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It seems like the Catholic Church is often (always?) somehow involved in these systemic child abuse/mass grave stories and it’s mind-boggling to me that we cont

It seems like the Catholic Church is often (always?) somehow involved in these systemic child abuse/mass grave stories and it’s mind-boggling to me that we continue to allow an organization with that kind of track record to take responsibility for caring for and placing at-risk children.

garyrichardson 5y ago
While that may be true, it’s only part of the situation here. Residential schools in Canada were part of a system by the gov of Canada to eliminate/assimilate the First Nations people. Many argue this was genocide.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  The slash between "eliminate" and "assimilate" is doing a lot of work. It highlights two very different meanings of "genocide". It's the distinction between "killing people" and "killing a people". You're right regarding the history, of course. Also sadly, one has a way of turning into the other. Well, both are sad anyway.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > It highlights two very different meanings of "genocide". It's the distinction between "killing people" and "killing a people". “Killing a people” is genocide. “Killing people” is murder, mass murder if it is lots of people. The latter is sometimes part of the mechanism by which the former is achieved, but there aren’t “two different meanings of ‘genocide’” involved.
    - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
      > “Killing a people” is genocide. But people do change their identities all the time. And sometimes the destruction of one identity leads to the creation of a new one. This has been a key part of all nation-building exercises. It is a purpose of education and mass-media. Is the unification of tribes, the destruction of difference, necessarily "genocide"? Also, if you can speak of the "death of a people", surely you can also speak of a "birth"? What is the source material of the new group? A grouping is an abstract concept. Individual people have a right to exist, but do abstract groups, just because we anthropomorphize them? Any adjective is an abstract grouping of all nouns to which it'd apply.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > But people do change their identities all the time. People die all the time, and its not murder. A deliberate campaign to kill a people is genocide. A people dieing by processes that don’t involve a deliberate campaign is not genocide.
      - brailsafe 5y ago
        The attempted unification of tribes by removing their identity is different than unification. Unification is only so if whatever happens is a joint proposal of some sort
        SZJX 5y ago
        This distinction sounds quite contrived to me. Surely you could see that, in most cases throughout the history, when a united identity emerges out of several different tribes/groups whatsoever, there would be a leading group that exerted greater influence either by force or by (economic etc.) strength. Seldom is the case that all tribes decided that they were absolutely equal and would form a joint entity with the same amount of voluntariness from each side.
        brailsafe 5y ago
        I don't think you'd need absolute equality, influence, or perfect agreement, you'd just need it to facilitate somewhat voluntary cultural diffusion to decrease the level of conflict. In the context of the thread, it's historically accurate that this was already present in some ways during the centuries preceding Canada and the US' founding, but fell apart quite dramatically.
    - kyralis 5y ago
      I suspect you'll find relatively few people who will use "genocide" to refer to the eradication of a culture without concurrent mass killing of the members of that culture.
      - maximilianburke 5y ago
        I think the most notable genocides have involved murder, but that doesn't mean they all have. Look at what is happening to the Uyghur people in China; it appears to be more of an operation to destroy their culture and identity than to slaughter the people, at least at the moment.
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        > I think the most notable genocides have involved murder, They usually do, but sometimes the overt murder stops while the genocide continues. If, and this is debatable, an endpoint could be drawn for the Native Ameeican Genocide in the US, its definitely long after outright killing based on being a Native not assimilated into the White society stopped being an organized practice.
        maximilianburke 5y ago
        I totally agree.
        SZJX 5y ago
        This is also why the current definition by some western governments/parliaments of what's happening there as "genocide" has credibility issues in some eyes. If everybody suddenly agreed that "genocide" means "systematic attempt at cultural assimilation" then fine (would also mean that such "genocides" have been taking place all the time, since group identities disappear and reappear in an endless ebb and flow, maybe not so much in the modern world with all these nation borders, but much more commonly throughout the history), but just as this chain of comment reveals, 1. a more universally accepted term (also in e.g. the Canadian government's own report) would be "cultural genocide" and seldom would people use "genocide" to mean something without actual mass murdering 2. even the idea of "cultural genocide" is to some extent subject to debate.
    - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
      So if I take a million people into the gas chambers, and they are diverse in every dimension, then I have merely committed a mass-murder, but not a genocide? But if, in the minds of those people, just before I hit the switch, a collective identity forms -- "The People of the Gas Chamber" -- then my act is instead genocide, due to their internal mental state? (Interestingly, little would be so likely to cause such a shared identity to come into existence, as exactly this kind of shared threat.)
      - melolife 5y ago
