Trevor Noah: Catholic Church is a "molesting club with an opening prayer"

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Somehow as absolutely horrible as something is in reality, people are always able to find a way of making an absurd hyperbole around it.

There are ways of being appropriately harsh about this without denigrating and dismissing every other aspect of the Catholic church and the priests and lay people within it who are standing up against this and calling the hierarchy to account.

It's also not clear to me exactly how much worse the Catholic church was in this time frame when most of these events occurred than other institutions.  It may have been, but how do we know?  Others shouldn't be cocky without holding up their own groups to scrutiny.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Somehow as absolutely horrible as something is in reality, people are always able to find a way of making an absurd hyperbole around it.

There are ways of being appropriately harsh about this without denigrating and dismissing every other aspect of the Catholic church and the priests and lay people within it who are standing up against this and calling the hierarchy to account.

It's also not clear to me exactly how much worse the Catholic church was in this time frame when most of these events occurred than other institutions.  It may have been, but how do we know?  Others shouldn't be cocky without holding up their own groups to scrutiny.

what other institution could even come close, is there some other group that the Catholic church is in competition with?  College sports organizations?  They've had 2 high profile cases in the last decade, horrible.  Lets say it's really bad and there are ten times more of these things going on that we don't know about and lets be generous to "the Church" and say every single case of abuse in the Church has been uncovered, the numbers still aren't close....at all.

I guess I also don't understand the attachment to the church...do you really think being a Catholic is the ONLY way to get to Jesus?  That's what we were taught in S.Baptist circles (that Catholics don't play well with other Christian organizations)...but we were taught a lot sh**t about Catholics and only some of it ended up being true, is this one true too?  Do you really think heaven is out of reach for you if you start going to Lutheren church to do your "Christianity"?

One issue here is that the Catholic church is just really big.  I don't know exactly how many more priests there are than college sports coaches but I'm guessing it's a lot.  When there is an example of abuse in a public school, or in some non-denominational or independent Protestant church, it's not as readily considered indicative of these institutions in a broader sense. 

Bore is correct that here have been some unique institutional and cultural aspects to this.  But on this I disagree - the PA report is shocking. We knew some of this stuff already about the lack of accountability, but some of this is disturbing in a way that seems new. A truly sick culture was able to develop in some cases, though again we don't know how widespread when it comes to other dioceses. It is just shocking on a gut level that it happened at all.

Church isn't primarily about "getting into heaven" and a primary way much of evangelicalism ill serves Christians and society as a whole is by giving this impression.  I'm not Catholic, but I have pondered seriously converting, finding in Catholic tradition a spiritual richness that contrasts both with sclerotic fundamentalism and anemic Moral Therapeutic Deism. With the latest revelations, I am finding such a move much harder to imagine. But for those who already belong to the Catholic church and believe its teachings, can anyone be surprised at those who would stay and fight for the renewal of the church they love?

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

^ There was never any theological justification for clerical celibacy. It was instituted in the 11th century purely to clamp down on priests inheriting their positions and thus reducing their accountability to Rome. It's entirely possible to lift the requirement tomorrow (which isn't the same for ordaining women to the priesthood), but this will cause a logistical nightmare within the bureaucracy. Their hand might eventually be forced, though.

Prohibitions on priests getting married go back to the councils of the 4th century, but those who were already married were allowed to become priests. The Roman Church commanded also that a priest live with his wife "as with a sister" and not have sexual relations with her.  Unsurprisingly that was often not followed. At the 7th c. Council of Trullo the Eastern Church rejected completely the demand of abstinence for married priests.  The Western Church eventually came to a different resolution, which was to prohibit the practice of ordaining married men altogether (and this was increasingly the custom for a long time before it became a uniform requirement in the 11th century). 

There are theological and biblical justifications for the practice of celibacy for priests: the imitation of Christ's celibacy for the sake of his ministry & his bride the Church; Paul's advice to the Corinthians that "The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided."     But the practice of ordaining married priests that exists within the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church means that the Catechism recognizes it as not an absolute theological requirement.

I wonder what is the effect for non-"straights" on the removal of the celibacy requirement. With this requirement, priests who are attracted to women are united in a common duty along with those who are attracted to men, and with everyone else. What happens then when the one group may take a spouse and engage in sex, and the other not?  Does this solve a problem, or just divide relations among priests into subcultures?