The Kintyre Forum

should he go to jail?

I don't know about jail but if it is true that he failed to properly investigate a serial abuser in that children's home for the deaf in the States then he should certainly be tried in a court of law.

do you ever get the feeling that all organised religion is under all out attack at the moment ?

The Obvious one is the war against Islam.
Closer to home, The Church of Scotland is being rocked to it's core by militant gay rights protesters waving the political correctness cosh.
The Church of England is equally troubled and semi re-alligning itself with Rome.

Rome meanwhile is frantically trying to deal with all the skeletons in the closet, which include its clandestine methods in the past to make the problem go away.

I think it was last Christmas, the BBC new at tea-time ran a piece along the lines of British citizens are becoming pagans & earth worshippers in droves .... which I thought was rather curious.

If all this had gone according to plan, I believe Gaia was supposed to be the new (and only) religion. (ties in neatly with climate change)

Spiritual belief should be a personal thing. These days organised religions are more than ever just political footballs.
Where it will end up, who knows ?

I think it's safe to assume that mere mortals like myself really know very little about anything.
All that information is above top secret.
Opinions are based on what we are told, or what is deliberately leaked/spun.

You can apply that to most aspects of life, not just religion.

ie. its a very tightly controlled debate.

2 + 2 equals

a) 3
b)10
c) 7
d) 23
e) I don't know

£3.73 wrote:Rome meanwhile is frantically trying to deal with all the skeletons in the closet, which include its clandestine methods in the past to make the problem go away.

These are serious allegations and in particular the ones in Wisconsin. So it isn't just problems in the past that will make this go away. It just isn't natural for a man to NEVER show feelings for the opposite sex so is the Catholic religion an open gate to paedophiles? Are we trying to say this has happened in modern days I bet not.

£3.73 wrote:Opinions are based on what we are told, or what is deliberately leaked/spun.

You can apply that to most aspects of life, not just religion.

£3.73, I was thinking that this morning when I was reading the thread about drugs because the whole debate on that is exactly the same. I cannot remember now where I found it but I read a fantastic piece on the debate on drugs a few weeks back where the writer was using many drug-taking/selling analogies on how the ordinary person in the street had a new, much more dangerous drug which was a bigger threat to our mental well-being despite being freely available for little cash.

He/she explained the side effects like initial emotions of happiness or anger, a state of enhanced awareness which was really a form of delusion, making them increasingly detached from reality and unable to form their own decisions becoming paranoid and ending up joining angry mobs and attacking people. What is this drug? Newspapers.
The barest facts are the drug's purest form so actually these facts can make us grow intellectually. However, as we all know, facts are expensive so this writer very cleverly explained using his analogy that in order to save money, unscrupulous 'dealers' (and we know who these are) just mixed cheaper and more toxic stuff like bias, mass hysteria,empty opinions, bull***t, hysteria, adverts and photographs of Jordan and her desired lifestyle. You can see the result everywhere as the poor users don't have a clue at the end of their drugtaking of how toxic it all is. And you can see it on this forum. I do it myself - sometimes I think it's even my own stream of consciousness! We all have media abuse and I thought the writer used a great analogy there. He was discussing how we cannot have a sensible debate about drug control but I would say it is about anything: the Venables/Thomson lynch mob, hated social workers,the MPs expenses debacle, global warming, immigrants, et al - as you say, religion too.

So I'm going into rehab to get cleaned. I'm Govangirl, I'm 29 ( ) and I'm addicted to The Daily Sh**e. I was drawn in by the offers of free John Wayne DVDs and the chance to win a bungalow in the country. But now I'm out of control. I'm voting BNP, I hang about police stations hurling abuse at police vans driving out on the chance there are paedophiles inside, I have a one-person campaign to search the lorries coming off the ferries in case any thieving asylum seeker is coming to rob me of my well-earned taxes and I have a strong desire to marry that poor Peter Andre. Please help me, my life is a mess as I cannot sleep at night worrying about what Father Joseph meant by these cuddles when I was 5 and I can't eat because everything will give me cancer and I am way too obese anyway now that I'm nine stone.

Oh hell, what am I going on about. I'm not addicted. I can give up whenever I want, honestly.

Brilliant post !!!

