Quote Originally Posted by chriscorey View Post
I don't want to bother timber anymore, but this is interesting article. I don't think it's celibacy. I do think pedophiles infiltrate. I also think there's a portion of pedophiles joining the clergy hoping God can save them.

https://www.scu.edu/illuminate/thoug...m-fiction.html

Statistics don't lie and I'm not interested in debating low grade pop psychology.
okay Im getting drawn into this stupid fucking conversation again, but okay.

Clerical celibacy doesn’t cause pedophilia and sexual crimes against minors.
Think about it. If you can’t or don’t have sex with a consenting partner would children become the object of your desire? Of course not.
Right. This sounds like actually a pretty ill conceived thought. I'm surprised this is coming from a University website. What's with this "of course not"? There is no back up statement, its just a pure hypothesis statement disconnected and without any argumentation. Yup, yup, very convincing.

No empirical data exists that suggests that Catholic clerics sexually abuse minors at a level higher than clerics from other religious traditions or from other groups of men who have ready access and power over children (e.g., school teachers, coaches).
I can understand this. Stands to reason. I think the clergy are held to the highest standard, and make the headlines even more as they are supposed to be above these worldly issues.

Homosexual clerics aren’t the cause of pedophilia in the Church.
Since about 80 percent of the victims of clergy sexual abuse are male, many wish to blame the clergy abuse problem in the Church on homosexual priests. While research does suggest that the percentage of Catholic priests who are homosexual is much higher than found in the general population, we know that sexual orientation is not a risk factor for pedophilia. Homosexual men may be sexually attracted to other men but not to children. Research has found that most of the sexual abuse perpetrators didn’t consider themselves homosexual at all but were “situational generalists’’ (i.e., they abused whoever they had access to and control over, boys or girls
Not much to say here. But I wonder, what is this "situational generalist" thing, if not a crime of opportunities? You are saying that predators are premeditating their advancement into the clergy, and maybe that is going on, but it seems that they are mostly doing these crimes because the opportunity is arising.

The Church has used best practices to deal with this issue since 2002.
The incidents of clerical abuse in recent years (i.e., since 2002) are down to a trickle. Many of the newer abuse cases since 2002 have been perpetrated by visiting international priests here on vacation or sabbatical who have not gone through the extensive training and screening that American clerics now go through. The Dallas Charter and subsequent Church reforms have resulted in a number of industry standard and even ground-breaking policies and procedures to keep children safe in Church-related activities and keep abusing priests out of ministry. All dioceses and religious orders, as well as the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, have lay review boards with judges, lawyers, psychologists, social workers, human resource professionals, law enforcement officers, and so forth reviewing every and all cases of reported clerical problem behavior. A zero-tolerance policy is now in effect such that any credible accusation of abuse is reported to law enforcement, the offending party is pulled from ministry and evaluated, and if accusations are found to be credible then the offending party never returns to ministry ever again. Things are very different in the Church than before 2002.
Good. But I think society has swung the other way now. Its starting to assume all men are predators until proven innocent. Can male role models even exist nowadays with out assuming they are some kind of sexual predator in waiting?