Sorry this is late today - no excuses really other than I'm not feeling very well. Went to the Doctor and she said 'No' to me going back to work...
So anyway - here is the roundup.
Four excellent posts on abuse - We mixed our Drinks and Nightmares and Boners respond to Nadine Dorries, Andrew Brown does an excellent job of analysing the report on Catholic Priests and abuse and A New Name thinks about abuse in more general terms and caused me to finally write a series of posts on abuse.
The two posts I enjoyed most on the rapture were Maggi Dawn's informative piece and MadPriest's heartful thank-you, which I echo too - the rapture was a wonderful thing.
Dreaming beneath the spires writes some important thoughts about relationships. Beyondexgay has a lovely testimony - thanks to Eruptions at the foot of the Volcano for that one. Only dads has some parenting collywobbles - I know the feeling! Psychcentral has some interesting things about male depression that I didn't know - definitely worth a read. Jamie the Very Worst Missionary writes about where we find our self-worth.
nakedpastor has been both brilliant and harsh lately. Two posts that I really liked were Theologically assisted suicide and goats go to hell.
The only funny one I'm posting in this round up is from MadPriest - tiger escaped from toyrus recaptured by police.
So there you have it - hope you enjoy them, and thanks to all these people for taking the time to write these posts.
3 comments:
No. Sorry. Mr. Brown does a terrible job of analyzing the Catholic report on child abuse. In the first place he gets the statistical analysis completely screwed up. He compares the number of reported victims under age 10 in the American church per 100,000 confirmed children with all abused children under age 15 in Sweden per 100,000. Show me all abused children under age 15 per 100,000 children confirmed in the Catholic Church compared to American Lutheran children under 15, or Methodists, Baptists or Episcopalians. Don't pat yourself on the back until you can show me a comparison that actually means something.
The bald truth of the matter is that the Catholic priesthood was an ideal place for pedophiles to congregate because the hierarchy cared more about its power than the love, safety, and yes, faith, of its children.
Ah - sorry about that - have you told him he got the figures wrong - if not I will...
Anonymous, if you're going to play with figures, it would help you to understand what they actually are.
Contrary to your assertions, I didn't take "Reported victims under 10". They aren't broken out in the report. From the Catholic Church I compared all victims (actually, allegations) under 18 expressed as a fraction of confirmation candidates for that year against all Swedish crime reports for children under 15 expressed as a fraction of the entire Swedish population under 15 in that year. By this figure, a child in Sweden during the 90s was ten times as likely to be the victim of a sexual assault than a Catholic confirmation candidate was from his priest. By the end of the decade, the disparity was 30 times.
I did not add that during the noughties, the reported rate of sex crime against children in Sweden has continued to rise while the rate reported in the US Catholic church has continued to fall. But that's true, which makes the figures even more surprising. More to the point, some people, bewildered by arithmetic and logic, have supposed that the two figures are directly comparable. They are not. In order to get comparable rates, you would need to multiply the Swedish crime rate in all cases by fifteen, or divide the American Catholic one by the same figure. This is because a child is confirmed only once, but has fifteen birthdays before it is fifteen. So the American figures are expressed as abuse as a proportion of one fifteenth (or eighteenth) of the population of Catholic children, whereas the Swedish ones are abuse as a proportion of the whole vulnerable population.
I chose Sweden because it has a negligible RC population, and a very clear and open set of criminal statistics on the web. There are no comparable statistics for other American denominations, as anyone knows who has looked into this seriously.
Andrew Brown
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