Priest indicted on rape charges

[Algorem]

http://www.cleveland.com/newsflash/cleveland/index.ssf?/base/sports-15/1121312766115920.xml&storylist=cleveland

7/14/2005, 12:35 a.m. ET
By JOE KAY
The Associated Press

CINCINNATI (AP) — A Roman Catholic priest already convicted of soliciting sex from an undercover police officer was indicted Wednesday on charges he raped a boy while he was a church pastor in the 1990s.

The Archdiocese of Cincinnati placed the Rev. Raymond Larger, 54, on administrative leave following the indictment by a Hamilton County grand jury. Prosecutors said the victim came forward earlier this year.

It's the second time that Larger has faced sex charges.

In 2003, Larger pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges of public indecency and soliciting sex from a male undercover officer in a Dayton park. The archdiocese returned him to active duty last year over the objection of a support group for victims of clergy abuse...

[trumad]

1. CINCINNATI

Uh oooh...here comes Santorum.

[KC21304]

5. Cincinnati is a very red town, right ?

And I'm not talking about the baseball team.

[BurgherHoldtheLies]

2. Santorum will blame Boston liberals for this.

Sorry, Boston (and Massachusetts) for our idiot Senator from PA.:cry:

Our best apology to all of you will come in his defeat in 06.

[napi21]

3. Awe shit. Won't they ever learn? I thought this stuff was in the past!

As a Catholic, I'm ashamed at how the Church has handled these things. If this was the fundie church, I'd be screaming. Well, it's not theirs, it's mine! and I AM SCREAMING!

[Voltaire99]

14. Well done.

It will take such screaming if this establishment is ever to be dragged into the 21st century.

[Algorem]

4. The Husted Heisman

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=post&forum=102&topic_id=1627053&mesg_id=1627053 (4th story down)

Ohio House Speaker Jon Husted has plenty of time for fishing with lobbyists in Florida. But he doesn't have time for Regina Scolaro.

Scolaro sued Cleveland's Catholic Diocese in 2002, alleging that a priest molested her in the mid-'80s. But since state law bars people older than 20 from suing over abuse suffered as a child, she was out of luck.

So last week Scolaro, who now lives in San Francisco, traveled to Ohio to see why Husted is intentionally stalling a bill that raises the age to 38 and provides a one-year window allowing anyone to sue for abuses committed after 1970 <"The Sin That Keeps On Giving," April 27>.

But Husted -- recently ensnared in yet another scandal involving legislators living large on the lobbyists' dime -- gave Scolaro his best Heisman. First he ignored her e-mails, she says. Then he had a staffer call back to blow her off. The message: The Speaker's too busy. But he'd be happy to have someone who doesn't know anything serve you tap water, nod, and smile...

[dArKeR]

6. Pope Tells Journalists To Search For 'Truth'

Pope Tells Journalists To Search For 'Truth'
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/23/AR2005042301372.html?nav=rss_world/europe

The Vatican has sought the intervention of the U.S. State Department to declare Pope Benedict XVI immune from a sexual abuse lawsuit filed here, according to court documents.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3201751

Vatican said Monday there was no investigation under way of allegations that the Mexican founder of a conservative religious order sexually abused seminarians
http://www.winktv.com/x466.xml?URL=http://localhost/APWIREFEED/d8a8vi600.xml

Vatican Reportedly Clears Priest
Vaca, a former priest, is one of at least eight men in Mexico and the United States who have accused the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado of molesting them when they were teenage seminary students in the 1940s, '50s and '60s.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/22/AR2005052200966.html?nav=rss_world/europe

Despite the horrific drumbeat of child molestation revelations, however, sensible Catholics hoping for a more transparent and less sexually repressed church shouldn't hold their breath. The new pope is not only a longtime leader of vicious church attacks on "evil" gays, he also has shamefully blamed the molestation scandal on the media.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/thenation/20050524/cm_thenation/20050606scheer0524_1

Vatican Accused of Child Molestation Cover-Up
http://atheism.about.com/b/a/098516.htm

Survivors Network says the overwhelming majority of its members have never sued and are too traumatized to do so. They say they adopted their tactics after bishops promised for years to take action against guilty clergy, then never did.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7463011/page/2

Pope's Nazi past
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7576505 /

[matcom]

7. its BOSTON'S fault!

right? :eyes:

[arwalden]

8. WHY WHY WHY??!! "The archdiocese returned him to active duty last year"

[MountainLaurel]

9. Because the kid was trying to seduce him

:sarcasm:

At least that was how the Church documentation of the Boston cases often characterized the issue: Those damn slutty six-year-olds (that was one case that stuck in my head) were asking for it!

