Linked for truth. Moreover, suppose Douthat was right about the alleged permissive sexual mores of 1970s Ireland. What, by all the angels and saints and the holy living mother of the fuck does that explain? What is that supposed to say about the U.S.? Are we to believe that this sexual liberation permeated the Church hierarchy so thoroughly that they kept the vow of celibacy instead of permitting married priests, but decided that raping children was okay and then constructed a time machine to send the abusers back in time so the authorities could establish a track record of complete wickedness and uselessness?
Look, whether raping children is wrong is not one of the hard ethical questions. (Maybe Douthat skipped that night at RCIA.) And deciding whether to protect the institution or the rape victims wasn’t supposed to be one of the hard questions, either.
“Contrition” does not mean find a way to blame it on hippies on another continent. Christ on a cracker.
The Edge of the American West 
22 comments
April 9, 2010 at 5:52 am
kid bitzer
after the last prelate is hung by his entrails, we’re going to face a huge property management issue:
the criminal syndicate formerly known as the catholic church is the owner of astronomical amounts of property, real estate, artworks, and a small principality. also, the vatican library, which is probably the most precious collection on earth.
who’s going to oversee it all? who’s going to keep it out of the hands of the mafiosi, or italian govt, distinguishing them just for laughs?
a proposal. i know a family that already presides over a vast collection of properties and art-works. they’re already used to being a powerless vestige of a ruling elite. and they even have some experience defending a faith!
that’s right: the house of windsor. i think that the papacy should be abolished, and the remains of the criminal empire should be given to liz and her family. they’ve done a good job with the crown estates. i think they’d do well with st. peters, too.
April 9, 2010 at 6:12 am
zunguzungu
This is one of those facts that people like Hitchens don’t seem to grasp when they grandly predict the future collapse of the Catholic Church; at the end of the day, the Church’s *material* foundations are so unbelievable that long term projections like “collapse” make no sense. Even if world-wide Catholics continue to desert the church in droves over the next generations, the Pope can still just sit in the Vatican enjoying the wealth of centuries. That wealth isn’t going anywhere. I mean, they literally have their own *country.* Which means, I suspect, the Catholic church in fifty years is going to be an even stranger and weirder artifact than it is now.
April 9, 2010 at 6:19 am
kid bitzer
and even though its political demise would make me almost as gleeful as hitchens, i really do not want to see its collections pillaged and despoiled.
when things fall apart, things of value too often get lost. the loss of the baghdad museum was a calamity for mankind. the loss of the vatican’s holdings–just what is contained in that postage-stamp in rome–would be a far greater catastrophe.
some sensible receivership must be arranged. (tho i agree that the practical issue will not arise in my lifetime).
April 9, 2010 at 6:37 am
dana
Church’s *material* foundations are so unbelievable that long term projections like “collapse” make no sense.
I’m not familiar with Hitchens’ argument, but it seems plausible that the Church could collapse in that it could fail to attract believers or save souls (what I’ve heard was its original mission) even while enjoying the wealth of centuries. After all, the Parthenon outlasted the religion of the ancient Greeks.
April 9, 2010 at 8:00 am
Vance
To return for a moment to the repugnant argument at hand, I do think I see one of the steps in the sequence by which permissiveness in the wider culture is supposed to have led priests to abuse — by putting dirty thoughts in their minds, and encouraging them to believe they had the right to act on them. This doesn’t help explain the problem of time-travel, or why these priests chose to force themselves on children rather than leave or change the church, but I think it must be part of Douthat’s twisted logic. If I’m right, it’s a way of asserting the Church’s authority over the wider culture — for the sake of the Church and the children in its care, we nonbelievers must refrain from circulating ideas that would be dangerous to them.
April 9, 2010 at 8:26 am
dana
Even if you granted that, permissiveness* in the wider culture wouldn’t explain the cover-up, which is the heart of the current allegations.
*You know, I am too young to remember the 70s, but I’m reasonably sure that “make love not war” and similar coincided roughly with the development of stricter standards on things like statutory rape and rape more generally, so call me skeptical.
April 9, 2010 at 8:46 am
Vance
I’m older, but still not quite old enough to remember them “in that way”. But there’s obviously a connection between entertaining the idea that someone might choose sex, and realizing that it matters whether she does so choose. In other words, we don’t have to know history to see the problem you point out with that term “permissiveness”.