Really I'm speechless ... I wish you'd posted that before !

Are you only 29 right enough ? really are you ?

£3.73 wrote:
Really I'm speechless ... I wish you'd posted that before !

Not like you to be speechless! And before what? Before I started ranting on this forum or before you went out today to get a daily fix with your free Poseidon Adventure film?

And of course I'm 29! I have been for years!

Well, just before ... at the time you discovered it.

The Poseidon Adventure is an amazing analogy for the present day .... how would you survive if your world was suddenly turned upside down ? Would you blindly follow those you think have authority (and end up DEAD) .... or listen to the maverick preacher who isn't an expert at all, but tries to figure it all out as it unfolds (and dies btw) .... but live ! I think that's a great analogy !!!

Just to get back on topic.

Someone on the news made the observation yesterday that the priesthood does not create paedophiles, but it attracts them because of the opportunity it provides coupled with the façade of respectability that their office has. This whole affair is likely to blow that respectability out of the water if it hasn’t already done that. The sad thing is that it appears to be so widespread that it puts all priests under suspicion.

Whether or not the current Pope in his previous capacity as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has personally been involved in a cover-up, it is fairly obvious that much of these goings-on have been swept under the carpet over the years. If he has indeed been involved, it would be hypocrisy to write the letter to the Church in Ireland criticizing the handling of the whole issue if he was ultimately responsible for the handling of it.

What puzzles me with all of this is that if a priest sets out on a relationship with a member of the opposite sex, he is at least moved on to a different parish so that they can be separated, or as in the case of Bishop Roddy Wright, hounded out of office. Does this mean that a relationship between consenting adults is regarded as being more serious than the abuse and corruption of children?

Emdee have you read the book "The Awful Discloseures of Mariah Monk? It was written it the 1800's but is still in print. I read it a few years ago, not sure if i would read it again to be honest.

"The Hidden Secrets of a Nun's Life in a Convent Exposed was published in 1836. She claimed that Sisters of Charity of a Montreal convent were forced to have sex with the priests from the seminary next door. She said there was a secret tunnel connecting the two. If a baby resulted, it was baptized and then strangled and put in a lime pit in the basement".

Govangirl wrote"I'm 29 ( )"......Is that plus V.A.T?

EMDEE wrote:Just to get back on topic.

oh come on EMDEE, it's a great analogy, the Poseidon Adventure has Tsunami's & everything !

EMDEE wrote: The sad thing is that it appears to be so widespread that it puts all priests under suspicion.

EXACTLY. (see war on terror) we are ALL potential terrorists ! Every phone call, every email, every interNET movement, CCTV, SatNAV, CELL phones, high resolution naked body scanners at airports .... we are all under suspicion of something !

Your other points are very valid ! But again.... who leaked them into the public domain ? Why now ?
Why are the Church of Scotland & the Church of England imploding at the same time ?

And curiously, why did both Tony Blair & George W Bush both convert to Catholicism upon leaving office ?
The current debacle would surely have been on their political radar at that time.

£3.73 wrote:And curiously, why did both Tony Blair & George W Bush both convert to Catholicism upon leaving office ?

Tony's boss Cherie would probably have had him in the Catholic Church when they married if not before, but that might have been problematical to her getting into 10 Downing Street, and all the potential spin-offs that we are now seeing coming to fruition.

Or am I just being cynical?

There has already been a Roman Catholic US President, and look at what happened to him.

EMDEE wrote:Just to get back on topic.

Sorry EMDEE, was just trying to make the point about this issue being about what we're told by the media

Going back to the original question, if this been an international Internet paedophile-porn ring then the leaders would be rounded up and charged even if they'd never abused a child themselves. What gets me is that there were many, many people over many, many years who had to know that this appalling abuse was going on but chose to protect the church rather than the children. And where does this leave the original Christian vocations of everyone involved? It is a horrific crime and the Church needs to come out and apologise and admit and recompense, not continue with this cover-up. Perhaps instead of talking about jailing the Pope, we as a country should make it clear to him that he and his church should no longer shelter those responsible from the consequences of their actions. We cannot do anything to spare these children their suffering but the cover-up is what sickens me most. That and the power they have - oh and also, does it not raise the whole question of any religion having celibacy as it's central problem?