When the Priest says, "We are not all child molesters"

Remember: Most abusers do not get caught.

Most abusers get away with it for it can be hard to prove especially if the abuse happened decades before.

Most paedophile priests settle for activities that cannot be recognised as abuse such as visiting the schools to see children doing gymnastics.

Many paedophile priests cannot connect enough with children to groom them.

Many people get sexual outlets these days not by sexual activity but by porn.

All priests still protect their fellow priests who abuse and who pretend to be celibate. The one who covers up is worse than any abuser.
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With regard to the Catholic priesthood claiming that they are not all bad in the wake of the clerical child sexual abuse revelations I have this to say.

First the Church is only an organisation that can be brought to heel by voting with their feet just like any other organisation can. If bishops and priests boycotted the Vatican and returned its mail and did not take its phone-calls the whole child-abuse abomination would be soon a thing of the past. Then the Vatican would stamp it out. The record of Pope John Paul II’s lack of concern for the abused is astoundingly dreadful. He elevated John XXIII to Blessed, the last step before making him a saint, though he knew this pope gave out a secret instruction to the bishops of the world for them to excommunicate anybody who spoke of a priest abusing them sexually. The penalty was severe and showed that this pope knew there was a very serious problem and wanted it kept silent and did nothing at all to stop it. He didn’t care and his charm was false.
 
If laypeople stopped assisting in the ill-done by handing money to the priests and the Church the pope would soon get his act together and his rules which are a hindrance and his laziness in tackling the problem would soon be stopped. Many of the laity and nearly all the priests just carry on licking Rome’s boots and chattering about their horror at the crime of child sexual abuse. They don’t force change to happen so I do not find their lofty words impressive. I find their words disgusting and insulting and callous. How can we be expected to believe that the priests are not all bad when the supposedly good ones have never reported any priest to the authorities unless they were forced by the media? They have never urged victims to come forward. They have never offered counselling and support to the abused. They do not protest or call for protest when their bishop hides priestly paedophilia. Anybody that really was disgusted and outraged by the Church’s behaviour would break the rules and stand up to it to demand change.
 
Any priest can be promoted to a position in authority say as a bishop. When that happens, he simply covers up any sex abuse involving priests that he hears of and shuffles offending priests to different areas when there is a complaint it shows that the rest cannot be any better. They would just be as bad if they filled his shoes for he is one of them. The “good” ones become bishops and they still try to prevent the crimes from being stopped. They still refuse to get their priests put in some institution where they cannot get near children.

Second, the abusers would pay compensation to their victims if they were really repentant. So it happens that from the minute a priest commits the abuse he is an incorrigible whitewash and hypocrite who could not possibly believe that persistent sin like that could lead to everlasting damnation. They testify to Christianity not being true. The bishops, when satisfied that allegations are true, should pay the compensation so that the priests owe it to them instead from that point on. They are all as depraved as each other. Where is the Holy Spirit who guides them now? They stand between the victims and restitution to which they are entitled so they should pay up.

Third, the claim that the crimes of the clerics does not refute the faith is transparent and they read that it is false when they read their gospels. It is a lie that is told to continue manipulating the people. Christ promised special protection from sin to his true disciples. He said that you are known to be his disciple by the love you have for the brethren and that lying prophets are known by their bad fruits. The Roman Church will complicate things by claiming that you must look at the Church over all and not just at the blemishes. But Jesus’ statement about the fruits was spoken to people who would not have the time to do all that research and that thinking. He said that if your experience of a prophet is not good then you can walk away from him for it was meant to be a simple test. Hypocritically he did not want anybody to walk from him and sentenced them to eternal damnation for it – a veiled threat: “Come back or else!” The claim of Jesus that those who are really his followers will love tells us something very important. He is not just saying that his true followers will love but that their love will be a sign that Jesus gave them the unique and supernatural power to love for he says that Christianity is the best religion. It is not good enough to argue that there will be false Christians who will do evil so that the only true ones are the good ones. That makes the sign useless. Clerical child abuse can and should destroy faith in Jesus Christ. Notice also Jesus’ teaching by implication strictly forbids the secrecy and underhandedness that is universal in the Roman Catholic hierarchy. By implication it forbids having a hierarchy at all. The Catholic Church has no shame whatsoever regarding child sex abuse by clerics for instead of trying to stop the problem it moved the suspect priest to another unsuspecting parish. If it had any shame and the clerical system did not produce psychopaths then the Church would not be compounding its problem