April 9, 2010 at 9:04 am
kid bitzer
douthat does have a point, however, in that prior to the 60’s the church had never officially recognized the existence of lust. oh, sure: gluttony, wrath, sloth, and the other three. they knew all about the *six* deadly sins. but who had ever heard of sex?
and then the idea that people might be *tempted* by sexual desire–that came as a total bolt out of the blue for the church. they had made no institutional preparations for that kind of contingency.
for millenia, they had been teaching people that the devil would tempt them with sensual desires, like hunger and thirst, and wanting soft cushions. priests were given extensive pastoral training on how to resist the lure of comfy chairs.
case in point: there was a lot of emphasis in the church about the story of adam and eve, and this put every one on a state high alert against appeals. “lead us not into temptation!” they’d prey, visions of plump, fruity jonagolds dancing before their eyes. they knew about this sort of temptation, and they were ready to face it.
but sexual desire? they were just completely ignorant of its existence. no wonder they were caught with their pants down.
April 9, 2010 at 9:06 am
kid bitzer
‘appeals’ s/b apples, though at least the hated iphone autocorrect made a joke this time, sort of.
April 9, 2010 at 9:12 am
foolishmortal
priests were given extensive pastoral training on how to resist the lure of comfy chairs.
Unfortunately this practice was restricted to the Western church, and Byzantium was left defenseless against the onslaught of the Ottoman Empire.
April 9, 2010 at 9:16 am
kid bitzer
fm–now *that’s* funny.
April 9, 2010 at 9:40 am
Tom Elrod
foolishmortal for the win
April 9, 2010 at 9:56 am
dana
God, that’s great.
April 9, 2010 at 11:11 am
Russell60
Having all the stuffing up one end sometimes made the difference.
April 9, 2010 at 7:51 pm
Cdnl Fang
well… I wasn’t expecting any of this
April 10, 2010 at 5:10 am
Jason B.
Nobody expects the . . . oh, I can’t.
April 10, 2010 at 5:13 am
Matt Weiner
This seems like a good venue to request that any future posts about Douthat be illustrated with this picture.
April 10, 2010 at 5:24 am
Matt Weiner
By the way, my informants about the current Apostolic Visitation of American nuns say that it looks like the Church may be looking for an excuse to seize the nuns’ property in order to help cover their legal liabilities. And why do people seem to be focusing on ordaining married men as a possible solution, instead of ordaining women.
Also…
Look, whether raping children is wrong is not one of the hard ethical questions. (Maybe Douthat skipped that night at RCIA.)
Oh, you can’t blame Anything But Love for not knowing that. He went to Harvard, where the philosophy department has purged itself of metaphysicians and moralists.
April 10, 2010 at 7:05 am
chris y
And why do people seem to be focusing on ordaining married men as a possible solution, instead of ordaining women.
Because they’ve spent the last ten years or so on a massive recruitment drive against conservative Episcopalians who don’t like the idea of ordaining women? Even Ratzinger might find it a bit troubling, after shouting, “Come to Rome, there are no bloody women priests here!” at the Anglican hard right for so long, to suddenly turn around and say. “Whoops, sorry guys…” On the other hand, they’ve already made any number of dispensations for married episcopalian priests, so there’s a wedge in that door.
April 11, 2010 at 3:31 am
Aimai
I think I coughed up a lung at “ottaman empire.”
aimai
April 11, 2010 at 12:21 pm
Elizabeth D.
I think this stems from thinking of rape as primarily a sexual crime – a type of sex that is bad. Liberal Catholics are suspicious of the Church’s views on what kind of sex is good and bad. Therefore, they must be wishy-washy about rape. But rape is primarily about an assault on someone else, and thus even sex-positive people oppose it. Pretty much everybody opposes rape, in fact! There is literally no ideology I can think of that would excuse rape. And it’s a dirty slander to blame, even partially, the sex abuse scandals on liberal Catholics who a) never defended rape and b) practically by definition have very little influence over the decision-making of the higher echelons of the Church.
April 16, 2010 at 7:36 pm
James T
“There is literally no ideology I can think of that would excuse rape.”
[JAMES eyes ‘The Fountainhead’ suspiciously]