Reddit reviews The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice

Well, okay. I'd read his book if I were you. It's certainly not untrue.

Edit: The book if anyone is inclined to read it. Jenkins is a Protestant who has done a lot of work on anti-Catholicism.

The last acceptable prejudice.

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Anti-Catholicism-Acceptable-Prejudice/dp/0195176049

How about every one on this subreddit either send her a copy or at least tweet her a link to this:

https://www.amazon.com/New-Anti-Catholicism-Last-Acceptable-Prejudice/dp/0195176049

> Even as I'm searching, I feel an attraction and repulsion towards the Catholic church. The repulsion is in no small part a direct result of the child abuse scandal. On the one hand, I know that not everyone in the church is culpable. On the other hand, that doesn't matter--I suspect that some people that knew are still in the church, and as an expectant father that makes it very hard for me to trust my child's welfare to an institution that protected some of the very worst kinds of criminals. Have you, or Catholics you know, dealt with these feelings? How?

Absolutely. The things that some people in the Church did... People in positions of honor and trust, were horrid, deplorable, and utterly inexcusable. I, too, came into the Church after this all came into the light. The question of the sexual abuse of youth hits an especially raw nerve for me because three of my closest loved ones(spouse included) were victims of childhood sexual abuse, as well as a good friend I had when I was younger, and I have seen the devastating shadow it can cast over a person's entire life. (None of the aggressors were clergy in these four cases, but respectively a piano teacher, a next door neighbor, a stranger in a park, and a family "friend".) Also, a (public school) teacher who I had numerous classes with and who was my own homeroom teacher in my teens (the kids loved him, he had a good sense of humour and was widely regarded as being "cool") was later revealed to be a sexual predator of multiple teenage boy students of his over the years, and ended up in jail. It was a very disillusioning experience when that came out. (When guys I was friends with would talk about how cool he was, how they hung out w/ him outside of school and he even bought beer for them and stuff, I never guessed there was anything sexual going on there. I just thought he was one of those eccentric people who can really reach across the generation gap and chill with teenagers, and that he was just a progressive who understood and sympathised with us on how stupid the legal drinking age was. Little did I know.) Anyway. Just saying, the sickening topic of sexual abuse of youths struck close to home for me, for personal reasons.

For me it was important to first better understand the scandal, and some surrounding facts. (I'm talking about the scandal in the US, for clarification.)

• First, the rates of child sexual abuse that happened in the Church are about the same as the rates of child sexual abuse in the larger society, ie in other religious organizations, in the public school system, etcetera, it seems. This is NOT an excuse. People who are supposed to be on the spiritual path should do better than freaking average. But number crunchers seem to agree that child sexual abuse was actually not more prevalent in the Roman Catholic Church than it was in any other segment of society, and that's not the way it is usually presented or talked about.
  
  
• The despicable way it was dealt with, was also pretty typical for how things of this nature were dealt with in the greater society at the time they were taking place. I think we have had a tendency to hold the Church up to 1990's or 21st century standards for the way events were dealt with in the Church that took place in the 1960's and 1970's. Professionals who specialize in the question of this type of abuse, have pointed out, that at that time, this is sadly how most crimes of this nature were "dealt with" in our society :quietly, trying not to make public/societal/media ripples, presuming the reformibility of the offender (whereas now we see child predation as a rather incurable pathology), and releasing them, perhaps with a severe talking-to, but with no jail-time or psychiatry, to continue similar work in another (region/school district/ diocese/fill in the blank) There was a different societal understanding and approach to these types of crimes at that time. And the Church again, should have done way better that the crappy job that was being done by the rest of society. But media makes it sound like the Church alone was hushing these kinds of atrocities up, failing to alert police/authorities, or letting these perverts go free. Experts say that pretty much everyone was dealing with it that way at the time.
  
  So why the discrepancy in actual convictions and also media coverage? Well,
  
  
• (1) The Church, (while not as centralized in its power as people assume it is) passes more easily for one single coherent organization that can be held accountable for misdeeds. Protestant denominations are smaller, more fragmented, more local, less streamlined and consistent in the way they're run, and in the way their record keeping is done. Public schools are also hidden under more local umbrellas- citywide school districts under state control, and so on, right? Meaning when some cases of horrid abuse are unearthed, as in the case of my teacher, that's mere local news: an abuse that occurred in ___ unified school district. It is not glommed together with all the other US public school abuse cases making one snowballing nationwide report of abuse in "the US public school system" because that is not a real, blamable entity. Instead the cases spring up all over the nation but get little attention as they are simply dealt with as isolated cases and the problem of local communities, mentioned only in local news. In the case of the Church, (however surprisingly decentralized it may be in its management) it can still it can be seen as one massive and coherent entity, one bogeyman onto whom we can tack responsibility for a collection of scattered incidents that occurred over many, many years and many,many miles apart from each other. I am not a public school hater or anything, but if we would collect all the sexual abuse cases involving gov-run public schools across the entire nation over multiple decades, I am sure we would have a much bigger and more worrying abuse scandal on our hands. (The magnitude and number of offenses has been much greater... And the same types of repeated mismanagement occurred) But that will never happen because The US public school system is not a graspable entity in such questions- it fragments/evaporates into smoke when you try to catch hold of it, if you know what I mean. All you have are responsible school districts in responsible states, etc.
  
  
• (2) There were a lot of people (both inside and outside the Church) with their own axes to grind against the Church, who were all too happy to opportunistically use and amplify the sex abuse scandal to try to defame and/or restructure the Church for their own private reasons. Again, this is not an excuse for what happened, which was inexcusable, just an explanation of why it has been disproportionately highlighted in our society the the point where many now almost reflexively associate "priest" with "child-molester"...a prejudice that is both unfair and inaccurate. On the topic of how the scandal was, perhaps, unfairly dealt with by the media and gleefully picked up by people who were already haters of the Church, I think [Anti-Catholicism:The Last Acceptable Prejudice] (https://www.amazon.com/New-Anti-Catholicism-Last-Acceptable-Prejudice/dp/0195176049) talks about it at length. I haven't read it myself, but would like to. The author seems eloquent and sensible, and his credibility is somewhat enhanced by the fact that he is not Catholic himself.
  
  
• The rates of pedophillic abuse, that is, sexual abuse of prepubescent children, were actually lower that the societal average in the Church. While, sadly there were a few nasty cases of it, the vast majority of the cases brought forth in the US Church sex abuse scandal, were cases of pederastic abuse, that is the sexual abuse of "consensual" teenagers, and the vast majority of these cases were homosexual in nature. (Like my teacher.) Again, not an excuse. This, too, is utterly depraved and deplorable. But I think it's important to know what kind of abuse was actually prevalent, and the media can be misleading on this, making it seem like tons of priests preying on little children entrusted to their care, when in fact it was priests having totally inappropriate relations with teenagers entrusted to their care.
  
  So those are some facts. Now I'll try to explain my way of dealing with this all in a "reply" to this comment.
  
  

You're absolutely right. A non-Catholic wrote an entire book about this very phenomenon. It's a worthwhile read:

https://www.amazon.com/New-Anti-Catholicism-Last-Acceptable-Prejudice/dp/0195176049

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Catholicism_in_the_United_States#1980_–_21st_century

https://www.amazon.com/New-Anti-Catholicism-Last-Acceptable-Prejudice/dp/0195176049

https://www.catholicleague.org/category/annual-report/

They use sources and they show that you’re incorrect.

leave a copy of this on the board or his desk when he isn't around https://www.amazon.com/New-Anti-Catholicism-Last-Acceptable-Prejudice/dp/0195176049