Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Just how many pedophile priests are there anyway?

I see the pope has defrocked 400 of them in just 2 years. They need more than defrocking, though. They need prison time. It's a sad blow to any church to see it's leadership fall into such sin but at least they're trying to do something about it. I have no idea just how deep it really goes.

Pope defrocks 400 priests in 2 years
Published January 17, 2014
Associated Press

Jan. 16, 2014 - Charles Scicluna, former Vatican chief prosecutor of clerical sexual abuse, waits in Geneva, Switzerland, for the start of questioning over clerical sexual abuse of children. The questioning took place at the headquarters of the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, in Geneva. The Vatican came under blistering criticism from a U.N. committee for its handling of the global priest sex abuse scandal. (AP)

VATICAN CITY � A document obtained by The Associated Press shows Pope Benedict XVI defrocked nearly 400 priests over just two years for molesting children.

The statistics for 2011-12 represent the first time that the Vatican has provided details on the number of priests who have been defrocked. Prior to that, it had only revealed the number of alleged cases of sexual abuse it had received.

The document was prepared from data the Vatican had been collecting to help the Holy See defend itself before a U.N. committee this week in Geneva.

Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's U.N. ambassador in Geneva, referred to just one of the statistics in the course of eight hours of oftentimes pointed criticism and questioning from the U.N. human rights committee. The AP obtained the document Friday.

The Catholic Church long ago lost control of their seminaries, just like the mainline Protestant churches have. They are "dens of iniquity", and full of polesmokers.

This problem started back with nazi homo movement. They infiltrated the catholic priesthood with homos in an attempt to destroy the church from within.

That's what you get when you forbid priests to marry. � I hate Catholicism. Rules and regulations don't bring righteousness. They should be put in prison after having their root sawed off. Amen

What a complete crock of bullshit.

Not allowing priests to marry has NOTHING to do with people becoming pedophiles.

Pedophiles become priests, teachers, little league coaches, carnies etc to gain access to kids. They become or take the jobs for access to kids. They're pedos before they're priests, little league coaches, teachers et cetera. It's not the other way around.

Your line of thinking is exactly the same as "guns cause crime".

Perhaps, or maybe the whole priest/monk/nun thing has always been a socially-legitimate pathway for those wrestling with different sexual urges. Ain't saying they were all that way, or even a lot.

To put it in perspective, there are currently about 39,600 Catholic Priests in the world.
( http://cara.georgetown.edu/caraservices/requestedchurchstats.html )

For the Pope to defrock 400 of those that represents about 1%, which seems a lot.

Locally a much loved Irish priest "Father Mike" was kicked out about ten years back for getting a teenage girl (for once) pregnant.

Also, as a kid in England (starting at age ten) I went to a Catholic School run by an order of Irish Christian brothers, maybe ten on staff. A small minority of the boys were boarding students who lived there during the school year.

Turns out that one Christian brother (who were all unmarried with a vow of celibacy) was masturbating some of these students. I went there for two years before we left for America, never a clue as to what was happening although I was in class with these kids.

Interestingly enough, my American uncle had been in a seminary studying to be a priest before WWII broke out (he left it to join the Marines and ended up on Guadalcanal), to hear my mom tell it, one time he was over visiting he went with her to meet us after school and IMMEDIATELY red-flagged that guy on sight as suspect.

Neither my folks or anyone else thought anything of it at the time. I wish my Uncle were still around to ask him how he knew.

The sexual abuse only came to light years after the fact, when we all started talking decades later on the internet basically.

Birdwatcher

The Catholic priesthood attracts a LOT of sexually confused men, which manifests in a variety of deviant behavior, not just pedophilia.

spot on.

taught by the same order in Victoria BC. There were some sadistic buggers among them ,others were just great teachers,
our school had a lot of reject kids that no other school wanted, and some of those teachers loved using the strap.

norm

Not nearly as many as there are pedophile school teachers or coaches. Not even percentage-wise.

The homosexuals took over the catholic church seminaries. Just like they are taking over the older,protestant mainline seminaries.

The Holy Spirit has departed these "denominations" a long time ago. Now they toil in ritual and sin, trying to be "religious" as they twist and contort scripture to fit their evil desires.

There are probably as many pedophile priests as there are pedophile ministers, rabbis, Sunday School teachers, Scout leaders -- or Hunter Education instructors.

No way. Catholic Priests have a long history of pedophilia, way beyond the rate of other professions.

I agree that they have a long history of DISCOVERED pedophiles. Perhaps the other professions I mentioned haven't been under the witch hunters' obsessive eyes -- yet.

One would think.....the nuns would beat the $hit outta them with their frizzin' rulers.

Leather? About like a razor strap and applied to an outstretched palm in front of the class? Yeowww that stung!

We had one older master flip out one time and start really whaling on a kid who he couldn't keep from talking back, failing at him about the head and shoulders as he backed him into a corner. He briefly apologized to the class the next day for losing his composure and it was business as usual.

Seems like I got the strap every week for something. I recall my absolute dread of going back to school at the end of the summer holidays, but hey, at least you learned early on not to be a wuss. I never did learn much Latin, and writing left handed with the mandatory fountain pen was a pain.

Only remotely weird thing I can recall was when they lined us all up in the hallway and one at a time we went into an office where some man I had never seen before was asking us one at a time if we wanted to study to be a priest. Just has an odd vibe in memory somehow.

The really funny thing to all us St. Joes alumni though was, when they finally closed for financial reasons, they apologized for their "brutality"

That was before the child molesting thing was common knowledge tho...

Birdwatcher

Whether Catholic or other flavors, I agree. Confused men seeking solice and acceptance in the scripture and church.

Regardless- I hope "defrocked" means they cut 'em from nuts to chin and spill their guts on the church lawn.

The modern philosopher Adam Watts trained to be an Episcopalian priest and was for a period of time. Now Watts in his writings is in many ways an immoral kind of guy, finding nothing wrong with "open marriage" for example and wanting to elevate prostitutes to the level of nurses, but he did write well.

(during my three years of relative isolation in Africa his book "In My Own Way" was one that stood up to being read over and over again starting at any part, exactly as he had set out to write).

In that book he does say that, in his experience, the whole robed and costumed priesthood thing attracted a disproportionate number of homosexual men, closeted and otherwise.

Birdwatcher

Confused men are called to seek solace in the church but the Bible says that they aren't to be leaders or teachers. Leaders are to be solid in their beliefs and above reproach. The church has the responsibility of sorting them out, with the help of the Holy Spirit.

This is true. The gays took over most of the Catholic seminaries by the 1950s.