        No, because it depends on the executioner's intention.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > So if I take a million people into the gas chambers, and they are diverse in every dimension, then I have merely committed a mass-murder, but not a genocide? Yes. > But if, in the minds of those people, just before I hit the switch, a collective identity forms -- "The People of the Gas Chamber" -- then my act is instead genocide, due to their internal mental state? No, acts directed at the extermination of a people, not that incidentally cause it, are genocide. You’d still be committing mass-murder-but-not-genocide, not that the distinction is likely to be more than technically significant, unless you are a acting in a context so as to not render mass murder an international crime but only one subject to local jurisdiction. (Genocide is universally subject to universal jurisdiction, while mass murder requires special additional circumstances to rise to an international crime — either a war crime or crime against humanity.) And when mass killing does rise to genocide, its not “instead of” being mass murder, but “in addition to”. Same with deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, enslavement and other “act based” crimes against humanity when done as part of a mechanism aimed at destroying a people. The offenses are cumulative, not alternative.
        FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
        So then the act rises to this special tier because of the belief, in the mind of the actor, that the victims believe themselves to belong to a common group. And the goal, to the actor, is not so much killing, as it is the destruction of the belief in each victim's mind, that they belong to the group. The destruction of the body and mind holding the belief is just a means to this end. This is all very strange.
gedy 5y ago
I'm not defending the church, but others here have pointed out that public schools have as much sexual abuse as churches or parochial schools.
j45 5y ago
Seems can be a weak entry into such a serious topic. https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060525 https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060...
refurb 5y ago
Not necessarily. The Anglican Church and other Protestant churches ran many of these schools. And interestingly, Dartmouth College in New Hampshire was created to educate native Americans. Now it’s an Ivy League college.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>It seems like the Catholic Church is often (always?) somehow involved in these systemic child abuse/mass grave stories and it’s mind-boggling to me that we continue to allow an organization with that kind of track record to take responsibility for caring for and placing at-risk children. What's the alternative? The government is no better here.
- brailsafe 5y ago
  The only options are the fucking Catholics or the government!?
  - frabbit 5y ago
    Quite literally. Except that the government is often the fucking government.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    You can pick other religions or institutions. They're no better at scale.
simon1ltd 5y ago
I’ve heard that insurance for Catholic Churches aren’t any higher than insurance for a different denomination —- the abuse is at the same level as other churches, it’s just that the Catholic Church is so much larger than any of the others. I can say that the mandatory training programs and background checks that are required to work with children (now) far exceed anything I’ve seen from other churches.
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  This is almost certainly false. Please provide evidence for these claims.
  - frabbit 5y ago
    I second this demand. It is obvious that Protesants carry out more abuse.
  - simon1ltd 5y ago
    I can't find the article, which I read years ago. Some quick googling did turn this up: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/do-the-right-thing/201003/six-myths-about-clergy-sexual-abuse-in-the-catholic-church https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/do-the-right-thing/2... Which discusses the fact that the abuse isn't any more prevalent than with school teachers or other denominations.
wyager 5y ago
Public schools are statistically more of a danger to children than church institutions. The Catholic church collects flak because A) it’s a politically convenient target B) they’re one of the largest institutions in the world that run children’s programs.
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
It’s a function of the size of the church. Not only does it mean that there are more Catholic-affiliated institutions (and more opportunities to draw a similarity between troubled institutions), it also means that it is the only organization who can pull off a systematic cover-up. The actual abuse rates are similar whether the institution in question is Catholic, Anglican, or secular.
twodave 5y ago
No, it’s people. It’s always people. That even the church carries out such atrocities says more about humanity than it does about the church.
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  "Even a church"? Like a church would be less likely to carry out these atrocities than other institutions? The opposite is almost certainly true.
  - twodave 5y ago
    The “church” in my comment is referring to people. Institutions don’t commit atrocities. People do. I was trying to illustrate (perhaps poorly) that even in our most sincere attempts to be good, we fail at it regularly. But how we love to point out and condemn darkness in others.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
Celibacy imho plays a significant role in this. In other churches, you can get normal people to join, because they can still live relatively normal lives, get married, have kids, etc. With celibacy, you immediatly dismiss all people who wish to live relatively "normal" lives, and get a lot more outcasts into the organization. Add to this a relatively easy access to children, the higher ups giving protection to criminals, and you get where we are now.
- SZJX 5y ago
  Celibacy might have played a role, though I doubt if the logic is that it "attracts outcasts". If somebody made up their mind to be celibate regardless of whether he is a part of the church or not, I don't think joining the church would predispose them to enacting more abuses on the children. On the contrary, I would say that the effect could be that it places an unreasonable restriction on "non-outcast" people who otherwise would have wanted to have sex "normally", but were forced to not do so, at least out in the open, when they join the church. Then, their immediate and most obvious choice becomes turning to the children, as you mentioned. This is what I find unreasonable about this blanket celibacy requirement.

garyrichardson 5y ago

While that may be true, it’s only part of the situation here. Residential schools in Canada were part of a system by the gov of Canada to eliminate/assimilate the First Nations people. Many argue this was genocide.

