solicitr wrote:- Would find it defensible if the atheists handled the sexual abuse cases through their internal procedures, rather than reporting to public authorities.
Is anyone arguing that, for any group? Otherwise a good list, but this item's stuffed with straw.
soli --
My closest friend is Catholic, and I spent four hours arguing this point with him last weekend. His argument, as best as I can recreate it, is that norms concerning the reporting of sexual abuse by authority figures to secular authorities have changed drastically over the past 100-120 years, and may not have been as well-developed in (say) the 1970s as they are now. At the time, he suggested, abuse victims may have felt more comfortable raising the abuse issue internally within the Church, rather than going to secular authorities. Similarly, he contended that Church authorities may have viewed the appropriate course of action (according to then-prevailing
societal norms for dealing with sexual abuse) as being to discipline the relevant people internally. He also proffered various hypotheticals - what if an abuse victim sought out a pastor, asking the pastor to hold the abuse in strictest confidence and not go to the uathorities? What if an abuse victim confided in a deacon, but the abuser was a bishop over which the deacon had no power?
Although my friend agreed with me that "the ideal" would be for the Church to state unequivocally that
going forward, it would promptly report abuse to the secular authorities, he was much more ... patient than me about the idea that it might take the Church time to reach that point of view. However, he disputed my view that Church authorities acting according to the norms of the 1970s and 1980s were equally at fault for not reporting the abuse of which they were aware to public authorities, whether or not the matter was handled internally.
So, I hadn't proffered that example as a strawman, but rather in response to a lengthy conversation I had with a bona fide, lifelong Catholic. I hope that clarifies things.
As for the Irish case, I concede I don't fully understand the protocols to which you are referring, and I will need to do more reading before commenting further. I should thus probably have excluded that example.
(both edits are for grammar)