Would we really be better without religion?

[Occam's Spork]

In my opinion, atheism is derivative.
Most forms of atheism are some form of repressed religion.

But I didn't start this particular thread to discuss the existence of God--
The topic is, would humanity really be better off without religion?

Atheism, aspires no direction; We are all individuals.
An endless variety of human beings with different trajectories; But if this is the case, isn't civilisation is as likely to collapse as be improved on?
Civilisation owes it's existence to the prospect of a utopian political order, and this ideology started with religion at it's foundation.
With individualism at it's core, what would be the goal if atheism ran things?

[KTJ]

from The Washington Post…

Vatican's handling of sexual misconduct complaints
about ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick reveals
a lot about the Catholic Church

The story behind the four complaints to Rome about McCarrick helps
explain why the allegations against him remaining hidden for so long.

By MICHELLE BOORSTEIN | 4:03PM EDT — Monday, October 01, 2018


In this November 14, 2011 photo, then Cardinal Theodore McCarrick prays during the United States Conference
of Catholic Bishops' annual fall assembly in Baltimore. — Photograph: Patrick Semansky/Associated Press.

IN November 2000, a Manhattan priest got fed up with the secrets he knew about a star archbishop named Theodore McCarrick and decided to tell the Vatican.

For years, the Reverend Boniface Ramsey had heard from seminarians that McCarrick was pressuring them to sleep in his bed. The students told him they weren't being touched, but still, he felt, it was totally inappropriate and irresponsible behavior — especially for the newly named archbishop of Washington.

Ramsey called the Vatican's then-U.S. ambassador, Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo, who implored the priest to write the allegation so it could be sent up the chain in Rome. “Send the letter!” Montalvo demanded, Ramsey recalls.

He never heard back from Montalvo, and Ramsey has since destroyed his copy of the 2000 letter, he said.

“I thought of it as secret and somehow even sacred — something not to be divulged,” Ramsey told The Washington Post. It wasn't the concept of a cleric occasionally “slipping up” with their celibacy vow that shocked Ramsey, who believes that's common. It was the repeated and non-consensual nature of the McCarrick allegations.

Since Pope Francis suspended McCarrick this summer for allegedly groping an altar boy and multiple clerics have been accused of covering for McCarrick, a spotlight has been trained on the only place with the authority to oversee a cardinal: the Vatican.

There are still many more questions than answers about Rome's role. Who was told about the problem, and what was said? Were those discussions ever conveyed to popes Francis and Benedict? And, finally, if the pontiffs knew what was occurring, what did they do about it, if anything?

Ramsey's 2000 letter to Montalvo, who has since died, is the first known report to the Vatican about McCarrick, who just a couple months later rose to Catholicism's highest echelons as a cardinal.

But reports about his behavior continued, and the allegations grew more serious. In addition to Ramsey, at least three other people sent letters to Vatican ambassadors — called nuncios. They include well-known priest-turned-psychologist Richard Sipe and two New Jersey bishops, Paul Bootkoski and John Myers.

The most extensive report about what may have happened to communications about McCarrick once they got inside the Vatican came from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former ambassador to the United States, who dropped a bombshell tell-all in late August. Viganò wrote that a number of top Vatican officials — including popes Benedict and Francis — had been told about McCarrick's alleged misbehavior.

Since Viganò published his largely unverified account on several conservative sites, most people named in it have declined to comment. At least one, Monsignor Jean-François Lantheaume, who worked at the U.S. Embassy in D.C., responded to the letter, saying without elaboration that it is true.

Through dozens of interviews, documents and published blog posts from the time, The Washington Post has pieced together an account detailing the origin and nature of complaints to the Vatican about McCarrick. The story behind the complaints, at least three of which occurred in 2000 or later, also illustrates the great value placed on deference to hierarchy within the Catholic Church, the silence and secrecy around the topic of priest sexual activity and the extreme opaqueness of the Vatican bureaucracy — factors that contributed to the allegations against McCarrick remaining hidden for so long.

“The curia takes dysfunction to a whole new level,” said Tom Doyle, who worked at the Vatican's U.S. Embassy in the 1980s as a priest and canon lawyer and now works as an advocate for clergy abuse survivors.

“Decisions could be made by one [Vatican official] who says: ‘Screw this, I'll reroute it through the basement’.”

