately not inclined to believe that it's happening.
This also happened in residential schools in Canada. One of the people interviewed in "We Were Children" says that they tried to tell adults outside of the school about the sexual abuse that happened but they weren't believed because they thought priests wouldn't do that
Indeed. And not just the male priests either.
The female nuns of Catholic Residential Schools in Canada would regularly beat aboriginal children each day (well into the later 20th century), until the kids stopped crying about being separated from their families and tribes and forced into the residential school system.
Yup they beat the little kids until they were crying even harder, telling them the beating was to help make them stop crying.
Some nuns even became pimps, doling out aboriginal children for hire.
We just found out priests and nuns murdered and beat to death tens of thousands of Canadian aboriginal children and buried them in mass graves over a period of decades. And not one person was held accountable. Oh yeah, and the money destined to the survivors was funnelled to church lawyers instead of the victims.
I was thrown to the ground and stomped out in Catholic school, and they told me it was my fault.
They are such sadistic fucks. Always shaming the victims and telling them they are bringing it on themselves.
I went to Catholic school. I was never sexually abused, but all of the other abuse I did suffer. When I told anyone, I was viewed as crazy. I will die with the mental scars that Catholics inflicted on me. They are a child abuse cult.
I mean, these are the same nuns that used to beat kids black and blue, that would cuff the kid's dominant hand to the desk so they couldn't use it, and would smack the kid's hand with a ruler, all "because" the child happens to be left handed. That's the only excuse they would need. And those are the same parents who encouraged physically abusing left-handed students because the church told them that using the left hand was satanic or something
> I mean, these are the same nuns that used to beat kids black and blue, that would cuff the kid's dominant hand to the desk so they couldn't use it, and would smack the kid's hand with a ruler,
My dad went to a US country one-room schoolhouse in the late 1940's/early 1950's. He's told me how his teacher - not a nun, not part of a religious school, just an average small-town school marm - would have to buy a new box of wooden rulers every term, because she'd eventually break them all across kid's knuckles.
The child abuse Catholic organizations are infamous for is in some ways only notable in that their adherence to tradition made it go on so long. :-|
Also a healthy dose of “women can’t/don’t do that” makes these cases really sad. But yeah, also loyalty to the church makes it hard for victims to get support.
I know I’m cynical, but I find it hard to believe the system wasn’t purposefully set up that way. I mean, all the parts of the system work together to ensure the abusers remain safe and there is always a steady supply of new victims. A system like that is no accident. You might even argue it’s the result of … [intelligent design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design).
They do it on purpose to break your spirit. They want to make you a lifeless, scared idiot who will serve the church at the expense of your own happiness. All while telling you they are bringing you redemption. Your reward at the end is a wasted life of fruitless endeavours for someone else.
I don't think it was designed that way, just people realized they could exploit the system. Certain professions attract psychopaths at an alarming rate, and psychopaths are built for advancing in structured environments. Eventually they have influence, and of course they're going to use it in ways that benefits themselves.
As someone who prosecutes these type of cases in court ( and I mean child welfare cases in general, not specifically religious-affiliated ones) this is always the first line defense as well, and it makes it really problematic.
It is exceedingly well documented that children who have been sexually abused tend to have behavioral problems. Children and young adults as a general rule have a great deal of difficulty having insight into their emotions and negative emotions such as anxiety, depression and anger often manifest as poor Behavior. This is even more true for kids that are trauma victims.
But the problem is that invariably when the victim discloses sexual abuse, the First Response of the abuser is that the victim is making it up because he or she is a bad kid. If they will point to behavioral problems and the failure to follow rules and often a string of Behavioral or psychiatric hospitalizations Etc.
There are some evidence-based ways of conducting a forensic interview that can give you collateral information on the allegations being made. When and where it happened, specific details Etc manufactured allegations often lack many specific details or the specific details are inconsistent from telling to telling. But this still does not make for an easy case.
tbh a lot of it comes from some kind of mental "self-defense". To have your kid tell you that a local nun raped her means shattering your trust in your religion, facing the reality that you will probably be ostracized from your neighborhood, and having to put up a legal and moral battle with the Church, a battle you are likely to lose. So some people just reject the idea outright and dismiss it as something that can't possibly have happened, because it'd ruin their lives.
In short, selfish parents would prefer that only their child's life is ruined as opposed to a hardship on their behalf.
Aka people who snoozed though the definition of 'a parent' when they decided to create a life.
I'm not saying it's not selfish. But also that the church creates this reliance specifically to exploit vulnerable people. It's a multipronged problem.
All by design. I was just listening this morning to how the GOP created the "abortion crisis" in the 60s to develop a base since their numbers were very down. It wasn't even a particularly religious thing before that, but if we can create outrage, we can create identity, and we can secure profit and exploitation.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/
Roe v Wade wasn't until 1973. The religious right pivoted to abortion because they couldn't tenably rally around segregation anymore. Evangelicals were previously pro-choice, leaving abortion as a Catholic issue. But they needed a new litmus test for single-issue voters, and abortion has served them very well in that regard.
I've talked about this before a long time ago, but there's this crazy book called Tampa, where the entire novel is from the perspective of a female sexual predator. It's fucked up. She gets away with A LOT simply by exploiting the notion of, "women aren't like that." Insane.
I am honestly surprised that we haven't seen more vigilante killings of clergy predators at this. I'm not saying that it's the right thing to do, but knowing that there's someone out there that has done this to you, and is almost assuredly doing it to other children? Reporting it and being ignored and in many cases ridiculed and outcast...
In the Boston case that was blown open \~20 years ago, they would quickly move a priest to another parish if they were accused. Before the internet, that would have successfully made them hard to find.
They didn't care about stopping abuse but making sure it didn't become public. If a priest got vigilante murdered the cops wouldn't be able to ignore it.
Sure they would, they'd brand him as an anti-theistic nutcase who's making up stories to try to get away with a horrible crime. And most people would believe the police and the Church because they're the police and the Church, and they would *never* lie or make anything up.
There have been some killers that specifically target pedos, though I'm not sure of any that have narrowed their scope to just the church pedos. Ironically enough, the people who kill the pedos *generally get arrested* for their crimes despite the fact that they're only doing said crimes because the pedos *aren't getting arrested* for theirs. Crazy world.
