Bill Donahue, the head of the Catholic League, makes his living by loudly defending the Catholic Church against any and all criticisms. What is extraordinary are the arguments he uses. For example, one of his pet peeves is that the media is biased against his church and picks on them needlessly. His evidence? He actually asserts that they ignore the fact that most priests are not pedophiles but were merely molesting adolescent boys. So that’s all right, then.
It is one of the biggest myths of our time that the Catholic Church has had a problem with pedophile priests: as the John Jay College for Criminal Justice showed in its 2011 report on this subject, less than 5 percent of the abusers were pedophiles. In almost all cases, the victims were adolescent males who were inappropriately touched by homosexual priests. Both newspapers cover this up, thus perpetuating a lie.
Back up defense? Look, look! Other religious people are doing it too!
Moreover, 85 Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn have recently been arrested for the sexual abuse of minors and yet neither newspaper reports on this.
Donahue sounds increasingly just like a small child caught in some misdeed arguing in his defense that his offense could have been worse and anyway other people did it too. With defenders like this, no wonder the Catholic Church’s reputation is in tatters.
less than 5 percent of the abusers
I wonder what percentage of the abuse CASES were accounted for by those that Donohue narrowly defines as “pedophiles.”
As if the other abuses of trust relationships were somehow less wrong?
He is technically right about the pedophile thing it is really tossed around more then the strict definition warrants. To me the abuse isn’t the main or noteworthy issue about the catholic church. Any large organisation is going to have some members comic some crimes. No the big issue that we need to hammer them on is the conspiracy to cover up the crimes and shuffle priests around.
I would still love to ask how the age of the boys makes it any better.
If Donohue was an attorney, I certainly wouldn’t want to be defende by him.
This is like the ‘Art Grainge defence’ (Art being a friend of mine long ago) -- “I didn’t do it and, if you let me off, I promise I won’t do it again”. Pure childishness. And anyway as many a parent has said “It’s not so much what you did as that you lied about it”.
Imagine how God feels being defended by ‘Don’t You Know Who.’
I agree that there are always going to be some rotten apples and that the blatant cover-up, beginning at the very top with Mr. Pope, is the issue. But at the same time one would think that daily immersion in the teachings of the Catholic Church would have prevented or curbed any deviant tendencies. After all the Church claims to be the beacon for morality. Apparently not! The child rapist priests are just common criminals protected by the RCC.
As Mano points out, Donohue is a professional victim who complains about any “insult” to the Catholic Church. If nobody has insulted the RCC, then Donohue will manufacture an insult. He got upset at the top of his lungs when the owners of the Empire State Building wouldn’t light up the building in white and blue to commemorate Mother Teresa’s 100th birthday.
Precisely. In addition, it’s my understanding that while the fraction of priests who were abusers may not have been out of line with what one would expect in any given population (there is some controversy on this), the cover-up seems to have meant that the victims per abuser was much higher.
The main difference, of course, being that the Jewish abusers have been properly reported to the civil authorities, and arrested — i.e., subjected to criminal sanctions — instead of hushed up and moved around by the hierarchy to abuse again.
Donohue’s current crusade involves trying to get Comedy Central sponsors to drop Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show”, mostly because he showed a picture of a nude woman with a manger scene covering her groin.
So far, his only success has been with Delta Airlines. Amazingly, Pepsi told him to go blow; most of the others, apparently, aren’t saying (or changing) anything.
Their moral record is just so bad I don’t even think of that kind of argument anymore.