Hey, anybody who grew up with a domineering abusive parent can tell you, it happens in small organizations too. I think it’s what happens when there’s no system of checks and balances in place.

A new low, even for them. How can they dare to even allude to the holocaust, considering the collusion of the Vatican with fascism throughout Europe (and the whole long sad history of the Church with respect to anti-Semitism).
I think the point about small versus large monotheisms is well taken. Personally I think that monotheism, in and of itself, has an inherent tendency toward intolerance. But we all have problematic tendencies. We are, after all, carnivorous animals. But we can choose to be vegetarians, or at least we can choose to be ethical in the way we obtain our food and especially our meat (and eggs, etc). But meat still tastes good. And that’s something to think about. The flesh of our fellow living beings tastes good.
But we are not all murderers, simply because we all have a taste for blood. And obviously the vast majority of Christians (and Muslims) are decent human beings, or at least as decent as the rest of us on a reasonably good day.
But monotheism + power = trouble. No doubt about that.

Psychopaths are attracted to positions of authority and power. You see it in politics and in law enforcement before they started instituting psych evals. The bigger the organization the more attractive it is to psychopaths. Unless the Catholics Church organization starts giving everyone psych evals and acting on the evals, nothing will improve. They will just get better at hiding the problem.

You stated your case in a very unbiased and intelligent way, Gus. If “they” have anything against your argument it will be because of the reasons you’ve provided here, and not because they’re reacting with sanity themselves.

I’m wondering if, or how much, monotheism plays a part here. I understand the “king” model of organization and power from the top. But some polytheistic pantheons also concentrate ultimate authority and power in a single deity, who serves as the “boss” deity.
I suspect that the hierarchy may be more telling than the theology. Paganism is somewhat more decentralized and egalitarian in organization. And Paganism tends to try to conceal the criminal and squicky about itself in different ways than likening pointing out stuff to anti-Semitism.
Most responses from the Catholic Church and it various spokespeople strike me as arising from affronted pride–or insulted hubris–or self serving narcissism–or whatever plunges even deeper and darker into the abyss than that!

Pitch-
I think there is a reciprocal relation between how we conceive our deities and the kinds of societies we live in. Hunting and gathering societies tended not to have strong hierarchies, either in their conception of the spiritual world or their own practices. Agricultural societies generally had both – especially as they developed into states and empires.
Even so, Zeus was never the all powerful One – Demeter called him on his stuff over Persephone, for example. When Pagan societies thought about a single source, it was more like a monistic One than a despotic Boss.
Pagan societies were more than capable of developing despotisms – but their spiritual pantheons were not so much, and to my knowledge we had to wait for monopolistic monotheism to get anything resembling the Catholic Church. So I think my monotheistic point stands.
While from the outside the corruption in the Church’s hierarchies seems almost universal, I doubt that most of these predators started out that way. I think making one’s career within a big organization is corrupting as such.

I think it’s partly monotheism and partly all big organisations. I think other things are involved as well, though.
One is having a celibate clergy. Now, I can see the argument for celibacy for solitary ascetics living in caves, or even monastic orders, but it’s asking for trouble insisting on it for anyone who wants to be a religious functionary. ISKCON had similar problems a few years ago, and South-East Asian Buddhism has constant sex scandals.
A second is the culture of secrecy. Protestant pastors and secular schoolteachers might be as prone to child sex abuse as Catholic priests (I doubt this), but the police would usually be called in those cases. Actually, there are some similarities with anti-Semitism here, but not in the way the priest argued; there was a case in London about 20 years ago in which Orthodox Jews who reported child sex abuse to the police were ostracised by their community for taking internal problems to the secular courts, and the community argued that it was suffering persecution. UK Muslim communities also routinely cover up this sort of thing.
Ratzinger is an absurdly easy target, almost a pantomime bogeyman. With the looks of a James Bond villain,and a Nazi past, and now with involvement in covering up child rape. I wonder whether this wiil mean the end of the Catholic Church as an influential force in Europe? Here’s hoping, anyway.
On a more wonkish level, I’m interested in what the legal approach should be. I suppose, as a head of state, the pope cannot be tried. Is he still a German citizen, or did he change his citizenship to Vaticanian (?) at some point? Could a declaration be made for his arrest if ever he crosses into Italy?

