This reminds me of nothing so much as the stunning Scientific Fact that 100% of those who deny that correlation equals causation DIE!
Similarly, there were virtually no super-novae till the astronomical revolution and its liberal radio-telescopes caused them to happen. Likewise, germs did not exist until the biology revolution and its pernicious microscope brought them into being.
The Party of Personal Responsibility upon which Bishop Barron and Word On Fire continually dance attendance really needs to learn the meaning of the words, “through my fault, through my fault, through my own most grievous fault.”
The tired wheeze that the problem is gays and libs when the reality is that the problem is predators, gay and straight, and enablers, liberal and conservative, has passed from being the quick-draw wrong popular diagnosis it was 25 years ago, to being the wilful, fact-ignoring lie of conservative, scapegoating MAGA Catholics who know better, but continue to lie.
Just how fact-ignoring?: https://www.ncronline.org/…/multiple-resignations…
Frustrated by poor communication and a workplace culture they say has been warped by secrecy and hypermasculinity, at least a half-dozen Word on Fire employees in recent months have resigned from the Catholic outlet founded by Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron.
Those who remain at the Illinois-based multimedia nonprofit are working in an environment that a few recently departed workers described to NCR as beset by low morale, damaged trust and a “boys’ club” culture that made some female employees uncomfortable and others unwilling to raise concerns to leadership.
“To put it bluntly, I do not feel that if I had been one of the victims, I would have been protected in any way,” said a former staff member, who left Word on Fire after working there for about a year.
The former employee, one of several who asked not to be named for fear of being blacklisted in the Catholic media industry, told NCR that issues pertaining to morality and safety influenced their decision to leave.
Perhaps best known for “Catholicism” — a slickly produced 10-part docuseries that ran on some PBS channels in 2011 — Word on Fire’s once pristine image and that of its high-profile founder have taken hits in recent weeks amid its handling of sexual misconduct allegations against one of its former employees, Joseph Gloor.
Gloor — a 40-year-old former bodybuilder, fitness model and MTV personality who became a Word on Fire senior producer and photographer and its highest-paid employee — was accused last year by four women of aggressive, nonconsensual sexual behavior in his personal life.
Here’s reality: The Rule of Benedict from around 500 AD has punishment for sexual assault against youth and novices. Justinian and Charlemagne both enacted harsh laws about it. Saint Peter Damien was talking about it 1000 years ago as well.
This is not because there is something specially depraved about priests. Predators go where prey is. Helping professions like teachers, counselors, day care worker, teen shelter workers, and, alas, priests will naturally attract sex predators for the same reason water holes attract hyenas: that where the prey is. You either create structures of virtue to weed predators out or you will get structures of sin that protect them.
(Likewise, professions that let you commit violence such as police, security, and the military will naturally attract predators who are into domination and violence, which is exactly what the MAGA cult revels in. If you have no mechanism for screening out such predators, they will create mechanisms and mafiosi systems for protecting such predators and punishing those who try to stop them. See A Few Good Men.)
Contrary to Bp. Barron’s correlation-implies-causality claim, the reality is that the sexual revolution, among other things, helped create a population with a vocabulary able, for the first time in history, to articulate the abuse committed against it. To paraphrase Will Smith on the seeming uptick in police abuse of brown people five years ago, “It wasn’t happening more. It was getting filmed more.” The Sexual Revolution was no more the cause of the priest abuse scandal than cell phones killed George Floyd.
Abuse predates the Sexual Revolution since the Fall of Man and the Church has but one choice, cover it up or confront it. Blaming the Sexual Revolution is just more lame cover up. There are many places in the developing world where the Sexual Revolution has not yet happened. Abuse is rampant there. Victims still feel ashamed to speak against it because it has not yet been worked out in many cultures in the developing world that rape defiles the rapist, not the victim.
It profits a man nothing to gain the whole world and lose his soul. But for Tucker Carlson?
Of which more tomorrow.
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12 Responses
Bishop Barron is essentially blaming the laity for the clerical sexual abuse of minors scandals. Did the laity move serial abusers from parish to parish? Did the laity ignore credible reports of child sexual abuse? But somehow, these scandals are the fault of the laity. Yeah, right.