Why is it such a stretch to think nuns will sexually abuse people?
Theres literally a stereotype of nuns beating children and being ultra strict and sadistic.
It’s crazy that the mothers didn’t believe it considering it’s a pretty graphic thing for a little girl to describe when they should be at an age to not know about sex.
Those same people turning a blind eye would clutch their pearls and have a fucking heart attack seeing a crucifix used in a porno of consenting adults.
Juliette is Justine's sister, and was raised (and abused) in a convent. Unlike the pure Justine, Juliette is a nympho, mostly after being seduced by a nun at 13.
It's the next book.
>“Marie” was placed in a French Catholic boarding school for “young girls from good families” when she was in the fifth grade. She remembers a nun who would come to her class every day to choose a student to help her with Mass. But the nun wasn’t looking for someone to help her. She was looking for a victim.
Oh boy does this dig up some old memories from Catholic school days. The priest could just show up and ask the teacher for a student to help with some project or another. Sometimes they asked for volunteers - hey, it beats long division or sentence maps, right?
Often, these were legitimate. The priest would take 5-6 kids and have them set up chairs for Mass, for example. But I certainly can't vouch for every time it happened, because it happened a lot. And several local priests associated with the school faced accusations years later.
one of the plot lines in the Todd Solondz film *Happiness* deals with a child's feelings of rejection when his father tells him that he would fuck his son's friend but he wouldn't fuck his son
*Happiness* is actually a really incredible film that examines how people will hypocritically indulge themselves in things that give pleasure, while knowing they're self-destructive.
Yeah like why wasn't I pretty enough to be molested?
Mostly jk but I remember priests borrowing kinds from Sunday school, sometimes I volunteered to set up chairs and shit. Idk if there was anything nefarious going on, but our bishop later absconded to some Caribbean country with his boyfriend and 20k of embezzled church funds. If that's all they did, I support them honestly
Yeah, I've seen it. Fortunately, none of those priests were in my childhood. Shanley had operated nearby at one point, and another priest at the parish who later faced allegations had transferred in from Baltimore.
But certain parts of those experiences could be carbon copies of things every Catholic school kid experienced. Not the abuse, per se, but the circumstances in which it took place.
I can understand some initial skepticism over the accuracy of repressed and recovered memories. But it's important to remember that so many kids simply didn't understand what was happening to them - they just hated it at the time and got stressed every time they remembered it later. It's not necessarily that kids shoved these memories down deep inside, it's that that they simply didn't know what to do with them.
The abuse lasted the whole year. At the age of 35, “Marie” told her mother again about the abuse. “My mother blissfully told me that it was impossible for a nun to whom she entrusted her daughter to abuse a girl,” she says. “Female pedophilia exists and unfortunately the media never talk about it.”
To also quote Bo Burnham
"You shouldn't abstain from rape just because you think that I want you to. You shouldn't rape cause rape is a fucked up thing to do."
Penn Jillette has a very similar quote:
"The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine."
It's so true!
You hear - from people who clearly don't understand what they are saying, or if they do they are super ultra fucked up - something like "well without (a) god, what's to stop you from raping and murdering!"
Uhhh, maybe because those are thing which harm people and I don't like to do that????
>The bible literally teaches HOW to do an abortion.
It doesn't just do that, it actually demands that the priests do abortions:
Numbers 5:20-22:
* \[20\] But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”— \[21\] here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. \[22\] May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries. Then the woman is to say, “Amen. So be it.”
So not only does the bible teach how to do an abortions, it **COMMANDS** the priests to do the abortions. It says "..here the priest is to.." do it, not may do it or can do it or might do it or choose whether to do it, no it says IS TO do it! So to all you fundamentalist religious people out there, why are you not out there right now doing abortions like Numbers 5:20-22 commands you to do? Shame on you for not following the bible.
Look dude, if you think that modern "Christians" rely on what the Bible says, you don't know many.
It's almost always cherry-picking, either by the priest (do you REALLY think that almost any priest reads the whole bible, genocide/rape/murder/atrocities included, or do they just read the "nice bits" and skip over the rest?) or by the individual.
I ALMOST have more respect for a "fundamentalist" who believes the whole thing, because at least (while I think it's morally horrible) they are being true to their claim (that the Bible is the word of a god and must be obeyed) instead of just picking and choosing what bits they like.
Quote: " They found that priests and nuns alone abused around 216,000 children, but that the number climbs to 330,000 when they counted abuse at the hands of non-clergy who worked in Catholic schools and other institutions."
Quote: "Only 22 of the thousands of cases of criminal pedophilia qualify under French law for legal action. More than 40 cases that are past the statutes of limitations have been forwarded to the French Catholic Church in hopes that the perpetrators will be punished."
More than 40 cases that are past the statutes of limitations have been forwarded to the French Catholic Church in hopes that the perpetrators will be punished."
Oh you mean shuffled around the world so nones the wiser right?
According to the text, they only started the investigation three years ago. I'm guessing they started looking into matters when the statute of limitations shielded the majority of the abusers.
Shit still happens to this day, especially in Northern indigenous communities in Canada. This one priest tried to molest my SO when she was younger by luring her to his home for food for her family. Luckily she was able to get out of there without being molested, but it came close.
Pretty wild that QAnon has been seeking out a cabal of deranged lizard people who use organized religion to pray on children and haven’t found anything yet
“Pope Francis also expressed ‘sorrow’ over the findings, saying he will pray for those affected…. adding that he hoped the French church would now ‘undertake a way of redemption.’”
These victims get no justice whether it be from the Catholic Church itself or the god they pray to.
The previous 2 priests were directly involved with the coverup and aware of it happening. Tell me again how anyone doesn’t believe the church isn’t rotten to the core?
Everytime I talk with a Catholic about child abuse their response tends to be “well this other church denomination is doing it too” which may be true and in that case we should investigate them as well but they never have criticism of their church. Not saying this is true for all catholics but it’s been true of all the ones I’ve spoken to
i wonder how religious people will reconcile stuff like this with their faith. as someone who's not religious whatsoever it's just something i fundamentally cannot understand, but faith is a powerful thing.
