The Sexual Offenders List for Dummies: There’s RC priests, Thai monks and then you have all the others.
It’s never easy to be a Pope. When you don’t have to accommodate madmen like Hitler, collaborate with South-American dictators or kowtow to Communist China leaders, your own flock and its so-called shepherds are always giving you one kind of grief or the other:
The Vatican has launched a new course to teach priests how to be less aggressive and more understanding in the confessional booth. Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, the bishop in charge of the Apostolic Penitentiary, one of the three courts in the Roman Curia, said the act of confession is undergoing a “grave crisis”. Writing in L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, he said that 30 per cent of worshippers “do not believe a priest is necessary to hear confessions”. A further 10 per cent, he said, “actively think a priest is an impediment in their relationship with God”.
Mgr Girotti said that large numbers of Catholics find it difficult to open up about their sins to their priest. He said a new course, which started on Monday, will help priests learn to be “ministers of reconciliation”. The course will also involve instruction on how to deal with “special cases”, such as divorcees, trainee priests, homosexuals and people who think they have been possessed.
Homosexuals, he said, should be pointed towards the doctrine of the Church. He said confessors should only offer them absolution if they have managed to “transform their relationships into ones of friendship and solidarity”. He also said confessors could play a key role in distinguishing between “deeply-rooted homosexual leanings” and passing fancies, especially when considering the cases of trainee priests.
Yes, those silly, passing fancies.
It’s funny how the Church can be quite hard-headed where it comes to poverty, contraception and the power structures within the Church but so optimistically blind and fudging on others. It’s what got them in all that trouble over paedophile priests: stubbornly hiding and moving around these serial predators, obstructing police investigations and being guilty of contempt in court. It seemed to be ‘easier’ to do all that and suffer the consequences than admitting these crimes were indeed deeply-rooted and not a ‘passing fancy’. That they have trouble distinguishing between homosexuality and paedophilia doesn’t help a lot either but that’s another story for another day.
Ah well, if you think that the Pope and his RC Church have a problem with their personel, spare a few sympathetic thoughts for Thailand’s secular and religious authorities:
BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thai officials urged Buddhist monks on Tuesday to avoid using social networking Web sites to woo women after an advocacy group found some monks were doing just that. The request came as police in the northeast detained a monk accused of using a Web site to lure a woman to his temple and raping her.
“I call on Hi5 users to tell the monks to leave the site if they are found using it,” junior minister Jakrapob Penkair told reporters after a Buddhist monitoring group said some monks were flirting on the Web site popular with Thai users.
Reports of monks caught using or selling drugs or having consensual sex with women are not uncommon in the Thai media, which reported on Tuesday a 23-year-old monk was caught raping a teenager he lured to his room through the Web site. A senior Culture Ministry official said monks should not be banned from the cyberspace, but should turn this “crisis” into “opportunity” by bringing Buddha’s teaching to the young.
“Instead of using the Net to flirt with young girls, monks should find ways to preach Dharma and lead them in the right direction,” said Ladda Thangsupachai, head of the Cultural Surveillance Centre.
Mind you, it might help to keep these poor confused monks from raping women and children if the head of the Cultural Surveillance Centre didn’t describe rape as yet another subcategory of ‘flirting with girls.’
Which just goes to show that when it comes to dealing with sexual predators within churches, there’s not much throwing (up) distance between Christians and Buddhists.
Which is great news for all those ecumenical organisations.
Not such great news for women and children, of course but on the whole most churches don’t give much of a fuck about them anyway.
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