[AndyTiedye]

10. To Demonstrate That They Are Above The Law

That is what this is really about, what any sexual abuse is about,
asserting one's power over others. They rape children because they can.
They can do it and get away with it.

[VegasWolf]

11. Meanwhile, the Pope closes in on those subversive Harry Potter novels.nt

[reprobate]

12. I posted this suggestion before and it was deleted the second time.

Please think about this before complaining. My thought is that the very paradigm that priest must be celibate selects for the abnormal person.

But first, a brief history of clerical celibacy:
http://www.futurechurch.org/fpm/history.htm
______________________________________________________________________

306-Council of Elvira, Spain, decree #43: a priest who sleeps with his wife the night before Mass will lose his job.
325-Council of Nicea: decreed that after ordination a priest could not marry. Proclaimed the Nicene Creed.
352-Council of Laodicea: women are not to be ordained. This suggests that before this time there was ordination of women.
385-Pope Siricius left his wife in order to become pope. Decreed that priests may no longer sleep with their wives.

Fifth Century
401-St. Augustine wrote, “Nothing is so powerful in drawing the spirit of a man downwards as the caresses of a woman.”

Sixth Century
567-2nd Council of Tours: any cleric found in bed with his wife would be excommunicated for a year and reduced to the lay state.
580-Pope Pelagius II: his policy was not to bother married priests as long as they did not hand over church property to wives or children.
590-604-Pope Gregory “the Great” said that all sexual desire is sinful in itself (meaning that sexual desire is intrinsically evil?).

Ninth Century
836-Council of Aix-la-Chapelle openly admitted that abortions and infanticide took place in convents and monasteries to cover up activities of uncelibate clerics.
St. Ulrich, a holy bishop, argued from scripture and common sense that the only way to purify the church from the worst excesses of celibacy was to permit priests to marry.

Eleventh Century
1045-Pope Boniface IX dispensed himself from celibacy and resigned in order to marry.
1074-Pope Gregory VII said anyone to be ordained must first pledge celibacy: ‘priests first escape from the clutches of their wives.’
1095-Pope Urban II had priests’ wives sold into slavery, children were abandoned.
_____________________________________________________________________

In fact, as late as the fifteenth century half of the priests in the RCC were married and accepted by their congregations.

My point at the start was to argue that enforced celibacy selected for the very tendencies the we today find abhorrent.

Man (both the male and female varieties) is born with some innate, hard wired drives. After survival, the most forceful is procreation, the drive to pass on our genes. I would argue that celibacy is even more difficult because it negates another hardwired need: The need to be loved and accepted by another.

If this is true, and it is accepted psychology now, then anyone pledging celibacy for life is going against his basic needs as a human being. So it would follow naturally that for those in training for the priesthood, denied the contact of females, would turn to each other for contact. The problem comes when those in the priesthood, with the power of their position, turn to those innocents they are supposed to be shepherding and use them for substitutes.

This subset of what is called abnormal is present in all of society, but in the general population they don't have the cover of their position to hide behind. In a setting such as the church, they would be attracted to the facts that they would have power, cover, and plausible deniability. They would be powerfully attracted to the position, not to forge that in their early years they would feel apart from society and the priesthood would certainly satisfy that.

[RaRa]

13. This is exactly what a former priest writes about

I think his name is Kennedy and he writes essentially that the Catholic Church's position with their priests creates and promotes sexual deviance; that by not allowing men to develop normal sexual relations (adult relations) that the Church sets up this wicked scenario.

[Voltaire99]

15. Reasonable idea. However...

That line of thinking is plausible.

Of course, you aren't accounting for the problem of married people being pedophiles. Marriage selects for an extremely broad group, structures sexuality in the relationship, and yet still fosters abuse. Do you have any evidence that Catholic priests are likelier than married heterosexuals to be pedophiles?

I suspect the celibacy requirement is part of a bouquet of factors that produces priest pedophilia, some of which you mention: secrecy, authoritarianism, the catcechism's sexual confusion and repression, the concepts of "sin" and "confession" that ritualize invasive priest behavior, and most importantly a hierarchical leadership that places its interests ahead of its own parishoners' safety.

Short of putting CCTV cameras in churches and rectories, I don't think the problem will end soon.

[zara]

16. Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum: Must have been a LIBERAL priest.

[Catfight]

17. YEAH...only hundreds more to indict! nt