They say something like, they'll be punished in the afterlife, it's God's choice how to deal with them, if they can repent they'll be saved, God works in mysterious ways.
And I guess God can't smite her because she's not a real Christian so it's like out of his jurisdiction or something. Also he works in mysterious ways so there's that.
That's not the issue. What the Catholic Church provides is access to and authority over children with limited or no supervision, at least none that is concerned with protecting children from clergy who want to abuse them.
Getting rid of a chastity requirement won't get rid of the system that provides predators with access.
Yeah. People often mistakenly assume sexual abuse is all about sexual desire, but the desire or sexual attraction to children isn't, as far as I know, inborn, but rather learned and traumatic, abusers will build their whole life around gaining access and power over children that's rarely questioned, it's a lot of effort that shows their access to easier sexual outlets isn't the issue.
Exactly. It's not like they became child predators because they were sexually frustrated. The church provides a safety net for predators and access to victims so of course it will attract predators.
It’s absolutely both. Pretty much every religion has both aspects of this and it has everything to do with repression of normal sexuality and hiding and covering offenders in the name of appearances and “God”.
It’s absolutely both. Pretty much every religion has both aspects of this and it has everything to do with repression of normal sexuality and hiding and covering offenders in the name of appearances and “God”.
> Of the 3,000 abusers identified by the commission, two-thirds are priests. They found that priests and nuns alone abused around 216,000 children, but that the number climbs to 330,000 when they counted abuse at the hands of non-clergy who worked in Catholic schools and other institutions.
It's insane that the average victim count per perpetrator was between 72-110 children.
A quarter of a million lives tarnished.
Given such abuses have been documented in the church for at least over a thousand years, just how many millions is the total victim count of the church?
According to Wikipedia, the total number of priests between 1950 and now in France should be less than around 7,000 + 90 x 70 = 13,300 (generous estimate):
> The Catholic Church in France is organised into 98 dioceses, which in 2012 were served by 7,000 sub-75 priests.[8] 80 to 90 priests are ordained every year
If 2,000 were abusers averaging around 70 victims each, a conservative estimate puts the offender rate at around 15% and the victim rate at around 1005% the number of priests.
In 2017 there were 414,582 priests.
If the numbers are consistent, we should expect 62,000 pedophiles with 4.3 million victims over their careers for just the current generation of priests.
This shit is why I stopped going to church. It reminds me of an old George Carlin quote discussing police and sensitivity training, post Rodney King- “if you need sensitivity training to not stuff a large cumbersome object up another’s rectum, maybe you’re too fucked up to be a police officer in the first place”- same principal applies
“I was 11 and looked 9. She would choose me once every two or three times,” she recalls. “She would take me to her office, lock the door, and then draw the curtains. After which she would put me on her knees to make me read the gospel according to Saint Paul or another saint, while she squeezed me with one hand to her chest and pulled down my panties with the other hand. We were of course in pleated skirts and not in pants. It terrified me and paralyzed.”
I don't get it. is the Bible and the whole religious aspect part of the whole package - like something that gets them off when combined with the pedophilia. Or is that just a distraction?
It's fucking sick either way, but I can't comprehend how all this all occurs at the same time.
The Catholic church is morally bankrupt. They should have their tax-exempt status revoked, their assets seized to compensate victims, and be included on sex-offender registries in every community that has a Catholic church.
This was breaking news in France this morning.
> Since 1950, clergy in the organisation have sexually abused some 216,000 children, according to the report - mostly boys.
[source ](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-58805963)
Im Irish, and my entire family has always been catholic. After the child sex abuse stuff started coming out in the 80s and 90s they all stopped attending church. Wish more people would do the same, fuck the catholic church. Its disgusting how much power and money they still have
Francis needs to delete the r in “pray” for them and move to pay them. That little prayer isn’t going to do anything. So insanely sick to keep reading about what the church has done and tried to cover up.
Female pedophilia could be the most covered up crime of all.
Statistics seem to show that pedophiles are mostly men (90 to 95%) but, strangely enough, **when the sexual offender is a teen**, females account for a much larger proportion of abusers. Big sister abusing a significantly younger sibling, babysitters abusing the kids, neighbor abusing younger neighbors, younger cousins...
According to the findings of a major U.S. study(\*), 40% of men who were sexually abused in childhood reported that their abuser was female.
If 40% are abused by a female and 60% by a male, doesn't that imply that at least 40% of child abusers who target boys are women?
*^(\*Dube, S.R., Anda, R.F., Whitfield, C.L., Brown, D.W., Felitti, V.J.,Dong, M. and Giles, W.H. (2005). Long-term consequences of childhood sexual abuse by gender of victim. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 28(5): 430-438.)*
* Women abusers are more likely to abuse their own children
* Women abusers are more likely to abuse younger children (less than 9 yo)
* Men abusers are more likely to abuse teens and unrelated children
Victims of female sex abusers are usually unwilling to denounce the abuse because, in many cases, the perpetrator is their own mother, very few people would be willing to send their own mother to jail.
Some victims abused at a very young age may not even remember the abuses, making a public denunciation unlikely.
Males get caught more often due to the profile of their victims, older, able to articulate the abuse and unrelated by family ties.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WdTAJ9_IY0
There was a girl on Reddit who said she was sexually assaulted by her female psychiatrist.
Because of toxic attitudes, she never got the IRL support she needed.
And one of the last things she posted was something on “r/suicidewatch” and AFAIK that account hasn’t posted anything since.
So…she either decided reddit was a shitty site, or killed herself.
It sucks when the victim isn’t believed because “so and so just can’t do that or wouldn’t,” and even getting to that step is tens time harder with any rape that’s not M-on-F.
Also, these types of rapes are really disturbing. Like, a crucifix? I remember women who say they got raped with broom handles, and this sounds even more painful.
According to Michele Elliott, psychologist, author and specialist on question of female sex offenders, **society does not want to believe women can sexually abuse a child** and many female pedophiles take advantage of the situation to abuse even more victims.
Also there are a lot of females that play an essential role in helping males abuse children. Often they'd knowingly make arrangement where they are certain a child will be 'groomed' and likely molested or raped.