Here’s the problem though: one of the things the Catholic Church did in response to the abuse scandals was to ban openly gay priests from serving in the priesthood. So its not just about Bishop Barron blaming the liberals and the gays and whatnot; he is also to a significant extent, reflecting official Church policy.
So is the Church going to walk that back or is that another one of those things they can now never admit to being wrong on?
There were many documented cases that occurred well before the 1960s, not sure of numbers, though.
I heard this same line many times from the right side of the aisle. They really really want a convenient scapegoat to blame for the problem, because fixing the structures of clericalism and attraction of predators is hard.
You’re right, positive things resulted from the sexual revolution, but I’ve never ever heard that acknowledged by anyone on the Catholic right… It’s much easier to adopt a dualistic black white paradigm and try to pretend the past 70 or so years of history never occurred, including V2.
When I was new to the internet, in 2001 (and reading you on Beliefnet, Mr Shea), this was already a tired old trope. But you can’t get rid of a bad penny.
Well, permit me to be the devil’s advocate. I remember the bodybuilder that was the WOF “predator”. It was around 2020 (Covid), and my family tuned in to mass with Bishop Barron. Those masses brought me some nostalgic comfort because they took place across the street (in the old convent) from San Roque school where three generations of my family went to school. I just remember being a bit amused because a girl I went to school with was doing readings, –Noel, along with this dude who wore very tight fitting shirts (lol). I remember laughing about the fact that Bishop Barron had hired a rather compelling someone to do readings when we were all quarantined. Honestly, if a woman had worn a shirt that tight, she would have been roasted by the Catholic holy rollers. My thought at the time, when I heard that the guy was living with him was that Bishop Barron must have been lonely. I absolutely don’t think that BB was doing anything bad with the guy. Later, I met them both in front of the SB Mission after mass on the lawn there. They zoomed in on my daughter-in-lw who had woven a little crown of daisies for her hair, from the lawn during the mass. My impression was that he had hired a dude to appeal to the young people. Any older person who associates with young people knows that young people need other young people to relate to. The fact that Bishop Barron needed that guy for obvious reasons doesn’t mean BB was being creepy. In my opinion, he is not guilty by association in THAT case.
Trump? The right wingers he’s given oxygen to? Oh. my. Good. God.
What is the explanation?
Also, Just an aside–Bishop Ziemann lived in that old convent BB lived in, in Santa Barbara. Can dark energy affect a place where wrongdoing has happened?
Clerical celibacy does not directly cause the clerical sexual abuse of minors, but it does dramatically shrink the pool of young men considering the Priesthood. Most “normal” young men simply will not consider a lifetime of celibacy. There are those very religious young men who can go this route and good for them. They are a small minority. Unfortunately, the clerical celibacy also attracts young men who are weird about sex. They don’t belong in the Priesthood, but we have seen too many of them.
The Catholic Right and the Bishops are adamant about not ordaining married men. They say this would “corrupt” the Priesthood. Really? An infusion of normal men might be just what we need.
Ordaining married men causes a lot of issues. Early Church had no problem ordaining them because the Church was different. But as time moved on and in Christendom, this resulted in priests becoming landed gentry that would bequeath property given to the Church as inheritance to their children (or as dowry). It wasn’t much of a problem if the eldest son carried on the “family business”, but it became one when Church property simply went missing—this meant that the next priest to come to the parish had no place to live in.
In modern practice, the Church would have to give up a lot of good things that were worked out since the 11th century. One such thing are itinerant priests who do not stay for long in one parish. How does a young priest’s family deal with having their lives uprooted every 2-5 years?
• Place to live and how to fund it. Priests would be expected to have large families. How would they fund a house for a priest, his wife and 4-10 children? Again, how to go about uprooting their lives and move their property? Live on rental?
• What about retirement and widow’s pensions when the wife was a SAHM or simply couldn’t raise enough for her pension fund?
• What about scandals concerning their wives and families? You can’t say it’s their private matter if the Church is providing their livelihood.
Some people proposed that these practices could be changed/ended. Fair enough, but what do you do if your parish gets a bad priest? You’re stuck with him for the next 50 years.
