Whoddu thunk a direct attack on the seal of confession would happen in the land of saints and scholars, but that's exactly what's happening with the Irish government on a collision course with the Church. If the legislation goes through, what then? Priests will be bound under the penalty of excommunication to defy the law. The persecution of the Church is coming and this is one more sign of it. That it would come about in Ireland, a land that sent so many priests as missionaries all over the world makes this Irish/German American want to weep.
It is one more tragic fallout from the sex abuse scandals! God help us.
Irish government plans frontal assault on confessional secrecy
This is what you consider the tragic fallout from the sex abuse scandal? How about the children who were forced to have sex with Catholic priests?
ReplyDeleteIreland is fed up with the facet that the Catholic church doesn't' care about child sex abuse, and since child sex abuse is a crime against the laws of the land and the laws of humanity, they are doing something about it.
Irish priests can obey the law of the land, or they can obey their church and go to jail. That's what should happen when the Catholic church ignores child rape for decades.
PatO, if you've been reading this blog for any time at all, you know I have no sympathy for child abusers or for the bishops who covered up the abuse. In the U.S. the main problem in the Church was admitting homosexuals to the priesthood who assaulted teenage boys. Over 70% of the abuse was homosexual in nature. I am not as familiar with the Irish situation.
ReplyDeleteBut attacking the seal of confession is not the answer.
And I have to wonder why the only child abuse anyone seems to care about is what was initiated by Catholic priests. Every other denomination has the problem as well as public school teachers but someone we never hear a word about that. I find that interesting and hypocritical.
There is this bizarre sense that somehow the sex abuse by priests is anomalous. The statistics show that it is less frequent among Catholic clergy than among Protestant clergy. That doesn't excuse it of course, but it shows quite clearly I think that it is a societal problem and not something unique to the Catholic Church.
ReplyDeleteThe church exacerbated the problem by admitting men to the priesthood of homosexual orientation. The problem there is the whole narrative that homosexuality is an orientation and somehow "natural" when in fact that too is a modern corruption of the truth.
Homosexuality is a deviant behavior which comes about from, among other things, an interrupted natural cycle in puberty and sexual role reversals do to environmental conditioning. It is a psychological disease. I did a lot of research on it at one time because I was curious how this behavior which was once so widely acknowledged to be a disease was suddenly declared just natural and I think it was due to the rise of a distorted view of what natural means.
C.S. Lewis in "Studies In Words" studies "Nature" and "natural" and points out the shift already underway in his time to what he called the d.s. (dangerous sense) which in the case of "natural" guts the word of any meaning whatsoever. Natural becomes a word that means simply anything that happens so that unnatural is robbed of its meaning and natural means nothing either. A word with no opposite doesn't denote a discernible state. It just means 'exists' for which we already have the perfectly fine word 'exists.'
So now we have this pathology increasingly violent, vulgar, and socially destructive sweeping through and degrading our culture.
We live in difficult times!
If people were using a screen and not going face-to-face in confession, how would a priest know the identity of the person confessing, or specifically whom to report? This is one reason why confession is *supposed* to be anonymous - puts too much on the priest otherwise.
ReplyDeleteMary Ann, as an instructional assistant at a public school, I worked for awhile with a teacher whom we all thought was a good one until he was arrested and convicted of molesting children at his apartment and church. He was a Mormon and was married. Now we all know that not all Mormons molest children, but some do as some in other religions or even the non-religous do. There was no evidence that any child at the school was molested since the school had a strict "No Adult Alone With Any Child" policy. When any of us had to work with a child alone for even a few minutes til another person came into the room, we went to the door to the hallway and opened it immediately so anyone walking by could see into the room. That is the key to ending child molestation AND any false accusations.
ReplyDelete"No Adult Alone With Any Child"
ReplyDeleteI understand why this rule has to exist. However, it is truly sad that society has fallen to the depths where we need something like this in place.
"But attacking the seal of confession is not the answer"
ReplyDeleteAgreed. As you may know, the current Irish government is not doing too good at home. Imho, this may be a ploy to try to deflect attention away from their own poor leadership.
However, it may well backfire on them. Time will tell.