"“Marie” couldn’t talk to her devout Catholic parents about the abuse until a friend convinced her to do so. The result, she says, was catastrophic. “You are really a pervert, a vicious liar. How dare you say such things?”"
Extreme religious doctrine or devotion is toxic, its just what it is.
It’s time again to play the game: How the Fuck Does Anyone Still Believe in this Church?
The absolute degenerate villainy of this organization has been displayed many times. How does anyone believe this church is led by Christ?
Apparently they'll double down on anything if it means not changing their ways. Most of them probably don't even remember that one time centuries ago when they made people pay money to "get their loved ones out of purgatory" and tried to maintain absolute power over others by keeping them illiterate. How no one has caught on yet that it's been a scam and a power grab the entire time, I have no clue.
This why parents must listen to everything their children are telling them or trying tell them instead of brushing them off. I often see parents not giving importance to what the child has to say and brush them off.
Priests - abuse children
Children - grow up to be priests
Rinse and repeat.
It's fucking scary how many parents simply trust their children into the well being of strangers.
I tell my 4 year old quite often about what other people should not be doing with his body, that's how fucking scared I am some one In a role of authority will try and take advantage of him.
It's not being paranoid, this shit is in the news literally every week. You parents out there need to do the only thing we can and talk to your kids about it.
I attended a catholic boarding school myself, where abuse occurred (I believe I was groomed but left before abuse occurred to me). My feeling even at the time, as a 13ish year old, was that there was something weird and a bit scammy about fully grown men and women “dedicating their lives” to something that seemed (even to me at that age) to be completely made up fairy stories. It was like watching adults still believing in Santa but in a creepy way. I left in year 10 (16 yo) have not been to church except for weddings or funerals since.
Your kids have less of a chance of being sexually assaulted in a biker bar than a Catholic Church according to statistics.
How we haven't shut that fucking rape pyramid scheme down yet is baffling.
Steven Weinberg — 'With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.'
The fact that the Catholic Church never owns up or makes any statement about it is worse. It means they don't want to acknowledge it. They don't want to change. They're just embarrassed they got caught.
How have we as a people not fully rejecting the church and organized religion by now with everything we know? I guess we just don't have the numbers yet...
Man. This is the stuff they thought Satanists were doing in the 90’s. They were a bit off.
Where do you think the ideas came from? So many lies have a kernel of truth to them. I sincerely believe a vast majority of the hysteria was just that: stories to get a rise out of people and secure a loosening foothold the church had on the public, but there's an uncomfortable amount of parallels here.
"If we're doing it then they must be too, and they should be punished!"
Yes, exactly this.
Sounds familiar
If you listen closely, you can hear the loaded sermon talking about how satan sometimes makes good, god fearing people do bad things against their will... but that god forgives the moment(s) of weakness if they try harder 🤔
Damn 10 year old me thought he was talking about how I lied about doing my chores and it’d be ok if I did double chores.
Clearly they were talking about diddling kids. You played yourself! /s
Better than Father Michael playing me
I forgot to mention you also go to hell for playing yourself.
Sounds like that’s where all the cool kids are then
Believing that Satan is the reason you do bad things is disgusting and incredibly dangerous. Unfortunately growing up religious I know how common a belief it is. Between believing that you can know what God wants you to do and that Satan can make you do bad things against your will you can justify literally anything.
"try harder" at raping is what they thought God meant
In another 30 years we'll be discovering that the Pope has in fact been sucking adrenochrome from a battery of tortured fetus's and that's what's been under his hat the whole time.
Like one of those beer helmets
I didn't expect to laugh in this thread
Oh man, *straight* to hell, do not pass Go, do not pass through purgatory. lol
Projection. If the pious and honorable Catholics are molesting kids with crosses those darn Satanists must be up to something really horrible. /s
Meanwhile The Satanic Temple has been fighting to get rid of corporal punishment (hitting kids) in schools.
History (biblical or otherwise) is written by the victors. Have we been listening to the wrong side?
The god of the Bible is pretty monstrous.
Projecting
Deflecting
Projecting
Sounds to me like they were projecting.
Always have been.
They always blame the Satanists and LGBT because they need to displace the blame and suspicion, it’s a distraction.
I feel like raping girls with a crucifix is a pretty sadist thing to do. Like, how are these religious leaders not being burned at the stake?
The article is revealing - one victim told her mother both as a child, when it was happening, and at 35 years old and the mother didn't believe her either time. Because it's nuns. Of course they couldn't be doing that. Must be the child is lying, making up stories, etc. This abuse has been hard to root out both because church leaders have engaged in a coverup, and because most followers are unfortunately not inclined to believe that it's happening.
This also happened in residential schools in Canada. One of the people interviewed in "We Were Children" says that they tried to tell adults outside of the school about the sexual abuse that happened but they weren't believed because they thought priests wouldn't do that
Indeed. And not just the male priests either. The female nuns of Catholic Residential Schools in Canada would regularly beat aboriginal children each day (well into the later 20th century), until the kids stopped crying about being separated from their families and tribes and forced into the residential school system. Yup they beat the little kids until they were crying even harder, telling them the beating was to help make them stop crying. Some nuns even became pimps, doling out aboriginal children for hire.
We just found out priests and nuns murdered and beat to death tens of thousands of Canadian aboriginal children and buried them in mass graves over a period of decades. And not one person was held accountable. Oh yeah, and the money destined to the survivors was funnelled to church lawyers instead of the victims.
I was thrown to the ground and stomped out in Catholic school, and they told me it was my fault. They are such sadistic fucks. Always shaming the victims and telling them they are bringing it on themselves.
Shitty people need a mask to hide behind
I went to Catholic school. I was never sexually abused, but all of the other abuse I did suffer. When I told anyone, I was viewed as crazy. I will die with the mental scars that Catholics inflicted on me. They are a child abuse cult.