Fourth, child abuse is a part of Roman Catholic doctrine which all the clerics support and promote. They want children to honour a man whose historical existence is not as certain as say that of Joseph Smith Jun as God, who is to be loved with all our powers to their entirety, himself. They are even to die for that man rather than blaspheme him like the apostles allegedly did. That not only is blasphemy against God but demeans themselves. To say that all love comes from God as the Bible says is to say that we cannot create love ourselves and downgrades human achievement. It is child abuse to tell children that it is God’s business what they do. So they are left to worry more about what God wants than what they feel they should do. That is no way to teach a child responsibility and imbue self-esteem.

Religion, and especially Christianity, also gives paedophiles good reasons to consider their feelings normal. The truth is the feelings are not normal for they are not about love but about gratification. It is not love to have sex with somebody who is not old enough to form a life-long loving relationship because they won’t be mature enough. If the child was really loved the other person would wait until she or he grows up. But the paedophile goes after the child just because the child is a child and that is sick. It is treating the child as a body and not a person. It is the body that is really loved and not the person. Sexuality between adults be they heterosexual or bisexual or homosexual must love the person in the body.

Fifth, Christian forgiveness condones paedophilia. To forgive a person because some weak or blind or absurd faith demands that you do is giving a bad reason to let the person off. Therefore it is condoning the sin.

When an abuser apologises he might say, “I am sorry but I do not ask for your forgiveness for I have no right to it.” This is what he would be expected to say. But if he is a Christian he WILL have to ask for forgiveness and claim that he should receive it. Jesus said we must ask God for forgiveness and that it is worse to offend God than people when we are to love God most of all so when you ask God you should ask people quicker. And the gospel of Jesus says we must forgive for since we are all sinners that have been forgiven others have a right to be forgiven for we have been forgiven ourselves. This is a cruel and insensitive gospel.
 
Peter once asked Jesus how many times he should forgive his brother if he sins a lot against him. He asked if seven times would do. Jesus said not seven times but seventy times seven (Matthew 18). That this was meant to be taken literally is shown by Luke 17:4 which commands that if one is sinned against seven times a day one should forgive when the person says sorry after each time. Jesus said one person was as good as another meaning nobody had the right to act superior and say, “I will not forgive you”. Jesus died for the undeserving so he showed that he meant we must be softies. So Jesus would have agreed with the Church forgiving pervert priests and moving them around. Or it could be that Jesus expected the end of the world to be nigh enough that there would be no time for his rules to be seriously taken advantage of by those who prove their lack of sorrow by re-offending. But the Church cannot admit he erred so it has to accept the former interpretation and it would have been just like Jesus to have meant the rule to be kept whether the world was to end soon or not.

Sixth, Jesus was friendly with tax collectors and prostitutes. Tax collectors often abused children sexually in return for writing off debts and they sometimes paid the debts of families in return for sex with the children. Paedophiles were attracted to the profession because they got a high level of legal immunity that enabled them to enjoy their perverted activities. Prostitutes, male and female, often had to sexually abuse children and dominate them to satisfy the depraved audience looking on. Jesus had no time for the rich or the Jewish religious ministers. Even decadent Romans got more respect despite their support for a licentious system of morality that permitted sex with children. Jesus never complained about Jewish men raping girls of ten which was common in a society that made sex objects of female children. Most females were married off while still children. If he had complained, there would have been a storm of incredible proportions and we would know about it. Instead he preferred to risk his life for creating fusses about his alleged relationship to God and so on.
 
Seventh, the Bible doctrine that the Church is not a collection of individuals but a unit in which all are mystically one body and that there is a supernatural solidarity and communion in the body teaches that we are to blame for each others sins in the Church for if we are not holy enough that leads God to decline many graces to others for he treats us as a body not as a gathering of members. So the “decent” priests say they are as bad as the paedophiles according to their own standards. They are the ones that say it so let them. A pile of sins that don’t physically do a huge amount of harm do enough harm spiritually to make paedophiles and then make them practise so they are very serious in that respect.
 