And so on. It doesn’t even address the fact that many priests already have their days filled to the brim with matters of their flock. A normal work week is 40 hours, one sleeps some 80 hours a week, and a lot of people can barely squeeze in their family matters in the remaining 78 hours . A priest typically spends 2 hours daily on Mass, 4 hours on a Sunday. That’s already 16 hours weekly. Add in hours in the chancery, a day job to provide for the family, you’ll soon exceed 40 hours. You expect the priest to be available day and night to anoint your sick grandma, you expect him to be available for funerals, you expect him to minister various groups by the parish. And there’s suddenly little to no time left for the family. Can’t happen, not going to happen.
So now you need five married priests to the work of one.
Are you absolutely sure this will bring in at least five times as many men willing to go into the vocation?
If yes, here’s another question: Do you think there will be enough women willing to go into a life like that?
And it doesn’t even address the problem. Do you really think there would be fewer “young men who are weird about sex” among those candidates? And whose weird views about sex would now affect not only themselves, but their wives and children, and those people who don’t listen to priests now because “they have no idea about married life” but would have no choice but to listen to married priests because—after all—they prove it can be done.
You need 5 married priests do do the work of 1 single priest? Nonsense. Where do you get that “information?” So married priests are not as good? Again, nonsense. You are assuming that married priests are not as good as single priests, which is erroneous. Give married priests a chance.
You’re reading my comments uncharitably and failing basic reading comprehension.
I did not say a married priest would be “not as good” as an unmarried priest. What I said is that if a priest was expected to have a family, wife and children, he would have to find time for them first and foremost. This would cut into his time to handle spiritual matters. A single priest has 168 hours in a week for his flock. A married priest would have 40 at best.
I just returned from a retreat for married couples where the priest assisting shared some of his life details in his testimonies. If a day had 48 hours, it would still not be enough to handle all his tasks. He was a parish priest and was sent by his bishop to a postgraduate course for a year at the other side of the country, no questions asked and was expected to handle all the matters of housing and transportation himself.
Now imagine a married priest in the same situation. Not going to happen.
Sure, you could say that the laity would pick up the clerical (office) positions that the priests now hold and it’s a possibility that’s already happening where there are too few priests to handle all the matters. But they don’t pay well and it’s rather hard to find people who want to do that job if they have better prospects.
As far as statistics go, there are more sexual abusers among married fathers than among priests. This is to be expected because of the watering hole theory for attracting abusers. It’s simply easier for abusers to do it in the comfort of their own home than to take on a publicly visible and scrutinized role and perpetrate their abuse there… aside from those cases that enjoy the thrill as part of the abuse.
Yes, correlation does not equal causation, but it can’t be overlooked that despite attracting predators, the current system is not a *complete* failure.
The way I see it, the sexual revolution *immediately* resulted in giving victims a language to name their abuse and they could finally raise their voice.
But it took longer for the rest to acknowledge that this is a problem. Not helped by the suspicious view of *everything* associated with the sexual revolution.
It took even more time to address the problem in formation of new priests and to attempt to filter them out and form them properly.
And it took even more than that for the current generation of bishops that finally sees this as a problem, and a bigger one that the past generation was willing to admit.
The problem isn’t really with “weeding out” abusers or with young men who are weird about sex (as @Will described). This is largely being done. Despite what @3vil5triker said about homosexuals, it’s difficult or impossible for a person with any non-conforming view on sexuality to become a priest. Asexuality is likewise shunned and a candidate who exhibits no natural sex drive or weird views about sex is unlikely to become ordained.
The real problem is to avoid creating abusers by bad formation. The problem is avoiding creating the weird attitudes to sex through bad formation.
Luckily, many dioceses took steps to make it more difficult for potential abusers to gain access to potential victims and this largely solved the most pressing issue, but it doesn’t address the system that enabled abuse in the first place.
But the one thing I hate the most about the system is the unwillingness of the authority to investigate abuse and hiding behind a misplaced confidence that the majority of accusations are false. If they were really confident in this, then a thorough investigation would reveal the falsehoods and prove that there isn’t really a systemic issue. One would think that this is what they want.
You don’t create abusers by bad formation. Abusers are perverts before they enter seminary.
This reeks of some form of predestination. By that logic, if you’re a pervert, there’s no chance for you to be a priest or a parent.
And if you’re not a pervert, you’re not in any danger of becoming an abuser.
Did I get that right?