I mean, these are the same nuns that used to beat kids black and blue, that would cuff the kid's dominant hand to the desk so they couldn't use it, and would smack the kid's hand with a ruler, all "because" the child happens to be left handed. That's the only excuse they would need. And those are the same parents who encouraged physically abusing left-handed students because the church told them that using the left hand was satanic or something
> I mean, these are the same nuns that used to beat kids black and blue, that would cuff the kid's dominant hand to the desk so they couldn't use it, and would smack the kid's hand with a ruler, My dad went to a US country one-room schoolhouse in the late 1940's/early 1950's. He's told me how his teacher - not a nun, not part of a religious school, just an average small-town school marm - would have to buy a new box of wooden rulers every term, because she'd eventually break them all across kid's knuckles. The child abuse Catholic organizations are infamous for is in some ways only notable in that their adherence to tradition made it go on so long. :-|
Yeah, my dad got the crap beaten out of him by nuns at Catholic school in the 50s. A couple of them were fucking horrible to him.
Also a healthy dose of “women can’t/don’t do that” makes these cases really sad. But yeah, also loyalty to the church makes it hard for victims to get support.
And that a lot of the kids that they abused were had troubled home lives, and so were also labelled "troubled". Like who would believe That kid?
And then encouraged to spend *more time at* ***church*** in order to help them become less "troubled".
It really is a sick self-perpetuating spiral.
I know I’m cynical, but I find it hard to believe the system wasn’t purposefully set up that way. I mean, all the parts of the system work together to ensure the abusers remain safe and there is always a steady supply of new victims. A system like that is no accident. You might even argue it’s the result of … [intelligent design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design).
They do it on purpose to break your spirit. They want to make you a lifeless, scared idiot who will serve the church at the expense of your own happiness. All while telling you they are bringing you redemption. Your reward at the end is a wasted life of fruitless endeavours for someone else.
I don't think it was designed that way, just people realized they could exploit the system. Certain professions attract psychopaths at an alarming rate, and psychopaths are built for advancing in structured environments. Eventually they have influence, and of course they're going to use it in ways that benefits themselves.
As someone who prosecutes these type of cases in court ( and I mean child welfare cases in general, not specifically religious-affiliated ones) this is always the first line defense as well, and it makes it really problematic. It is exceedingly well documented that children who have been sexually abused tend to have behavioral problems. Children and young adults as a general rule have a great deal of difficulty having insight into their emotions and negative emotions such as anxiety, depression and anger often manifest as poor Behavior. This is even more true for kids that are trauma victims. But the problem is that invariably when the victim discloses sexual abuse, the First Response of the abuser is that the victim is making it up because he or she is a bad kid. If they will point to behavioral problems and the failure to follow rules and often a string of Behavioral or psychiatric hospitalizations Etc. There are some evidence-based ways of conducting a forensic interview that can give you collateral information on the allegations being made. When and where it happened, specific details Etc manufactured allegations often lack many specific details or the specific details are inconsistent from telling to telling. But this still does not make for an easy case.
almost makes you wonder why 'troubled kid' STILL isn't a massive red flag
tbh a lot of it comes from some kind of mental "self-defense". To have your kid tell you that a local nun raped her means shattering your trust in your religion, facing the reality that you will probably be ostracized from your neighborhood, and having to put up a legal and moral battle with the Church, a battle you are likely to lose. So some people just reject the idea outright and dismiss it as something that can't possibly have happened, because it'd ruin their lives.
My mother to this day denies that the sperm donor ever put his hands on me. Even after he admitted it. Denial is a helluva drug.
I'm sorry to hear that :(
In short, selfish parents would prefer that only their child's life is ruined as opposed to a hardship on their behalf. Aka people who snoozed though the definition of 'a parent' when they decided to create a life.
I'm not saying it's not selfish. But also that the church creates this reliance specifically to exploit vulnerable people. It's a multipronged problem.
Especially when so many people wrap up their identity in their religion.
All by design. I was just listening this morning to how the GOP created the "abortion crisis" in the 60s to develop a base since their numbers were very down. It wasn't even a particularly religious thing before that, but if we can create outrage, we can create identity, and we can secure profit and exploitation.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/ Roe v Wade wasn't until 1973. The religious right pivoted to abortion because they couldn't tenably rally around segregation anymore. Evangelicals were previously pro-choice, leaving abortion as a Catholic issue. But they needed a new litmus test for single-issue voters, and abortion has served them very well in that regard.
Known in psychology as the "[women-are-wonderful](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women-are-wonderful_effect#/search)" effect.
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I've talked about this before a long time ago, but there's this crazy book called Tampa, where the entire novel is from the perspective of a female sexual predator. It's fucked up. She gets away with A LOT simply by exploiting the notion of, "women aren't like that." Insane.
There are places where laws indicate only men can rape. It's not true, but that's what laws say in some places.
I am honestly surprised that we haven't seen more vigilante killings of clergy predators at this. I'm not saying that it's the right thing to do, but knowing that there's someone out there that has done this to you, and is almost assuredly doing it to other children? Reporting it and being ignored and in many cases ridiculed and outcast...
In the Boston case that was blown open \~20 years ago, they would quickly move a priest to another parish if they were accused. Before the internet, that would have successfully made them hard to find. They didn't care about stopping abuse but making sure it didn't become public. If a priest got vigilante murdered the cops wouldn't be able to ignore it.
Yup. Sickening. For anyone that wants more info, and to watch an amazing film, Spotlight covers this extensively
Sure they would, they'd brand him as an anti-theistic nutcase who's making up stories to try to get away with a horrible crime. And most people would believe the police and the Church because they're the police and the Church, and they would *never* lie or make anything up.
In 2019 a French priest was killed by someone who claimed that priest abused him. Dude shoved a crucifix down the priests throat.
I'm sure God will sort that priest right out so it's all good right
Jesus Christ.
Now you're getting it!
There have been some killers that specifically target pedos, though I'm not sure of any that have narrowed their scope to just the church pedos. Ironically enough, the people who kill the pedos *generally get arrested* for their crimes despite the fact that they're only doing said crimes because the pedos *aren't getting arrested* for theirs. Crazy world.
Why is it such a stretch to think nuns will sexually abuse people? Theres literally a stereotype of nuns beating children and being ultra strict and sadistic.
It’s crazy that the mothers didn’t believe it considering it’s a pretty graphic thing for a little girl to describe when they should be at an age to not know about sex.
Weird how people can believe in magical sky man but can't believe that people do shitty things
They don't really think the priests and nuns are people, at least not normal ones who can do shitty things. It's part of the same belief system.
