BishopAccountability.org
	Catholic Church in Sorry Shape By Stephen Lautens Calgary Sun October 10, 2009 http://www.calgarysun.com/comment/columnists/stephen_lautens/2009/10/10/11364146-sun.html The arrest of Nova Scotia Bishop Raymond Lahey has had me thinking. In the unlikely event you missed it, Bishop Lahey had his laptop seized last month at Ottawa's airport. According to a recently unsealed search warrant, he acted suspiciously and was evasive at customs on his way back into Canada. They also noticed that his passport showed several trips to Southeast Asia, a part of the world known for child pornography. According to court documents, during a search of his computer, customs officers found several sexually explicit images of boys believed to be as young as eight. Lahey resigned last month as bishop of the diocese of Antigonish in Nova Scotia after he was charged with possessing and importing child pornography. All of this leads me to wonder, what's with the Catholic Church? OK -- that its power and the vast majority of its followers do good around the world is without doubt. Not being Catholic myself, I can't claim to understand the inner workings of that church. My impressions are as an outsider only, even though I have stood in St Peter's Square at the Vatican and been blessed by two different popes. I have many Catholic friends of varying degrees of devoutness, and I have admired the many accomplishments of the church and its members. But with years of scandals all in the same area of human frailty -- sex involving children -- you have to wonder what is going on. I'm not aware of other organized religions that have such a similar persistent and pernicious problem in this area. They all have their scandals from time to time, but nothing that plays like a broken record. Maybe the United Church, the Presbyterians, Russian and Greek Orthodox and Buddhists simply have better PR or are better at sweeping things under the carpet, but I suspect that is not the case. Every human institution -- divinely inspired or not -- is subject to the full range of human vices, mistakes and weaknesses. If the Catholic Church was an ordinary company, its human resources department would have been fired long ago for having screwed up its hiring practices so badly. What would you say if the officers of your bank, insurance company or grocery store clerks were all too often being charged and convicted of sex offences against children? I think you'd say they had better look closely at their hiring practices. Not only that, but you'd probably take your business elsewhere. You sure wouldn't leave your kid hanging around in the lobby. If it was your company, wouldn't you want to know why so many of your employees had the same terrible problem? Wouldn't you look at how you recruited your employees, how you trained them, what you expected of them? Would you protect your business by ignoring the problem, shuffling people around, and paying untold millions of dollars in settlements? How many times do you have to go down the same road before you realize there is a fundamental flaw somewhere not just in how you handle it, but also in what causes it in the first place. As I said, I'm not Catholic myself, so I have no particular axe to grind. But I know that man is a sexual creature. We were built that way on purpose. To expect priests to completely deny that aspect of our humanity in a healthy way is bound to have serious consequences, even if giving up normal human relations is considered a fundamental part of the divine calling. Or that requirement simply attracts too many of the wrong kind of people. Whatever it is, it isn't working, and there is no fix in sight. STEPHEN CAN BE REACHED AT CALGARYSUN@LAUTENS.COM
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