[lbo-talk] theory and practice

[Alan Rudy]

Maybe I missed the intended tone of your lead in... or misread the piece...
How quickly the church changes?  Or does it change quickly, and recovery
always come, only if your time horizon is from Adam and Eve to eternity?
I find it hard to believe that the 70s were THAT different in England than
they were in the US?  While I don't know if the word pedophilia was running
about all that much, everyone I knew among NJ teenagers knew what child
abuse was, that "dirty old men" did it and that there were a number of those
guys in the church... and I grew up in the pretty professional/secular
'burbs where most of the Catholics were the the salt-of-the-earth long-time
resident Italian shop-keeping, shoe- and watch-repair owning and gas station
running families who lived downtown and whose kids became the cops,
volunteer firemen and EMTs...
But, again, I mighta missed something.

On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 5:53 PM, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net>wrote:


> This caught my eye in light of recent discussions here about going to the
> experts and not the members for what the church is about.  There's also this
> interesting response that shows how quickly the church changes:
>
>
> "Child abuse has been going on since Adam and Eve came out of the
> garden,,,,,    If a case comes to us, we look at it, in the first instance,
> and say, does there seem to be any substance in this case, and straightaway
> hand it to the police. That's been our practice since '94."
>
>
> http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/03/world/la-fg-bishop-qa4-2010apr04/2
>
> Catholic Church will survive abuse scandals, says English bishop
>
>
> Bishop Kieran Conry, one of the few clerics to openly talk about the issue
> weighs in on whether the media are unfairly targeting the pope and the
> long-term effects of the scandal.
>
>
> [...]
>
> The '70s was a quite different era. I was in Birmingham, in England, in the
> '80s, and there was a case involving a priest in the parish next door to me.
> The common gossip was that this man was too close to children. We thought,
> yeah, that's not good, get him away from them, so they moved him on. But
> then a few months later, the whole thing comes out; he was abusing children.
>
>
> We didn't have the language [to describe it]; we didn't have the concept.
>
> But child molestation was a crime already in the 1970s. There was already a
> legal language to talk about it.
>
> The legal language might've been there, but the common language wasn't
> around. For instance, it wasn't till a few years ago that the word
> "pedophilia" appeared in an Italian newspaper. In many cultures it's just
> not talked about; it doesn't happen.
>
> [...]
>
>
> . You've spoken of "generations of damage" to the church. Can the church
> recover, and if so, how?
>
> It will recover; it's always recovered from damage, the damage done by the
> Reformation, for instance, and various times in the past.
>
> The problem with this is it's not a [single] incident that's damaged the
> church. I was talking about cases now emerging in Germany, beginning in
> Italy. . . . My fear is that it'll get worse before it gets better. That
> might be generations, the constant drip-drip of more sexual abuse cases.
>
> Is the church therefore fated to go from crisis to crisis?
>
> It depends on how you understand "church." The church is an enormous
> institution, and perception of it in most people's minds is actually fairly
> local. The church locally, I'd say, is still doing quite well. . . .
>
> [...]
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- 
*********************************************************
Alan P. Rudy
Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
Central Michigan University
124 Anspach Hall
Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
517-881-6319