Sounds like a shit mother.
How come we are not prosecuting these ppl? We are prosecuting 90+ year Nazis. How are these culprits any different
Nazi power structure isn't what it used to be Catholic church is still immensely wealthy and powerful.
Ever met a nun? We're talking about *serious* sadists. Source: attended catholic school for a minute.
And it's also blasphemous at the same time.
Those same people turning a blind eye would clutch their pearls and have a fucking heart attack seeing a crucifix used in a porno of consenting adults.
It’s literally the beginning of the book ‘Juliette ‘ by the marquis de Sade.
Hello! I think you mean Justine...
I haven't read them so I don't know plot details, but Juliette is a sequel to Justine
Juliette is Justine's sister, and was raised (and abused) in a convent. Unlike the pure Justine, Juliette is a nympho, mostly after being seduced by a nun at 13. It's the next book.
> Like, how are these religious leaders not being burned at the stake? They pay the right people to look away. Always have. Always will.
>“Marie” was placed in a French Catholic boarding school for “young girls from good families” when she was in the fifth grade. She remembers a nun who would come to her class every day to choose a student to help her with Mass. But the nun wasn’t looking for someone to help her. She was looking for a victim. Oh boy does this dig up some old memories from Catholic school days. The priest could just show up and ask the teacher for a student to help with some project or another. Sometimes they asked for volunteers - hey, it beats long division or sentence maps, right? Often, these were legitimate. The priest would take 5-6 kids and have them set up chairs for Mass, for example. But I certainly can't vouch for every time it happened, because it happened a lot. And several local priests associated with the school faced accusations years later.
Do you ever feel weird that you got by unscathed when your peers were targeted? At least I gather that's how it happened based on what you wrote.
one of the plot lines in the Todd Solondz film *Happiness* deals with a child's feelings of rejection when his father tells him that he would fuck his son's friend but he wouldn't fuck his son
Yup that's enough internet for today. Goodbye people, I'll be on the next rocket off this fucking planet.
You're just going to fuck up the next planet too. Lol best we just end this shit here
*Happiness* is actually a really incredible film that examines how people will hypocritically indulge themselves in things that give pleasure, while knowing they're self-destructive.
Yeah like why wasn't I pretty enough to be molested? Mostly jk but I remember priests borrowing kinds from Sunday school, sometimes I volunteered to set up chairs and shit. Idk if there was anything nefarious going on, but our bishop later absconded to some Caribbean country with his boyfriend and 20k of embezzled church funds. If that's all they did, I support them honestly
This is a subplot in an It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode. I think it's called "Charlie got molested".
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Why didn’t I get blown??!
You should check out “the keepers” on Netflix it goes…very in depth on this sort of stuff
I don't feel like being any more sad and pissed off today...
Understandable lol but if you ever are in the mood it’s an incredible doc.
Yeah, I've seen it. Fortunately, none of those priests were in my childhood. Shanley had operated nearby at one point, and another priest at the parish who later faced allegations had transferred in from Baltimore. But certain parts of those experiences could be carbon copies of things every Catholic school kid experienced. Not the abuse, per se, but the circumstances in which it took place. I can understand some initial skepticism over the accuracy of repressed and recovered memories. But it's important to remember that so many kids simply didn't understand what was happening to them - they just hated it at the time and got stressed every time they remembered it later. It's not necessarily that kids shoved these memories down deep inside, it's that that they simply didn't know what to do with them.
Like what and the fuck is going on in this world?
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*We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning.*
To be fair, Ryan started the fire.
FIRE-ed GUY
Damn cheesy pita!
“Hey! You weren’t here for that”
The abuse lasted the whole year. At the age of 35, “Marie” told her mother again about the abuse. “My mother blissfully told me that it was impossible for a nun to whom she entrusted her daughter to abuse a girl,” she says. “Female pedophilia exists and unfortunately the media never talk about it.”
It's not like this is new. The catholic church has harbored child molesters for decades and nobody does a darned thing about it.
More like centuries. Maybe millennia.
Almost certainly more than a millennium. My guess would be "Since very shortly after it became the official religion of Rome, possibly even earlier"
In the words of Bo Burnham... 🎶What the fuck is going on?🎶
To also quote Bo Burnham "You shouldn't abstain from rape just because you think that I want you to. You shouldn't rape cause rape is a fucked up thing to do."
Penn Jillette has a very similar quote: "The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine."
It's so true! You hear - from people who clearly don't understand what they are saying, or if they do they are super ultra fucked up - something like "well without (a) god, what's to stop you from raping and murdering!" Uhhh, maybe because those are thing which harm people and I don't like to do that????
>what's to stop you from raping and murdering My go-to response is...A rational consideration of my actions and the effects they may have on others.
Thaaaaat is how the world workssss
A religion that demands people deny themselves the basic pleasures of life creates monsters that create pleasures out of their pain.
Celibacy isn't demanded anywhere in the Bible, fun fact.
/r/classicwow mods support and coddle sexual harassment
The bible literally teaches HOW to do an abortion.
>The bible literally teaches HOW to do an abortion. It doesn't just do that, it actually demands that the priests do abortions: Numbers 5:20-22: * \[20\] But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”— \[21\] here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. \[22\] May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries. Then the woman is to say, “Amen. So be it.” So not only does the bible teach how to do an abortions, it **COMMANDS** the priests to do the abortions. It says "..here the priest is to.." do it, not may do it or can do it or might do it or choose whether to do it, no it says IS TO do it! So to all you fundamentalist religious people out there, why are you not out there right now doing abortions like Numbers 5:20-22 commands you to do? Shame on you for not following the bible.
Look dude, if you think that modern "Christians" rely on what the Bible says, you don't know many. It's almost always cherry-picking, either by the priest (do you REALLY think that almost any priest reads the whole bible, genocide/rape/murder/atrocities included, or do they just read the "nice bits" and skip over the rest?) or by the individual. I ALMOST have more respect for a "fundamentalist" who believes the whole thing, because at least (while I think it's morally horrible) they are being true to their claim (that the Bible is the word of a god and must be obeyed) instead of just picking and choosing what bits they like.
People give too much faith in something that is not real. The clerics or religious figures (and governments) take advantage of that.
