Criticism of Roman Catholic Church
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- See also Roman Catholic Church
Papacy
In the early centuries of the Christain Church, the Bishop of Rome was regarded as first among equals only, and his claims to supremacy over the Church were ignored or rejected.
Sexual abuse of children
Particular damage has been done to the institution and to its members trust in it by the revelation of child sexual abuse by a small but persistent group of clergy. Allegations of child sexual abuse scandals have been made against clergy in many parts of the world, with notorious cases hitting the headlines in Spain, Ireland, Canada and the United States For the Church, the crisis has been two-fold. First, many Roman Catholics had an almost automatic sense of trust in the clergy. The revelation that a number abused that trust fundamentally reshaped public attitudes towards the clergy. But secondly, the institution was damaged by the revelation that the Church's leadership seriously mishandled the misbehaviour of a small number of clergy, using Canon Law and diocesan boundaries1 to help clergy avoid popular anger and criminal sanction.
Similar issues have arisen in many social institutions (churches, schools, youth groups, etc.) in the late 20th century in response to changing social attitudes towards child sexual abuse. Victims are now more likely to publicize the crime than in the past, and the general public demands more severe punishment for offenders. Adapting to these new conditions has been especially difficult for the Catholic Church; although it has had a heavy doctrinal emphasis on morality, particularly sexual morality, in the past its attempts to handle such offenses quietly and internally proved inadequate to the task of dealing with paedophile clergy. Some bishops, archbishops and cardinals have sought to excuse their perceived incompetent handling of sex abuse cases by suggesting that they did not understand the nature of paedophilia, they believing that a priest could on his own reform, or that he could do so after a short stay in a church-approved clinic. However their critics have suggested that their apparent ignorance was due to their failure to listen to secular experts on the topic, with some critics suggesting that the Church's mishandling of the issue was symptomatic of its broader lack of understanding of sexuality in general.
The Vatican too has been criticised for what has been criticised as its cautious and unenthusiastic reaction to radical initiatives on the issue of dealing with paedophile priests made by the hierarchies in Ireland, Spain and in particular the United States, where a meeting of bishops produced an extremely draconian series of measures planned for dealing with abuse cases in the future. Controversially the Vatican vetoed the proposals, requesting that they be redrawn. Critics have suggested that the nature of the leadership elite at the higher ranks of the Roman Catholic Church, all male and most from their sixties to their eighties, made them singularly unsuited to dealing with an urgent crisis such as paedophilia. In the aftermath of the paedophile scandals, many victims sued the Catholic Church for compensation. To date hundreds of millions of dollars have been paid out to victims, while thousands more legal cases are pending.
1 Technically each diocese operates separately of its neighbours, while religious orders in each diocese are not answerable to or under the control of the local bishop. As a result suspicions about the behaviour of secular priests (priests belonging to the diocese) were not always reported to other dioceses or to religious order-run schools or hospitals, while abuse by religious priests (priests belonging to a religious order) was not always relayed by his order to the diocese and its schools. The most notorious example involved Fr. Brendan Smyth, a Norbertine Order priest in Ireland, whose activities (known about since 1945) were not reported to diocesian clergy let alone the police. Even when the man was convicted of raping hundreds of boys and girls, a number of dioceses, the Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh and his own order publicly blamed each other and accepted no responsibility themselves for the failure to stop Smyth over 47 years.
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