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
The slash between "eliminate" and "assimilate" is doing a lot of work. It highlights two very different meanings of "genocide". It's the distinction between "killing people" and "killing a people". You're right regarding the history, of course. Also sadly, one has a way of turning into the other. Well, both are sad anyway.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > It highlights two very different meanings of "genocide". It's the distinction between "killing people" and "killing a people". “Killing a people” is genocide. “Killing people” is murder, mass murder if it is lots of people. The latter is sometimes part of the mechanism by which the former is achieved, but there aren’t “two different meanings of ‘genocide’” involved.
  - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
    > “Killing a people” is genocide. But people do change their identities all the time. And sometimes the destruction of one identity leads to the creation of a new one. This has been a key part of all nation-building exercises. It is a purpose of education and mass-media. Is the unification of tribes, the destruction of difference, necessarily "genocide"? Also, if you can speak of the "death of a people", surely you can also speak of a "birth"? What is the source material of the new group? A grouping is an abstract concept. Individual people have a right to exist, but do abstract groups, just because we anthropomorphize them? Any adjective is an abstract grouping of all nouns to which it'd apply.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > But people do change their identities all the time. People die all the time, and its not murder. A deliberate campaign to kill a people is genocide. A people dieing by processes that don’t involve a deliberate campaign is not genocide.
    - brailsafe 5y ago
      The attempted unification of tribes by removing their identity is different than unification. Unification is only so if whatever happens is a joint proposal of some sort
      - SZJX 5y ago
        This distinction sounds quite contrived to me. Surely you could see that, in most cases throughout the history, when a united identity emerges out of several different tribes/groups whatsoever, there would be a leading group that exerted greater influence either by force or by (economic etc.) strength. Seldom is the case that all tribes decided that they were absolutely equal and would form a joint entity with the same amount of voluntariness from each side.
        brailsafe 5y ago
        I don't think you'd need absolute equality, influence, or perfect agreement, you'd just need it to facilitate somewhat voluntary cultural diffusion to decrease the level of conflict. In the context of the thread, it's historically accurate that this was already present in some ways during the centuries preceding Canada and the US' founding, but fell apart quite dramatically.
  - kyralis 5y ago
    I suspect you'll find relatively few people who will use "genocide" to refer to the eradication of a culture without concurrent mass killing of the members of that culture.
    - maximilianburke 5y ago
      I think the most notable genocides have involved murder, but that doesn't mean they all have. Look at what is happening to the Uyghur people in China; it appears to be more of an operation to destroy their culture and identity than to slaughter the people, at least at the moment.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > I think the most notable genocides have involved murder, They usually do, but sometimes the overt murder stops while the genocide continues. If, and this is debatable, an endpoint could be drawn for the Native Ameeican Genocide in the US, its definitely long after outright killing based on being a Native not assimilated into the White society stopped being an organized practice.
        maximilianburke 5y ago
        I totally agree.
      - SZJX 5y ago
        This is also why the current definition by some western governments/parliaments of what's happening there as "genocide" has credibility issues in some eyes. If everybody suddenly agreed that "genocide" means "systematic attempt at cultural assimilation" then fine (would also mean that such "genocides" have been taking place all the time, since group identities disappear and reappear in an endless ebb and flow, maybe not so much in the modern world with all these nation borders, but much more commonly throughout the history), but just as this chain of comment reveals, 1. a more universally accepted term (also in e.g. the Canadian government's own report) would be "cultural genocide" and seldom would people use "genocide" to mean something without actual mass murdering 2. even the idea of "cultural genocide" is to some extent subject to debate.
  - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
    So if I take a million people into the gas chambers, and they are diverse in every dimension, then I have merely committed a mass-murder, but not a genocide? But if, in the minds of those people, just before I hit the switch, a collective identity forms -- "The People of the Gas Chamber" -- then my act is instead genocide, due to their internal mental state? (Interestingly, little would be so likely to cause such a shared identity to come into existence, as exactly this kind of shared threat.)
    - melolife 5y ago
      No, because it depends on the executioner's intention.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > So if I take a million people into the gas chambers, and they are diverse in every dimension, then I have merely committed a mass-murder, but not a genocide? Yes. > But if, in the minds of those people, just before I hit the switch, a collective identity forms -- "The People of the Gas Chamber" -- then my act is instead genocide, due to their internal mental state? No, acts directed at the extermination of a people, not that incidentally cause it, are genocide. You’d still be committing mass-murder-but-not-genocide, not that the distinction is likely to be more than technically significant, unless you are a acting in a context so as to not render mass murder an international crime but only one subject to local jurisdiction. (Genocide is universally subject to universal jurisdiction, while mass murder requires special additional circumstances to rise to an international crime — either a war crime or crime against humanity.) And when mass killing does rise to genocide, its not “instead of” being mass murder, but “in addition to”. Same with deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, enslavement and other “act based” crimes against humanity when done as part of a mechanism aimed at destroying a people. The offenses are cumulative, not alternative.
      - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
        So then the act rises to this special tier because of the belief, in the mind of the actor, that the victims believe themselves to belong to a common group. And the goal, to the actor, is not so much killing, as it is the destruction of the belief in each victim's mind, that they belong to the group. The destruction of the body and mind holding the belief is just a means to this end. This is all very strange.