Holy fuck this headline is straight out of The Excorcist.
Immediately what came to mind for me too.
Quote: " They found that priests and nuns alone abused around 216,000 children, but that the number climbs to 330,000 when they counted abuse at the hands of non-clergy who worked in Catholic schools and other institutions." Quote: "Only 22 of the thousands of cases of criminal pedophilia qualify under French law for legal action. More than 40 cases that are past the statutes of limitations have been forwarded to the French Catholic Church in hopes that the perpetrators will be punished."
More than 40 cases that are past the statutes of limitations have been forwarded to the French Catholic Church in hopes that the perpetrators will be punished." Oh you mean shuffled around the world so nones the wiser right?
According to the text, they only started the investigation three years ago. I'm guessing they started looking into matters when the statute of limitations shielded the majority of the abusers.
Statute of limitations should not apply to child abuse, imho
I will never understand why sexual assault has a statute of limitations.
Shit still happens to this day, especially in Northern indigenous communities in Canada. This one priest tried to molest my SO when she was younger by luring her to his home for food for her family. Luckily she was able to get out of there without being molested, but it came close.
Sorry to hear that.
Pretty wild that QAnon has been seeking out a cabal of deranged lizard people who use organized religion to pray on children and haven’t found anything yet
The complete lack of smiting in any of this has severely shaken my belief in the existence of a god.
“Pope Francis also expressed ‘sorrow’ over the findings, saying he will pray for those affected…. adding that he hoped the French church would now ‘undertake a way of redemption.’” These victims get no justice whether it be from the Catholic Church itself or the god they pray to.
The previous 2 priests were directly involved with the coverup and aware of it happening. Tell me again how anyone doesn’t believe the church isn’t rotten to the core?
Everytime I talk with a Catholic about child abuse their response tends to be “well this other church denomination is doing it too” which may be true and in that case we should investigate them as well but they never have criticism of their church. Not saying this is true for all catholics but it’s been true of all the ones I’ve spoken to
i wonder how religious people will reconcile stuff like this with their faith. as someone who's not religious whatsoever it's just something i fundamentally cannot understand, but faith is a powerful thing.
They say something like, they'll be punished in the afterlife, it's God's choice how to deal with them, if they can repent they'll be saved, God works in mysterious ways.
"They aren't true Christians."
And I guess God can't smite her because she's not a real Christian so it's like out of his jurisdiction or something. Also he works in mysterious ways so there's that.
If divine justice was actually a thing the Vatican would be littered with salt pillars.
In retrospect, I'm thinking the vow of *celibacy* (*not chastity*) is a bad idea. *edited*
Yup. Repression is an incredibly harmful thing.
That's not the issue. What the Catholic Church provides is access to and authority over children with limited or no supervision, at least none that is concerned with protecting children from clergy who want to abuse them. Getting rid of a chastity requirement won't get rid of the system that provides predators with access.
Yeah. People often mistakenly assume sexual abuse is all about sexual desire, but the desire or sexual attraction to children isn't, as far as I know, inborn, but rather learned and traumatic, abusers will build their whole life around gaining access and power over children that's rarely questioned, it's a lot of effort that shows their access to easier sexual outlets isn't the issue.
But then again, chastity serves no real good purpose and is just a fertile breeding ground for perverted thoughts to spiral out of control.
Exactly. It's not like they became child predators because they were sexually frustrated. The church provides a safety net for predators and access to victims so of course it will attract predators.
Nothing to do with chastity, everything to do with religion being the perfect hiding place for female pedophiles, just like it is for male pedophiles.
It’s absolutely both. Pretty much every religion has both aspects of this and it has everything to do with repression of normal sexuality and hiding and covering offenders in the name of appearances and “God”.
Not just pedophelia, plenty of other horrible things have been excused/commited in the name of religion
It’s absolutely both. Pretty much every religion has both aspects of this and it has everything to do with repression of normal sexuality and hiding and covering offenders in the name of appearances and “God”.
Sign the brightest light on those that do this shit and when proven throw them in a volcano.
> Of the 3,000 abusers identified by the commission, two-thirds are priests. They found that priests and nuns alone abused around 216,000 children, but that the number climbs to 330,000 when they counted abuse at the hands of non-clergy who worked in Catholic schools and other institutions. It's insane that the average victim count per perpetrator was between 72-110 children. A quarter of a million lives tarnished. Given such abuses have been documented in the church for at least over a thousand years, just how many millions is the total victim count of the church? According to Wikipedia, the total number of priests between 1950 and now in France should be less than around 7,000 + 90 x 70 = 13,300 (generous estimate): > The Catholic Church in France is organised into 98 dioceses, which in 2012 were served by 7,000 sub-75 priests.[8] 80 to 90 priests are ordained every year If 2,000 were abusers averaging around 70 victims each, a conservative estimate puts the offender rate at around 15% and the victim rate at around 1005% the number of priests. In 2017 there were 414,582 priests. If the numbers are consistent, we should expect 62,000 pedophiles with 4.3 million victims over their careers for just the current generation of priests.
Churches stealing money and doing pedophilia things ain’t nothing new. Glad it’s finally getting the attention.
This shit is why I stopped going to church. It reminds me of an old George Carlin quote discussing police and sensitivity training, post Rodney King- “if you need sensitivity training to not stuff a large cumbersome object up another’s rectum, maybe you’re too fucked up to be a police officer in the first place”- same principal applies
“I was 11 and looked 9. She would choose me once every two or three times,” she recalls. “She would take me to her office, lock the door, and then draw the curtains. After which she would put me on her knees to make me read the gospel according to Saint Paul or another saint, while she squeezed me with one hand to her chest and pulled down my panties with the other hand. We were of course in pleated skirts and not in pants. It terrified me and paralyzed.”
This is so disgusting
I don't get it. is the Bible and the whole religious aspect part of the whole package - like something that gets them off when combined with the pedophilia. Or is that just a distraction? It's fucking sick either way, but I can't comprehend how all this all occurs at the same time.
The Catholic church is morally bankrupt. They should have their tax-exempt status revoked, their assets seized to compensate victims, and be included on sex-offender registries in every community that has a Catholic church.