People are only turned off religion by the bad behaviour of clergy in their own religion. The Catholic Church was unaffected by scandal among clerics in other faiths but it was a different story when its own priests and bishops were found to be child abusers or sympathisers with such. This tells us a lot about the believers. They have the attitude, “My religion is good and those other religions are bad and because they are bad the scandals among their clerics don’t bother me and indeed don’t surprise me.” It shows that there is bigotry lurking inside them even if they cannot see it. The sensible attitude is that clerics going wrong prove whatever it is they prove about religion in general not just their own religion in particular.
 
The tendency of nearly all Catholic clerics to cover up and the fact that few are left undamaged by celibacy clearly shows that they should not have any access to children and should not be allowed to teach. Many understandably feel that if a priest is not angered enough by child abuse to fight the church then it is because there is some paedophilic tendency in that priest.
 
HOLLOW APOLOGIES
 
The priests and bishops of the Roman Church bore one with their apologies for child sex abuse committed by priests and bishops. Many of their apologies have been proven to be insincere by their subsequent actions - by their attempts to prevent justice being done and to keep abuse under wraps and to intimidate those who are making allegations.
 
If you commit a public "sin", you have to confess that sin to the public and ask for pardon. Where are the priests who were asked to do that by the pope or the Church? Tony Blair was welcomed into the Catholic fold without apologising for the women and children that died because of his warmongering.
 
No Catholic priest broke ranks to stop and expose his paedophile co-workers in the priesthood. And this despite the fact that they teach that we must suffer to the point of bloodshed for the cause of justice. The whole child-abuse abomination was covered up and steps were taken to move the abusers around to help them find new flesh to violate. The priests during all this time were smug in their virtue and ate their communion every day - eating communion is a declaration that you believe yourself to be righteous and clean from sin and right with God. They judged sinners in the confessional - this too declares that the priest is claiming to be holy enough so that he can be in a position to judge in the place of Christ. Apologies are plenty. Their apologies are hollow. It is hard to believe that people who are so cold could really be sorry. And especially when this smug unjustified sense of righteousness and holiness was carried for years and decades. The evil of the priesthood is proof that religion is self-deceit. It shows that the biggest number of religionists - if not all - must be deceiving themselves. Christianity certainly leads to trouble. Christians hunt for miracles and end up tricked and robbed by evangelists and visionaries. Sick people die for they depend on miracles more than on their doctors and they are let down. Even the Christians themselves admit that most apparitions and miracle claims are untrue or doubtful. Any system of belief that produces self-deceit and depends on it is encouraging paedophiles to believe that God made them the way they are and if they are compelled to abuse it is God's will. Indeed, the Church teaches that God is ultimately responsible for all that happens for he makes all things and keeps all things in existence or they would disappear. The Church does not have the honesty or integrity to openly admit this. A system that is based on self-deceit is encouraging paedophiles to believe that their evil actions are somehow justified and even that they are not in control of what they do to children though they are. The condemnations of paedophilia from a religion of self-deception are worthless. If you advocate self-deceit at all you are advocating that a person must have a right to abuse children and justify it in his mind. Why one form of self-deceit and not another?
 
Some say that "it is total insanity to argue that people join the priesthood to abuse children! Why not become teachers or doctors instead? Why not become a father and abuse your own kids? A profession seen as celibate and holy would hardly be an attraction for the paedophile. The power to be a priest and the occult abilities to to do priestly duties such as turning bread into Jesus are given at the sacrament or ordination. Perhaps that sacrament has an evil power in it for there is something in the priesthood that makes one self-righteously corrupt and often a danger to children." If so the apologies from the priests for allowing sex abuse to happen are indeed hollow and empty.
 
The bishop who says sorry for helping clerical child molesters dodge justice but who does not make huge sacrifices to help the victims - pay for counsellors etc - is merely insulting the victims. It is action we want. What use is his sorry? He is asking to be esteemed as somebody making a fresh start - it is all for his benefit. He will never be anywhere near as sorry as the victims were that the abuse happened.