It's not only priests.If you are only going to only make it illegal for priests and only for a specific crime, I would fight against it to the supreme court.
The Catholic church wants to be exempt from the laws that apply to everybody else.
Tom
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It's not only priests.If you are only going to only make it illegal for priests and only for a specific crime, I would fight against it to the supreme court.
I've been Catholic since I was born, in 1958. I couldn't disagree more.
There's a reason that we have laws requiring people to report child abuse. Laws that don't apply to other kinds of crime, like burglary and drug dealing and fraud. It's because child abuse is so easy to overlook, rationalize, justify, etc. But it causes huge amounts of cumulative damage. This has been going on for centuries. Not just the RCC, but our sense of entitlement and authority has been a huge source of human suffering for altogether too long and has to stop! Child abuse too ugly of a crime to leave it up to a nonprofessional to take responsibility for the outcome of deciding which abusive situations need to be investigated by the law and which don't.
No! Priests need to stick to religion and let other people do their job of protecting people from molesters. They cannot be given legal protection from the outcome of their decisions on this subject. They need to decide whether leaving a child at risk is worth a multimillion dollar lawsuit against their diocese and prison time, or just doing the right thing. Which is involving the professionals, not hiding behind ecclesiastical law.
I have seen too much damage done. No. Take that burden off of priests by requiring them to follow the law.
Tom
It's not only priests.
The Catholic church wants to be exempt from the laws that apply to everybody else.
Tom
... and wants legal protection when he does it:
Melbourne archbishop says he'd rather go to jail than report child abuse heard in confession
He's certainly not alone in his opinion, and the law of many countries does give priests the protection he wants.
... but should it? Should priests who decide to shield child abusers be exempt from mandatory reporting laws?
Aye, they care more about their image of wholesomeness, rather than actually practicing it.Boom! Exactly.
The thing that makes priests receiving full immunity from prosecution for complicity compared to your average layman all the more ridiculous is the level of trust invested in a member of the clergy by their religious community. By failing/refusing to come forward with information about a child abuser's activities the priests in question are enabling that abuser to continue their activities confident that one of the few people other than their victims who knows about them is restrained from alerting the authorities - and into the bargain they are breaching their duty of care by permitting (or even personally visiting) harm on some of that religious community's most vulnerable members.
The wider RCC is also culpable as an organisation because its tendency to shunt problematic men of the cloth from one diocese to the next protects them from scrutiny as well as enabling them to continue to molest kids. And to top it off, they encouraged a culture where children who did try to talk to their elders about it were silenced and punished for doing so.
We're already all-too-aware of the consequences of making these clergymen above the law; time to end their unreasonable exemptions.
For most things, I am OK with the seal of the Confessional. Icky, but needful. Like lawyer/client privilege.Perhaps it's good that people know there is someone they can confess anything to without getting reported.
I think it's more important to stop people who sexually abuse kids.I think it's good they have that option.
I would say the archbishop shouldn't have to report anything said in confession since it's confidential. But if he has some other reason to believe it's happening he should report it, regardless of whether he also heard about it in confession.
For me this in not about the crime, it is about the way the information is gotten. If you lie to a person or torture a person to get the information it is not valid. If the state comes out and says there are no protections for criminals. If they say anything to anyone and that person does not turn the information over to the police they can also be held in jail then it is equal and fair.
If you are only going to only make it illegal for priests and only for a specific crime, I would fight against it to the supreme court.
I'm not. It creates too much entanglement between religion and government.For most things, I am OK with the seal of the Confessional. Icky, but needful. Like lawyer/client privilege.
If a teacher was told something in confidence, what should they do?
Set up a confessional box?
I hope for their sake than an abused child never confides in you.
I do too, but it might not do any good. The pedophile isn't going to confess to someone who is going to turn them in. They might as well just turn themselves in. Same consequenceI think it's more important to stop people who sexually abuse kids.
Set up a confessional box?
I do too, but it might not do any good. The pedophile isn't going to confess to someone who is going to turn them in. They might as well just turn themselves in. Same consequence
So, legally (and morally, imho) the answer in Victoria (where the OP is from) is that you must report it.