gedy 5y ago

I'm not defending the church, but others here have pointed out that public schools have as much sexual abuse as churches or parochial schools.

j45 5y ago

Seems can be a weak entry into such a serious topic. https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060525 https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060...

refurb 5y ago

Not necessarily. The Anglican Church and other Protestant churches ran many of these schools. And interestingly, Dartmouth College in New Hampshire was created to educate native Americans. Now it’s an Ivy League college.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

>It seems like the Catholic Church is often (always?) somehow involved in these systemic child abuse/mass grave stories and it’s mind-boggling to me that we continue to allow an organization with that kind of track record to take responsibility for caring for and placing at-risk children. What's the alternative? The government is no better here.

brailsafe 5y ago
The only options are the fucking Catholics or the government!?
- frabbit 5y ago
  Quite literally. Except that the government is often the fucking government.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  You can pick other religions or institutions. They're no better at scale.

simon1ltd 5y ago

I’ve heard that insurance for Catholic Churches aren’t any higher than insurance for a different denomination —- the abuse is at the same level as other churches, it’s just that the Catholic Church is so much larger than any of the others. I can say that the mandatory training programs and background checks that are required to work with children (now) far exceed anything I’ve seen from other churches.

baobabKoodaa 5y ago
This is almost certainly false. Please provide evidence for these claims.
- frabbit 5y ago
  I second this demand. It is obvious that Protesants carry out more abuse.
- simon1ltd 5y ago
  I can't find the article, which I read years ago. Some quick googling did turn this up: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/do-the-right-thing/201003/six-myths-about-clergy-sexual-abuse-in-the-catholic-church https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/do-the-right-thing/2... Which discusses the fact that the abuse isn't any more prevalent than with school teachers or other denominations.

wyager 5y ago

Public schools are statistically more of a danger to children than church institutions. The Catholic church collects flak because A) it’s a politically convenient target B) they’re one of the largest institutions in the world that run children’s programs.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago

It’s a function of the size of the church. Not only does it mean that there are more Catholic-affiliated institutions (and more opportunities to draw a similarity between troubled institutions), it also means that it is the only organization who can pull off a systematic cover-up. The actual abuse rates are similar whether the institution in question is Catholic, Anglican, or secular.

twodave 5y ago

No, it’s people. It’s always people. That even the church carries out such atrocities says more about humanity than it does about the church.

baobabKoodaa 5y ago
"Even a church"? Like a church would be less likely to carry out these atrocities than other institutions? The opposite is almost certainly true.
- twodave 5y ago
  The “church” in my comment is referring to people. Institutions don’t commit atrocities. People do. I was trying to illustrate (perhaps poorly) that even in our most sincere attempts to be good, we fail at it regularly. But how we love to point out and condemn darkness in others.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

Celibacy imho plays a significant role in this. In other churches, you can get normal people to join, because they can still live relatively normal lives, get married, have kids, etc. With celibacy, you immediatly dismiss all people who wish to live relatively "normal" lives, and get a lot more outcasts into the organization. Add to this a relatively easy access to children, the higher ups giving protection to criminals, and you get where we are now.

SZJX 5y ago
Celibacy might have played a role, though I doubt if the logic is that it "attracts outcasts". If somebody made up their mind to be celibate regardless of whether he is a part of the church or not, I don't think joining the church would predispose them to enacting more abuses on the children. On the contrary, I would say that the effect could be that it places an unreasonable restriction on "non-outcast" people who otherwise would have wanted to have sex "normally", but were forced to not do so, at least out in the open, when they join the church. Then, their immediate and most obvious choice becomes turning to the children, as you mentioned. This is what I find unreasonable about this blanket celibacy requirement.