Again with the Sursum Corda. I took a long break from trying to single-handedly fix the Catholic Church.
The crisis is not about pedophilia. There is pedophilia in the world. It is a sickness. It is listed by the American Medical Association as an incurable disease. I find it hard to see it as just another temptation thrown in our path. I don't experience this temptation. Most people don't. I made a decision before I got married to follow a rule. This is a similar decision to the one a priest must make before being ordained. There are people who manage to follow that one rule. Then there is a long gradient of people who fail to follow it with various colorful consequences. At some point along the gradient, we are dealing with pathology. At some point along that gradient, one must stop pointing at people and saying, "that is a selfish amoral bastard who thinks he can get away with X" and start saying "that is a sick bastard who needs medical treatment". It is not in our power to get a fix on exacly where that point lies. I do know that at the far end of this scale we find our predatory priests. We have left the realm of who is gay and who is straight and who is having an affair and have entered the realm of clinical medicine. That is science. That dog is salivating and that one isn't. This crisis is not about pedophilia but about leadership.
The supposed leaders, best identified as the bishops and cardinals, really screwed up. They will keep screwing up because their position is now impossible. They are at the point in a chess game where I usually accidently knock the board over and forget the postions of the pieces. One one side they have, from the pope on down, a sick clerical culture with sick attitudes towards sexuality and sick attitudes towards dissent and control. On the other side they have a healthy, vibrant, diverse, rich, highly educated laity with all sorts of interesting interpretations of Christ's teachings. This crisis has exposed gulf between the people and the church leadership. The leadership just wants things to be like they were before. They can't put it back together with the limited tools they have. Read about the bishops. Their frontal lobes are locked in fear. How can we pry their fingers off the steering wheel and get them out of the drivers seat?
2:30:06 AM 
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