Even this rationale couldn't soothe the conscience of the clerics. And so a grand philosophy had to be constructed; one that would forever blind or bind the conscience of priests and bishops. Enter the scion of the marriage between the God Complex and Hubris: the Dehumanizing Effect. This stated that all who received Holy Orders were called directly by God. The act of being selected directly by God made priests better than the rest. The myth of celibacy was the linchpin that proved priests were the betters of man. Ipso facto, the rude and scoffing multitude could be used and abused without penalty. (If anyone really thought God was calling these perverts to serve in the priesthood, they would all be running for the exit doors.) The irony is that this myth of being better than the rest is precisely why the hierarchy has been rendered soulless.
For centuries the hierarchy has had an ingrained attitude that there is nothing wrong with habitual dalliances by members of their priesthood with men, women and children. This thought process became a clerical tradition and the tradition became church policy. It readily explains the process by which the hierarchy lost any semblance of humanity when dealing with children being raped, sodomized or molested by their priests. It took a proclamation by the pope in the sixteenth century to declare that Native Americans had a soul. Hitler referred to his idea of sub-humans as mud people. American slave owners declared slaves property. Religious orders call them, "the rude and scoffing multitude." Whoever the abuser, they all see their victims as: "less than," which makes any crime against them palatable.
Do priests really consider themselves to be divinely selected? Proof of the god complex theory comes to us from the surveys done to gather information for Louise Haggett's Bingo Report.13 According to the survey, a full third of priests surveyed said they either agreed or strongly agreed with this statement: "I believe in priestly divinity" an additional 10% said they neither agreed nor disagreed with the statement.
A Different Hypothesis:
The late, great, erudite New York Senator and Catholic, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote an essay titled: Defining Deviance Down.14 His premise was that society keeps lowering the bar by which they define deviant behavior. If he were alive, he would certainly understand how his work applies to the RCC especially this paragraph.
"In this pattern, a growth in deviancy makes possible a transfer of resources, including prestige, to those who control the deviant population. This control would be jeopardized if any serious effort were made to reduce the deviancy in question. This leads to assorted strategies for re-defining the behavior in question as not all that deviant, really."15
Moynihan's observations lead to a completely new perspective on the permissiveness of the Roman Catholic Church. The permissiveness pervasive in the church now has a purpose behind it: The bishop's control would be seriously jeopardized if any attempt were made to eliminate sexual deviants from the ranks of the priesthood. The greater the deviance allowed in the priesthood, (a virtual feudal system) the greater control and power the hierarchy exerts over its priests. This would certainly explain the unprecedented inhumanity exhibited by bishops towards children. Sexual abuse was redefined from a crime to a sin. Ephebophilia was split off from pedophilia to make sex crimes with post-pubescent boys a few degrees more palatable since a teenager is not a prepubescent boy or girl. (Defining deviance down as if there were a distinction in abuse) That distinction with post-pubescent boys was made to place the blame squarely on homosexual community within the priesthood totally ignoring the sexual abuse of teenaged girls by priests. The bishop's had a very clear choice, their power or children's lives. The bishops opted to keep their power by tightening their power over this group.
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