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That’s up from 10 years on the statute of limitations. Victims of priest-rape are supposed to feel grateful for the benevolence, right?
But the kicker is that the announcement of this change was paird with the edict that The Vatican also plans to make it a major crime against the church to ordain a woman as a priest. Nice comparison, huh? A comment on this news by Damian Thompson, editor of Telegraph (IK) blogs:
If I’d been put in charge of the Vatican press office with a specific brief to provide ammunition for the Church’s enemies, I don’t think I could have come up with anything better than this. Increase the penalties against abusers in a way that might have generated positive headlines – but make sure you bundle them up with separate penalties involving invalid women’s ordinations. That will allow the anti-Catholic media to proclaim: “Catholic Church condemns priestly paedophilia and women’s ordination” – and imply “Catholic Church equates priestly paedophilia and women’s ordination”.
Obviously, the Vatican PR machine realized that was problem – this was the response.
The Vatican has revised its procedures for handling priestly sex abuse cases, streamlining disciplinary measures, extending the statute of limitations and defining child pornography as an act of sexual abuse of a minor.Vatican officials said the changes allow the church to deal with such abuse more rapidly and effectively, often through dismissal of the offending cleric from the priesthood.
As expected, the Vatican also updated its list of the “more grave crimes” against church law, called “delicta graviora,” including for the first time the “attempted sacred ordination of a woman.” In such an act, it said, the cleric and the woman involved are automatically excommunicated, and the cleric can also be dismissed from the priesthood.
Vatican officials emphasized that simply because women’s ordination was treated in the same document as priestly sex abuse did not mean the two acts were somehow equivalent in the eyes of the church.
“There are two types of ‘delicta graviora’: those concerning the celebration of the sacraments, and those concerning morals. The two types are essentially different and their gravity is on different levels,” one Vatican official said.
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Love the clarification from the Vatican!“The two types are essentially different and their gravity is on different levels”
And 20 seconds of looking at it reveals what? That raping a child has a statute of limitations and involves some amount of discipline for the priest, who remains both Catholic and a priest, while attempting to ordain a woman has no statute or limitations and results in defrocking and excommunication.
So not only do they have different levels of gravity, attempting to ordain a woman is clearly worse.
This, in the face of the fact that, like performing a marriage ceremony when you are not authorized to, performing an ordination ceremony invalidly has no effect. Neither the Church nor the State recognize the validity of the ordination. If some other sect does, that’s their business, not the Roman Catholic Church’s.
So the gravity of and penalties for pretending to ordain a woman are more severe than for actually raping a child or statutorily raping a minor.
Lovely. They wonder why they have PR issues. They couldn’t even bother to put this is a separate document? Frankly, I’m surprised attempted ordination of a woman wasn’t already a grave sin to them, and if it was in a separate document issued a week later, nobody would likely have even noticed.
[Shrug] What do you expect from apostates?Joseph Ratzinger has made a huge mark on the post-Second Vatican Council Roman Catholic Church, from the time he succeeded the reactionary Cardinal Ottaviani as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, until now withhis papacy.
Vatican II represented the Church’s brief encounter with the Modern World, and since then, the hierarchy has been making itself increasingly irrelevant to that Modern World. The first sign was Paul VI’s encyclical “Humanae Vitae” (On Human Life), which condemned artificial birth control as sinful. Many Catholics, who had previously been told to use their informed consciences on the subject, shrugged, continued to use their informed consciences, and ignored the directive. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Ratzinger, had a hand in that decision. He continued blundering his way through official documents on issues touching the LGBT community, and time after time, the Church has failed to grasp or have any idea of morality or goodness.
More recently, the Church maintained that only masculine terminology, and not gender neutral terminology, can be used to invoke the Trinity during a baptism, and the Church invalidated any baptisms made in the name of “The Creator, the Refeemer and the Sanctifier” (or other acknowledgments that the Image and Likeness of God is “Male AND Female, as stated in Gen. 1:27).
It is no surprise that this misguided and apostate hierarchy has now equated the ordination of women with pedophilia.
Of course, I have moved on, but after all those years as a ROman Catholic, I can only shake my head in disgust at the hierarchy’s appalling lack of moral uprightness.
I’m willing to bet moneythat no report of a woman being ordained has ever been ignored by a Bishop for decades, or that the participants in such an ordination have been “punished” by simply being moved to another parish where they were left free to offend again.
The Vatican couldn’t have announcedany more emphatically (albeit unwittingly) that it is an enemy to social progress, to justice and to equality. Let’s at least give them points for being truthful, though I can’t imagine they meant to.
So women’s ordination is actually worse than pedophiliaIf the spotty bits of Catholic education that still linger in my memory are accurate, wouldn’t violating a sacrament (e.g. ordaining a woman) be a greater sin than raping a child.
The former is subject to latae sententiae excommunication – a charming latin phrase that basically indicates the punishment is automatically invoked as the crime is committed. So, so if you ordain a woman, the woman and the person performing the ordination are automatically and immediately excommunicated. In other words, cut off from God’s grace and all access to the church.
On the other hand, if you rape a kid and get caught within 20 years, you might lose your job. And we still won’t tell the police.
Just one of many reasons why I am no longer a Catholic.
I wonder how…Pope Sidious (aka Benedict XVI) will make any ordinations of women the fault of teh gheys, like he does every other problem in the “Holy” Mother Church.
Not enough congregants? Blame teh gheys and their evil immoral lifestyle!
Not enough priests? They’ve been seduced by those evil gheys!
Kiddie-fiddlers in the priesthood? It’s all cause of teh ghey, honest!
It gets old very quickly – unless the audience is full of bigots. Being Catholics, it’s hard to imagine what else they could be.
Welcome to the large and ever-growing club.
Oh honey, I’ve been gone a whileGave it up for Lent in the early 90s and never looked back.
It breaks my mom’s heart, but there’s very little about the organized church has any redeeming value from my perspective.
In short….They lie.
Separate but not equalYes a violation of the sacraments is a higher “crime”. Thus ordaining women is seen as more severe in the eyes of the church. PR by the Vatican will deny it, but any priest who commits sexual misconduct with a child is still entitled to perform the sacramental rights of the church.
A nun was recently excommunicated for permitting an abortion in the hospital in order to save the mother’s life. Pedophilia priest do not challenge the patriarchy and therefore are allowed to continue in their function. However, the evilness of women exerting some common sense will not be tolerated.
A few years agoI encountered one of those annoying nuns who seem determined to bring gay “apostates” back into the Catholic fold. I made the mistake of mentioning to her that she was from the order that had taught me in grade school. She took that as a big challenge to get me back into the pews. In that smug, condescending tone they all seem to use, she asked in sorrowful tones, “So you’ve fallen away from the church?” I looked her right in the eye and told her, “No, lady, I jumped.”
Even that didn’t discourage her. So I started asking her about specific nuns who had taught me. And every time she told me one of them was dead, I laughed hysterically. That finally gave her the message, and she shut up and left me alone.
Oops–supposed to be a reply to smartypants