I’ve just looked it up, and apparently the pope does have Vatican citizenship, and a Vatican passport, along with 557 other people. Isn’t the statehood of the Vatican a bit of a legal fiction, rather like geeks starting their own Internet-based kingdoms in their bedrooms, or those Australian gays who tried to declare independence for a gay kingdom on some inhabited island? Thoughts?

One of the root causes of the Vatican’s current difficulties is that for over a decade, under John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, made it his personal business to silence, suppress, and stifle any theologian who actually cared about social justice, while the church contented itself with finger-wagging lectures about how capitalism should be fairer. As a consequence, when the current scandal broke, the Roman Catholic Church had neither the moral nor the intellectual base from which to formulate an appropriate response. As a result, we’re seeing the current spate of lies, spin, deceit, belligerence, finger-pointing, blaming the victims, blaming the media, playing the victim card, and attempting to change the subject.
Interestingly, in a letter to Cardinal Ratzinger in 1988(!), Fr. Matthew Fox, O.F.P., compared the Roman Catholic Church to a dysfunctional family. Things have gotten worse since then. If you’re interested, you can read the letter at http://www.matthewfox.org/sys-tmpl/htmlpage12/

Another thoughtful post.
“Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” -Lord Acton
“Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it” -William Pitt, the Elder, The Earl of Chatham and British Prime Minister from 1766 to 1778

The church has made many mistakes throughout history…
We want to see immediate change, public apologies and compensation!

Yeah, I see how you’re looking at the links between (Christian) monotheism and elaborating hierarchicalism. It doesn’t work out quite the same with a polythistic pantheon. It probably has to do with ultimate power-over moving down from a single and unquestionable source.
And the notion that there exists nothing outside–thus capable of disputing or resisting–the source of that power-over. The notion of, say, Papal infallibility, for instance.
What makes me twitch most, mentally, about all this abuse in the Catholic Church stuff is that I have come to find good understanding in the satirical and outrageous portryals of priests leading collared small boys on leashes as a matter of daily affairs seen in “South Park.”

I think its interesting that the Pope is also a head of state. The Vatican state that is. So if the head of a particular state has knowingly covered up crimes that makes him corrupt.
If the head of a state is corrupt and the authoritys of that state do not bring him to justice, then what role does the international community play?
As in the case of the Vatican, quite possibly as it turns out the majority of the state and all its authoritys are corrupt. So would the international community be justified in an invasion of the Vatican to arrest these fugitives?
I think it would be completely justified. Other nations have always found it justified to over throw a corrupt government and/or one that commits crimes against its own people. But in the case of the Vatican or the Pope more specifically, these crimes were commited in the jursidictions of other nations. This I percieve, makes the arrest of the Vaticans corrupted goverment even more justifible. That the crimes were commited against citizens of multiple nations.

Jacob: This comes back to what I was saying about the Vatican being a bizarre legal fiction – an “invasion” of the Vatican would require about a dozen Italian policemen.
Can any country declare international institutions within its borders to be independent states?

Regardless of the Vatican’s international status, the very idea that government and religious figures alike covered up the disgusting crimes that were perpetrated is mind-blowing. Factor into the mix that much of the information was actively suppressed, and you have an organization that intentionally withheld information that would have stopped abuses by what would have, at the time, been called rogue priests/bishops/etc. or what they actually are: sick pedophiles and vile abusers. The fact is, all the way to the top, these cases were ignored, glossed over, or buried, and more often than not the perpetrators were never punished.
When Pagans say they’re scared of hierarchy, I understand. However, as has been pointed out, many Pagans have more varied ways of governance within their Tradition or group(s) that make it far harder to cover up abuses. This is not to say abuses don’t happen, and believe me, I understand how smaller groups can be placed under tight control and subject those in them to abuse. However, the problems of the Catholic Church and its abuses don’t just range through its structure, but also those nations and governments that enabled their deceit.