Doyle said he believes ambassadors in the 1990s and early 2000s sometimes ignored communications about sex abuse because the topic was newly volatile, and the less of a paper trail the better. The Vatican's embassy in D.C. is the first stop for complaints within the American Church.

Montalvo, in particular, “simply ignored any communications he received about sexual abuse of children,” Doyle said.

Documents sent to nuncios are most likely — although not always — forwarded to the secretary of state's office, at the Vatican in Rome, but it is up to that office to determine whether that information is forwarded to the pontiff, according to experts on the workings of the Vatican. The church does not routinely share information about internal communications with lay Catholics or journalists.

The complaints about McCarrick sent by Ramsey, Bootkoski, Myers and Sipe entered this murky system, and their travels within the Vatican remain mostly a mystery.

‘Send me the letter’

Ramsey took a major risk for a priest in November 2000, the day after Pope John Paul II named McCarrick to be D.C.'s archbishop. The role, one of American Catholicism's most prominent positions, virtually guarantees a cardinal's red hat and the unquestioned power that goes with it.

Ramsey told The Washington Post he called Montalvo to share what he knew. Ramsey had been a seminary professor in New Jersey when McCarrick was archbishop. He was sharing what his seminarians had told him.

He said he described the situation on the phone and asked if Montalvo would receive a letter on the topic; the ambassador said yes. The next day Ramsey said he got cold feet, and called Montalvo to say he was having second thoughts. What if they let on to McCarrick that he had shared the allegations?

“Send me the letter, send me the letter,” Montalvo emphatically urged him, Ramsey says. “What do you think, we are fools?”

Ramsey said he sent the letter to Montalvo registered mail but never received any acknowledgment. Although Ramsey destroyed his copy of the letter, he says his language was similar to that in a follow-up he sent, in 2015, to Boston's archbishop, Cardinal Sean O'Malley, head of Francis's commission on clerical sex abuse. In that letter, which Ramsey shared with The Post, he expressed concern about “a form of sexual abuse-harassment-intimidation or maybe simply high-jinx.”

A few weeks ago, Ramsey said he discovered in his records a 2006 letter from Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, now head of the Vatican's liaison to the branches of Catholicism in North Africa and the Middle East. That letter, first reported by the Catholic News Service, seems to confirm that higher-ups in Rome had received Ramsey's note about the shared bed.

In that letter, Sandri inquires about a job candidate who attended Ramsey's seminary. Sandri appears to have been asking if the candidate was involved in the allegations about McCarrick.

“I ask with particular reference to the serious matters involving some of the students of the Immaculate Conception Seminary, which in November 2000 you were good enough to bring confidentially to the attention” of Montalvo, Sandri wrote.

In Viganò's letter, he says Montalvo and his replacement in D.C., Pietro Sambi — who died in 2011 — “did not fail to inform the Holy See immediately” about Ramsey's letter, yet he offers no details or evidence.

Some Catholics have questioned the credibility of Viganò, an anti-Francis conservative whose own record on handling clergy abuse cases has come under scrutiny.

In Rome, Sandri and a nun accompanying him told The Washington Post last month that he would not speak about any knowledge he has of complaints about McCarrick.

“Never, never,” the nun walking with Sandri told The Post.

“Oh, well, God only knows about the future,” Sandri said with a laugh. But “no one will talk. It's a matter of prudence, of wisdom.”

Much more damning allegations were to come.


Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick speaks during a memorial service in South Bend, Ind. On Friday, September 28, 2018.
Roman Catholic Church officials confirmed that the disgraced ex-cardinal who was removed from ministry amid
allegations of sexual abuse has moved to a friary in remote western Kansas that is near an elementary school.
— Photograph: Robert Franklin/South Bend Tribune/Associated Press.

The lawsuits

In the 1990s, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post, a priest in his early 30s from the Diocese of Metuchen (New Jersey) reported to his superiors and mental health professionals that he had in the past been sexually harassed and victimized, in the seminary and by “his bishop.” While the documents don't name McCarrick, a source who is very familiar with the man's case confirms that it was McCarrick.

Those stories came out through counseling after the priest self-reported to his superiors that he had been sexually involved with two male minors. Counselors through the 1990s determined the priest had been victimized himself several times in his life, was not a pedophile and could be returned to ministry.

