Looming over the selection process for the next pope is the fallout from the sex scandals that have rocked the church, especially in the US and Europe. While there have been reported cases of abuse in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, they have been fewer and it is not clear why. It may be that victims in many developing countries have less power and the church has more, and thus they have been less reluctant to come forward with complaints.
One of the people being mentioned as a strong candidate to be the next pope is Ghana’s Peter Turkson. He was asked recently about the possibility of the sex abuse scandal spreading to Africa.
“African traditional systems kind of protect or have protected its population against this tendency,” he said. “Because in several communities, in several cultures in Africa homosexuality or for that matter any affair between two sexes of the same kind are not countenanced in our society.”
According to the American Psychological Association, “homosexual men are not more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexual men are.”
Turkson acknowledged that many Catholic nuns have been driven out of the church because they are prevented from joining the top levels of the Church and becoming priests, but he defended the practice as part of Catholic tradition.
“If one does not have access to ordination is not discrimination,” he said, but rather “it is just how the church has understood this order of ministry to be.”
Turkson seems to have an extraordinary inability to see abuse, a lack of curiosity to initiate investigations, obliviousness to the fact LGBT people are in every part of the world, and the ability to provide glib rationalizations for the church’s awful policies and track record.
It looks like Turkson would make a great pope.
yes, he certainly seems as willfully ignorant as a pope should be.
“African traditional systems kind of protect or have protected its population against this tendency,” he said.
Yeah, that’s what the Catholics said in Ireland and America too. Didn’t work. Any other ideas?
How about they consider Joe Arpaio? He’s got kind of a Latin-American name, and he has the same tendency to recruit known child-molesters and wife-beaters to “protect” people, whether they need it or not. He’d be a perfect fit — and he may need the same immunity the curent Pope has.
Even if some misguided homosexuals were to blame as he claims, it still does not clear the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that actively protected these criminals from blame. I suppose such behaviour is another cherished tradition of the Church.
The one that was in and out in 30 days was the last good pope and he had 30 days too many. The Church can’t get a pope sensitive to issues like LGBT people, pedophilia, women’s issues, etc. because there are no candidates with those qualities. And if there was, the rest would probably kill him.
Actually, that short-lived pope John Paul I was supposed to have been a nice, simple man of the people. He may have been the right person to bring the church into the modern age. We’ll never know.
Also:
Citations or it didn’t happen since the 1970s.
It’s most likely because European-based cultures have more equality for women and more democracy. They are less male-centred than Asian and African cultures.
http://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal-justice/global-prevalence-child-sexual-abuse/
I wouldn’t doubt that the rankings of least and most corrupt countries is nearly the same order as countries with the least and most child abuse and molestation. The least corrupt countries are Scandinavian, while the most corrupt are in Africa and south Asia. Silence due to fear and culture of complicity in the populace makes committing crimes far easier.
The reported rate of child molestation will not correspond with the rate of the crime itself. The more open the society is, the less stigma placed on the victim, the more likely the victims are to report it (vis-a-vis, the reporting now of child abuse by priests and nuns that happened decades ago). Conversely, the more corrupt the society, the less likely victims are to report because they can’t trust authority or there is no authority at all. It’s easy to blame the victim being silent when they are unlikely to be believed or likely to be accused of causing it.
You’re kidding, right? You actually believe gay men are more likely than average to molest children? Or did you misread what he said?
http://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/child-sexual-abuse.aspx
http://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal-justice/global-prevalence-child-sexual-abuse/
That 7.5% in the US equates to about one in thirteen boys being abused, while 25.3% is one in four girls. If you doubt the fact that pedophiles are disproportionately heterosexual, answer one simple question:
Why would “gay men” prefer girls?
Girls are three times as likely to be molested than boys in the US, yet children are 50% girls and 50% boys. Unless one believes there are three times as many girls as boys in the US, the gender ratio of molested children points toward pedophiles being heterosexuals.
left0ver1under:
It seems clear that Turkson believes homosexuals are more likely to be pedophiles.
I am not certain what the quote from the APA has to do with Turkson’s beliefs, as they clearly are contradictory.
It appears F has read the APA quote without the “not”; based on hir other contributions on FTB I do not think for a moment xe agrees with Turkson.