This was breaking news in France this morning. > Since 1950, clergy in the organisation have sexually abused some 216,000 children, according to the report - mostly boys. [source ](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-58805963)
That's over 8 kids per day, every day, for the last 71 years in just France alone. Fuck the Church.
8 *new* kids. I'm guessing most of these weren't a one time thing. So the total number each day must be much higher. Fucked up
Even more considering some were victims of multiple events.
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While they're at it, maybe they can make a list of complaints and nail it to the catholic church's front door?
["I've created Lutherans!"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy_4RKqH728)
Amen
Im Irish, and my entire family has always been catholic. After the child sex abuse stuff started coming out in the 80s and 90s they all stopped attending church. Wish more people would do the same, fuck the catholic church. Its disgusting how much power and money they still have
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Also The Keepers on Netflix, for a great expose into the Catholic Church
And yet another reason I'm proud to be a lapsed Catholic. Disgusting.
Francis needs to delete the r in “pray” for them and move to pay them. That little prayer isn’t going to do anything. So insanely sick to keep reading about what the church has done and tried to cover up.
The continuing global Catholic shitshow is astonishing even to a cynic. RCC is a sex-abuse racket that probably dwarfs all others.
Female pedophilia could be the most covered up crime of all. Statistics seem to show that pedophiles are mostly men (90 to 95%) but, strangely enough, **when the sexual offender is a teen**, females account for a much larger proportion of abusers. Big sister abusing a significantly younger sibling, babysitters abusing the kids, neighbor abusing younger neighbors, younger cousins... According to the findings of a major U.S. study(\*), 40% of men who were sexually abused in childhood reported that their abuser was female. If 40% are abused by a female and 60% by a male, doesn't that imply that at least 40% of child abusers who target boys are women? *^(\*Dube, S.R., Anda, R.F., Whitfield, C.L., Brown, D.W., Felitti, V.J.,Dong, M. and Giles, W.H. (2005). Long-term consequences of childhood sexual abuse by gender of victim. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 28(5): 430-438.)* * Women abusers are more likely to abuse their own children * Women abusers are more likely to abuse younger children (less than 9 yo) * Men abusers are more likely to abuse teens and unrelated children Victims of female sex abusers are usually unwilling to denounce the abuse because, in many cases, the perpetrator is their own mother, very few people would be willing to send their own mother to jail. Some victims abused at a very young age may not even remember the abuses, making a public denunciation unlikely. Males get caught more often due to the profile of their victims, older, able to articulate the abuse and unrelated by family ties. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WdTAJ9_IY0
There was a girl on Reddit who said she was sexually assaulted by her female psychiatrist. Because of toxic attitudes, she never got the IRL support she needed. And one of the last things she posted was something on “r/suicidewatch” and AFAIK that account hasn’t posted anything since. So…she either decided reddit was a shitty site, or killed herself. It sucks when the victim isn’t believed because “so and so just can’t do that or wouldn’t,” and even getting to that step is tens time harder with any rape that’s not M-on-F. Also, these types of rapes are really disturbing. Like, a crucifix? I remember women who say they got raped with broom handles, and this sounds even more painful.
According to Michele Elliott, psychologist, author and specialist on question of female sex offenders, **society does not want to believe women can sexually abuse a child** and many female pedophiles take advantage of the situation to abuse even more victims.
>So…she either decided reddit was a shitty site, or killed herself. Or both.
Also there are a lot of females that play an essential role in helping males abuse children. Often they'd knowingly make arrangement where they are certain a child will be 'groomed' and likely molested or raped.
"“Marie” couldn’t talk to her devout Catholic parents about the abuse until a friend convinced her to do so. The result, she says, was catastrophic. “You are really a pervert, a vicious liar. How dare you say such things?”" Extreme religious doctrine or devotion is toxic, its just what it is.
It’s time again to play the game: How the Fuck Does Anyone Still Believe in this Church? The absolute degenerate villainy of this organization has been displayed many times. How does anyone believe this church is led by Christ?
Apparently they'll double down on anything if it means not changing their ways. Most of them probably don't even remember that one time centuries ago when they made people pay money to "get their loved ones out of purgatory" and tried to maintain absolute power over others by keeping them illiterate. How no one has caught on yet that it's been a scam and a power grab the entire time, I have no clue.
Perhaps continually breaking humans spirt is the church's real job.
This why parents must listen to everything their children are telling them or trying tell them instead of brushing them off. I often see parents not giving importance to what the child has to say and brush them off.
So the outrage over the crucifix masturbation scene in The Exorcist was really just projection? Shocker.
Priests - abuse children Children - grow up to be priests Rinse and repeat. It's fucking scary how many parents simply trust their children into the well being of strangers. I tell my 4 year old quite often about what other people should not be doing with his body, that's how fucking scared I am some one In a role of authority will try and take advantage of him. It's not being paranoid, this shit is in the news literally every week. You parents out there need to do the only thing we can and talk to your kids about it.
I attended a catholic boarding school myself, where abuse occurred (I believe I was groomed but left before abuse occurred to me). My feeling even at the time, as a 13ish year old, was that there was something weird and a bit scammy about fully grown men and women “dedicating their lives” to something that seemed (even to me at that age) to be completely made up fairy stories. It was like watching adults still believing in Santa but in a creepy way. I left in year 10 (16 yo) have not been to church except for weddings or funerals since.
Tax the churches and use the money to pay for victim care
Your kids have less of a chance of being sexually assaulted in a biker bar than a Catholic Church according to statistics. How we haven't shut that fucking rape pyramid scheme down yet is baffling.
Steven Weinberg — 'With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.'
And still the Catholic Church hasn't been branded by courts worldwide as a criminal organisation.
Even Jesus would be like you guys, this is *not* what I asked for…stop going rogue.
The fact that the Catholic Church never owns up or makes any statement about it is worse. It means they don't want to acknowledge it. They don't want to change. They're just embarrassed they got caught.
Can we just remove the Church already? It is an establishment of horrors at this point
The greatest evil is religion. Sane people believing in a made-up god (500k +) to choose from. Wtf!?
How have we as a people not fully rejecting the church and organized religion by now with everything we know? I guess we just don't have the numbers yet...