But after the abuse scandals exploded in the early 2000s, the source said, the priest's case resurfaced because the priest's new bishop — in a more aware environment, post-scandal — reviewed all his priests' files, saw the priest's situations with the minors and sought to have him removed from ministry.

This badly upset the priest, who sued.

In the mid-2000s, the priest reached a negotiated settlement with the dioceses in Trenton, Metuchen and Newark, and details of it leaked. Viganò alleged in his letter that the priest himself sent around the details “to about 20 people, including civil and ecclesiastical judicial authorities, police and lawyers.” Some parts of it — without the priest's name — were also on the well-read blog of Sipe and on other Catholic blogs from the mid-2000s that still circulate today.

The scenes alleged in the settlement excerpt are disturbing. The then-seminarian described a fishing trip with McCarrick and two priests that ended in a motel room with two double beds. He described watching in distress as McCarrick and another priest caressed one another “from head to toe,” laughing in the next bed. At one moment, the seminarian said he made eye contact with McCarrick, and, he alleges “[McCarrick] smiled at me, saying ‘you're next’ … I felt sick to my stomach and went under the covers.”

In another excerpt from the settlement published on Sipe's blog, the seminarian said McCarrick summoned him to drive him from Newark to New York City and detoured them to an apartment in the city for the night. McCarrick, the settlement excerpt on the blog alleges, climbed into the seminarian's bed and wrapped himself tightly around the younger man, who describes feeling “paralyzed” and sick to his stomach to the point that he hid in the bathroom and vomited and cried.

The man has not responded to interview requests from The Washington Post. Diocesan officials in Newark and Metuchen, who in 2006 paid him $100,000, declined to comment for this article, as did Barry Coburn, McCarrick's attorney.

After the man became a priest, he was ultimately removed from ministry because of the allegations involving the two minors.

Dioceses in New Jersey reached the settlement with that man, and a second former priest, Robert Ciolek, who says McCarrick subjected him to unwanted shoulder rubs. Those settlements were made public just this summer, when McCarrick was first accused of harming a teenage altar boy.

But the dioceses now say they reported it all to the Vatican.

Bootkoski, who led the Metuchen diocese at the time of the two settlements, issued a statement on August 28 saying he had called Montalvo and then wrote to him about those two complaints against McCarrick, in December 2005.

Bootkoski and the Metuchen and Newark dioceses declined to share the specific wording he sent to Montalvo with The Post, but did share the cover letter.

“Enclosed please find the information about which we spoke yesterday,” he writes Montalvo. “If I can be of further assistance to you in this matter, please do not hesitate to call on me. With sentiments of personal esteem, and my prayerful good wishes for a blessed Advent and Christmas.”

A spokesman for the Newark archdiocese, James Goodness, recently told The Post that Myers, who left the position of archbishop in 2016, also told the Vatican ambassador about the two settlements but declined to say when or provide the communication.

Sexual behavior among priests

The language of the letters, which reveal little urgency, points to a paradox at the heart of the church: Why was everyone so calm about sexual behavior of any kind among clerics sworn to celibacy?

The McCarrick case reveals, among other things, the unspoken contradictions between the image of priests as completely celibate and the reality of men struggling at times with their sexuality. Some experts and clerics compared priests' celibacy vows to those of married couples who become unfaithful. In other words, physical or sexual contact between priests happens. But it's unclear how frequently it occurs and how often it is non-consensual.

In McCarrick's case, there are allegations of ongoing, abusive behavior. But in past decades, harassment or sexual behavior between adults did not prompt nearly as much alarm compared with priest abuse of minors.

Even so, the sexuality of priests has been largely a third rail in the church, with little open acknowledgment of the issue.

Some cite the work of Sipe, who passed away this summer but spent his life studying celibacy in the Catholic Church. In his 1990 book, “A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy”, based on a 1960-1985 study of priests, Sipe argued that at any one time only about half of priests were celibate.

Monsignor Stephen Rossetti, a psychologist who studies and writes on priest wellness, says the church in the past 15 or so years has gradually become much more strict about celibacy and willing to discuss the topic.

“Thirty years ago the message was muddled,” he said, arguing that McCarrick is evidence that the lines were blurry. “We've seen the disaster that came from that.”

