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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

>but why cover up the crimes and let them continue to be priests?

Because very few men are willing to spend ~8 years in higher education to make ~$30,000 a year for a job where you're on duty 24/7 with a private personal life forbidden to you. Many of the people willing to do that job are going to be flawed somehow, and firing any one of them causes the Church lose out on the huge amount of money they spent on training.

There's a lot of things wrong with the Catholic Church, but their actions can be explained without a need for some child abuse ring running the whole organization.

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> [...] very few men are willing to spend ~8 years in higher education to make ~$30,000 a year for a job where you're on duty 24/7 with a private personal life forbidden to you.

That's a rather ascetic view of what it's like to be a Catholic priest. They do have free time, and while yes, working on Sundays and holidays is part of the job, weekdays are relatively free.

> There's a lot of things wrong with the Catholic Church, but their actions can be explained without a need for some child abuse ring running the whole organization.

I used to think that, but the scale of cover-ups found in the Polish CC convinced me it cannot be the case. A number of bishops have now been found to ignore and bury accusations against sex offender priests, with written evidence available. All continued to have the full support (material in particular) of the Church. The scale of the tragedy is inexplicable. Protests by various groups to Vatican have also achieved literally nothing. You had paedophile priests pampered and protected by the CC like they were martyrs for the greater good (some were in fact called that).

As Napoelon said, never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence. But what's happening there is beyond any humanly possible incompetence.

I think you have backwards. The priesthood became entirely too revered and thus a status symbol. Within that framework, there were people who could go into the priesthood as a means of papering over their glaring faults and achieving a respectable image. Along the way, enough of those people have promoted into positions of power from which they try to shelter the priesthood at the expense of the church.

The Jesuits are mostly this same phenomenon; the order's brand became too coveted, the value was mined out of it, and now it's used by too many as a shield. It's like private equity for holy orders.

I don’t think it’s because of the money that the church refuses to fire pedophile priests. I think a lot more of it is about saving face. The church wants to maintain a veneer of holiness, one that is poorly tarnished now, and sweeping problems under the rug is easier in the short term to maintain said veneer. Of course, this strategy does not work in the long run.

There’s also the darker possibility that yesterday’s pedophile priests became today’s pedophile bishops who do not see this abuse as a problem to be corrected.

So, your explanation is that the Catholic Church would rather help cover up the crimes of an unfathomable number of paedophiles because it's easier than hiring some new ones? I don't think that's the case, because there seems to be an endless supply of paedophiles signing up to be Catholic priests, presumably because they know it's the safest place to commit their crimes. The Catholic Church is basically the Mafia but for nonces.

You make it sound like priests are just bad at maximizing their income, so they must be damaged somehow. But putting it in economic terms like that is silly. Priests aren't in it for the money or an easy lifestyle. Similarly I don't think the church is so worried about optimizing their training costs that it could be a plausible root cause. Reducing everything to a dollar amount is some weird sigma shit.

Though I agree... there's probably no coordinated conspiracy of abusers covering for other abusers, just a pervasive culture of secrecy and willingness at all levels to do anything to protect the clergy. And seriously, who thought it would be a good idea to sexually stunt young people with religious indoctrination, get them to swear to a vow of chastity, and then go their whole lives without sex or porn, and think it'll just be fine to trust them absolutely in situations of incredibly significant power imbalance? Like organizational reform aside, this doesn't seem fixable for the church. It's too fundamental to their whole model. They'll keep going because they have so much momentum, but more victims are going to keep getting hurt.

>. Priests aren't in it for the money or an easy lifestyle

Right, which immediately rules out like 95% of Catholic men from even considering the occupation. There aren't a lot of applicants to the job.

>Similarly I don't think the church is so worried about optimizing their training costs that it could be a plausible root cause.

Each priest has received 4-5 years of training that the Church paid for. Basically every other industry would also bend over backwards to save their ~$100,000 investment when they already have the hiring problem I mentioned.

I don't disagree with the rest of your post, Catholicism has a lot of problems. Even without those problems, they act like a lot of other companies that make similar choices of overlooking abuse because it's profitable to do so.

You're seriously misrepresenting reasons for vocation in the previous century. And they did have a private life.

I’m not sure if a pedophile ring is running the Catholic Church, but perhaps the power and authority attracted pedophiles, who rose in power and protected others and this attracted others to join the church.

It’s the same pattern to corrupt any organization.

Calling their studies “higher education” is being very generous.

As a general rule, priests are required to have a bachelor's degree before entering or finishing seminary.

Treating them as some kind of business organisation is a very cynical view of the Catholic Church. Worse still is beleiving that only flawed individuals would be interested in such profession. History is testament to how many men and women of strong character have sacrificed their whole life for their religion while contributing to their community.

>Worse still is beleiving that only flawed individuals would be interested in such profession

I said "many of the men interested in the profession would be flawed," I purposely made sure I didn't say all, but it's undeniable there are many scumbags too. For example, the topic being discussed.

And the Catholic Church does also have to act as a business. People are going to be mad at the Church if there wasn't a priest available for their grandparent's last rites, or if their local church has to schedule mass at an inconvenient time.

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