Like Cardinal McCarrick, first Cardinal in the history of the Church to be laicized because of his sexual misdeeds and crimes (adults and minors were involved).
Yes, McCarrick that violent criminal, thank you for the example. My point was that he was an outlier, that most child rapists did not ascend to bishop.
You know who was told about McCarrick and didn't believe the reports? Pope John Paul II.
Pope St. John Paul II. And you're saying it as if because he couldn't bring himself to believe this, that he was just as guilty of child rape as child rapists are, and that's just flatly incorrect. He didn't commit that violent crime, and he wasn't an accessory. His guilt is in his naivete.
You're going too far when you say any bishop who didn't call the police on a molesting priest was "probably a child rapist himself." Their crimes of culpability are bad enough
If they knew, with full knowledge just what a child rapist is, the sort of human being that that violent criminal is, then I'm not going too far. They're an accessory if they knew fully what they were dealing with and didn't call the police.
I think the bishops knew. No doubt. If they didn't, I can only think they were intentionally ignorant for their own purposes as I've outlined previously.
This is your proposed alternative to my notion that they were all deceived as to the gravity of the violent crimes being committed, and to the irredeemabilty of the violent criminals that they were dealing with.
This (
a priest's perspective vie Rod Dreher) may shed some light how priests think differently and why that mattered when it came to dealing with fellow priests. Not agreeing, I think clericalism is a continuing factor and unfixable problem, but it's another facet of the picture.
It was too long, as I tire quickly of Dreher's pontificating and sanctimony, but I did see that his priest friend wrote something that I've been saying all along: "priests generally don’t grasp the seriousness of the offense, and the damage it does"
They didn't, and I hope we can all learn the lesson that thinking of child rapists as anything other than just as dangerous as an unrepentant murderer, is a profound mistake.