Doyle said the McCarrick scandal is part of a years-long process of the “the myth of priests having no sex lives being shattered.” He said that many priests he knows try to be celibate but often fail. “And they are good priests.”

Even as he warned the Vatican about McCarrick's alleged misconduct, Sipe seemed at times deferential to the system he devoted his life to challenging.

His website contains a May 2008 letter he says he sent to Pope Benedict.

“Your Holiness, I, Richard Sipe, approach you reluctantly to speak about the problem of sexual abuse of priests and bishops in the United States,” he wrote on the widely shared post.

One case, he alleged, was about McCarrick.

Sipe wrote that when he taught at St. Mary's Seminary & University in Baltimore, in the late 1970s and early 1980s “a number of priests” came to him with reports that McCarrick took them to various homes in the New York/New Jersey area “and slept with some of them.”

Sipe cited reports from another blogger of three unnamed clergy (one a former priest) who had “no sexual contact” but did share a bed and later received cards and letters from McCarrick.

Sipe also appeared to cite, without names or details, the motel room scene that ended with the seminarian-turned-priest's settlement.

Sipe's posts often didn’t include citation, but he told The Washington Post this summer before he died that he spoke to multiple people who had been involved sexually with McCarrick, including the seminarian who later received a settlement. Sipe declined to identify people by name or connect The Post with them.

“Your holiness, you must seek out and listen to their stories, as I have from many priests about their seduction by highly placed clerics, and the dire consequences in their lives,” Sipe wrote to Benedict.

A 2010 post by Sipe says the seminarian's case was sent to the Vatican's doctrine-enforcing arm, which oversees clergy abuse cases, “but it has not yet responded,” Sipe wrote.

Sipe's wife, Marianne Sipe, and Doyle, who also worked closely with Sipe, say there is no evidence Benedict ever received his complaints. There is, however, a brief letter dated May 5, 2008, from then-nuncio Sambi, acknowledging Sipe's explosive allegations about McCarrick.

“I acknowledge your kind letter, with enclosure,” Sambi writes, in a letter on Sipe's site. “Rest assured that your correspondence addressed to the Holy [See] has been transmitted through the diplomatic pouch. With cordial regards and prayerful best wishes, I am, Sincerely yours in Christ.”

__________________________________________________________________________

• Stefano Pitrelli and Chico Harlan contributed to this article from Rome.

• Michelle Boorstein is a religion reporter for The Washington Post, covering the busy marketplace of American faith. Her career has included a decade of globe-trotting with the Associated Press, covering topics including terrorism in the Arizona desert, debates on male circumcision, Ugandan royalty, and how strapped doctors in Afghanistan decide who lives and who dies.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

• McCarrick is relocated to friary in Kansas

• US Catholic church creates new process for reporting misconduct by high-ups

• Pope Francis' popularity plummeting in the US after sexual abuse scandal erupts

www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2018/10/01/how-vatican-handled-reports-theodore-mccarricks-alleged-sexual-misconduct-what-it-says-about-catholic-church

[KTJ]

Any sane, intelligent person who reads that Washington Post article would have to conclude the world would be better off without religion and religious sexual sickos.

[Occam's Spork]

Oct 2, 2018 10:10:40 GMT 10 KTJ said:

Any sane, intelligent person who reads that Washington Post article would have to conclude the world would be better off without religion and religious sexual sickos.

The question I posit is, how would atheism do better?
Are you so naive to think there are no atheist paedophiles?

[KTJ]

There's that label again.

You must be really iinsecure if you constantly feel the need to stick a label on people who are merely refusing to believe unproven bullshit without proof being provided to show that your god is real.

[Occam's Spork]

I didn't invent the word. Atheist translates as "No God", that is your position, isn't it?
If you don't believe in God, at least have the balls to stand behind your worldview.
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck...

Except a more fitting title for you would be "Misotheist", you intolerant douche.

[Deleted]

Derivative as in differentiation from religion...?? or a money factor...??...odd expression.

A good percentage of the people have a need to follow, if not a religion then say a dictator, (Hitler) or authoritarian communism, so to degree religion plays an important role in social harmony.

Important thing is the freedom of choice...let religion rule and it will dictate.

[KTJ]

Religion is simply yet another scam to take money from gullible people.

