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Val Uptuous NotAgain's avatar

This is a PR foundation, but it didn’t take me working in PR to understand that it is better for your reputation to acknowledge a mistake and make up for it than it is to hide it. It’s something children learn, for goodness sake. In the thousands of years the RCC has existed (as a moral guide?!? Seriously?) they still haven’t learned this lesson.

The fact that this organization might have folks working for it that aren’t perfect is a given. That there may be folks who are this disgusting, depraved, criminal, might be expected even if it’s not desirable. These people exist and they look for opportunities to do what they are going to do, and the RCC is a place that would make it easier, simply by way of being authoritative. The problem with these revelations is that the church did nothing helpful and found ways to make the situation worse. In every single case. By trying to protect its reputation, the RCC made it worse. They setup more children to be molested. They drew in more rapists to the priesthood. They enabled the priests to do whatever they wanted with no repercussions. Made their reputation worse than if they had addressed the priests at the time they were found to be molesting children.

The RCC could have saved its reputation if they had been weeding out the predator priests as they came across them. Not shuffle them around to hide them, send them to resort like retirement homes, ignore and obscure allegations, and install policies that make it easier for them to groom and molest children.

The church will never police itself. It was born of corruption, it will die corrupt.

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Joe King's avatar

"Instead, whether through incompetence or malice, the Church dismissed Danielle’s concerns and let Carter roam free, from church to church, always maintaining his access to children."

Both. It's both. As well as the desire of those in power to maintain the illusion of righteous authority.

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