Take Hillsong as an example ... they have terminals for the gullible to stick their money machine cards into so they pay dosh over to the church.

[pim]

Would we be better off without spammers and trolls?

With apologies to Elvis...

He looks like an atheist

(soft background chorus: looks like an atheist)

Waddles like an atheist

(chorus - softly: waddles like an atheist)

Quacks like an atheist - but I don't mind.

He's an atheist undisguised. Oh yes he is. Atheist undisguised.

[Occam's Spork]

Oct 8, 2018 9:57:25 GMT 10 @pontodaheretic said:

Important thing is the freedom of choice...let religion rule and it will dictate.

Neither am I saying religion should dictate, but it shouldn't be overlooked as an effective guideline for societal behavior.
Atheism has no such agreed upon guidelines.

[pim]

It's tried, Occam, (i.e. atheism) but the record so far has been appalling. Nietzsche's late 19th century "God is dead" was not a declaration of victory for atheism. In fact quite the contrary it was a warning: God is dead lamented Nietzsche, and it's we humans who have killed him. It follows from that - and this is Nietzsche, not me - that we humans have arrogated unto ourselves what we'd hitherto left up to God. Basically Nietszche was saying "Be careful what you wish for". No more Matthew 22:21 "Render unto Caesar etc etc", according to Nietszche humans were eliminating God and leaving only Caesar. The Caesar parallel is interesting because when Caesar tried that on he claimed divine status for himself. It ended badly for him and for the next generation it was a miserable time to be a Roman.

In the first half of the 20th century they experimented with the secular ideology of fascism. It ended in ashes with over 100 million humans dying violently in two world wars. We’re very slow learners in this regard because the fascist phoenix appears to be stirring again. Basically the 20th century was defined by the challenge posed by totalitarian communism which, more than fascism, codified atheism into its program and defined it in terms of the class struggle through its own theological tool which it called "dialectical materialism". I can't help but describe communism in religious terms. Basically it's the secular god-that-failed.

Religion on the other hand has a much longer pedigree. Ponto does have a point when he says that when religion is in charge it "dictates". I wholeheartedly agree if he's talking about theocracies. Back in the days when "Christendom" had the Inquisition Europe resembled a dysfunctional insane asylum. Fast forward to the time of the great Protestant reformers, Luther and Calvin, and you find the various Christian polities of Europe have in effect become police states. Theocracies have religious laws, religious crimes and religious courts to try them. I can't believe you'd advocate the return of that state of affairs. One of the reasons why Islam has become so problematic is that it's experiencing its own particular reformation. Look at fundamentalist Islam and the theocracies and theocratic outfits that it's spawned. That’s what a Reformation looks like. Christianity had its reformation 500 years ago, complete with religious wars, misery and mayhem. It culminated in the Thirty Years War of the early 1600s which left Germany a charnel house. And all with the weapons and technologies of the 1600s. Muslims are having their reformation today - with 21st century weapons. Go figure.

The best thing we've come up with to date is the democratic secular state in which religion can find its place - and an honoured place at that - not as part of the state apparatus but in the private sphere: the "empire of souls" as one of the 19th century popes put it. The problem is that the "empire of souls" model works fine as long as the Church retains enough prestige and moral capital to function as a moral corrective. The toxic issue of paedophilia and the moral bankruptcy of the Church hierarchy with their cover ups and failure to deal with paedophilia have totally exhausted their moral capital. This has left a gaping hole which the snake oil merchants are very quick to fill.

Nietszche was right in ways that even Nietszche couldn't have predicted.

[Deleted]

We live on through the children.

[KTJ]

I drive trains past a fundy mega-church at Petone every day I go to work.

Every Friday evening and most of each weekend, the place is full of kids and teenagers. They promote themselves as a place with fun activities for young people, but I know that is only a front for brainwashing those young people with religion while they are still impressionable. It should be illegal to push religion on anyone until they are past their teenage years and have the maturity to decide for themselves in a rational, adult manner whether or not what is being preached to them is real, or is merely a con in the form of religious brainwashing.

[pim]

A top down authoritarian big government response that would make Peter Dutton smile. Sits oddly with your frequent grandstanding advocacy of "free speech with zero restrictions".

[Occam's Spork]

When KTJ makes proclamations about free speech, he really means only the opinions he agrees with.