Vatican orders psych exams for fututre priests

[Simon Bar Sinister]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27453318/?gt1=43001

oh, where to start...

[Msterbeau]

How about: About time?

[Rev.Reverence]

..they did not ORDER the tests...they just said URGE TESTING...not enough I think.

[StormKnight (1)]

You know, this would be interesting. Recalling XTC's song "Dear God," in the lines "Dear God,/Don’t know if you noticed/But your name is on a lot of quotes in this book./Us crazy humans wrote it, you should take a look," it would be interesting to see what type of issues or mindset people entering the priesthood have.

[Msterbeau]

You know, this would be interesting. Recalling XTC's song "Dear God," in the lines "Dear God,/Don’t know if you noticed/But your name is on a lot of quotes in this book./Us crazy humans wrote it, you should take a look," it would be interesting to see what type of issues or mindset people entering the priesthood have.

One word: Shame

[pomba gira]

I believe this is called "locking the barn door after the horse is gone, has travelled ten miles down the road, and been eaten by wolves". No, wait, if the testing is "urged" rather than required, that would be "pushing the barn door shut and putting a rock in front of it to keep it closed".

[TheGimp]

its about time and mabey poor lil ones will stop being abused by these pervs

[sass_in_the_pants]

Let's get this straight.

1. The OVERWHELMING majority of priests are good, honest, decent men. The scandal which happened six years ago continues to haunt all of the good priests today, and the remaining faithful. It's a shame that good, decent men who are serving God's people (that's everyone, by the way) are now blamed for the actions of OTHERS. The priests I know feed the homeless, clothe the poor, comfort the sick. People who don't even know them, people they pass in the airport, and people driving by in their cars, shout obscene things at them, and call them names.

2. The fact that this happened is shameful and disgusting. Faithful Catholics the world over continue to pray for the healing of the victims, and for God's mercy on those priests.

3. There has not been Vatican opposition to psychological testing, but they hadn't encouraged it either. It was really up to the rectors (those admitting seminarians into the priesthood) as to what methods to use to determine a candidate's worthiness to enter the priesthood. Now, the Vatican is urging specific methods.

[Rev.Reverence]

Let's get this straight.

1. The OVERWHELMING majority of priests are good, honest, decent men. The scandal which happened six years ago continues to haunt all of the good priests today, and the remaining faithful. It's a shame that good, decent men who are serving God's people (that's everyone, by the way) are now blamed for the actions of OTHERS. The priests I know feed the homeless, clothe the poor, comfort the sick. People who don't even know them, people they pass in the airport, and people driving by in their cars, shout obscene things at them, and call them names.

Yeah..the Majority...& they do GREAT WORK...I have been allied with several of them in the past...the problem is, that the "boy-touching-clergy" is doing all the same things that a normal Priest does...feeding/clothing/sheltering the hungry...Mass...I know a GOOD-Priest that payed a Ladies rent for a season when she lost her job...not loaned..GAVE.

But you can not tell a book by it's cover..

2. The fact that this happened is shameful and disgusting. Faithful Catholics the world over continue to pray for the healing of the victims, and for God's mercy on those priests.

I...unlike most..agree with the entirety of that statement.

3. There has not been Vatican opposition to psychological testing, but they hadn't encouraged it either. It was really up to the rectors (those admitting seminarians into the priesthood) as to what methods to use to determine a candidate's worthiness to enter the priesthood. Now, the Vatican is urging specific methods.

But there were a whole slew of instances when the Vatican moved BAD-Fathers from 1 place to another...leaving emotional devastation in it's wake..

By now, the Vatican should have Mandatory screening for ALL Rectories...(that's my opinion.)(& I think it is a good one.)

Some really interesting facts...

The number of priests has declined by 17% since the 1960s, even as the Catholic population has increased 38%

Perhaps they should let their Married men be Priests as well...

Catholic priests currently number over 400,000 worldwide. Of these, approximately 65% are considered diocesan priests (assigned to specific parishes within geographic regions) and 35% are considered religious priests (not necessarily assigned to a specific church community). It is now estimated that there are over 1 billion Roman Catholics in the world, representing over 17% of the global population. Although there is no church wide census, and there are various criteria for determining membership, scholars now estimate that Roman Catholics comprise nearly fifty percent of all "Christians" in the world. In 2001, there were approximately 63.7 million Roman Catholics in the United States.

Trying to verify...

How many Catholic priests are there in the world?

The most up to date census I could find was taken in 2005. It lists 406,411 Catholic priests throughout the world.

...& though I know it may waver a BIT off topic, I include an interesting article about the history of "anti-Catholic" sentiment...it is a BIT long...but VERY informative.

Bigotry against Roman Catholics, as well as the ideas that have rationalized such bigotry, have long been elements in North American politics and popular culture. Like racism and anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism is a fluid, international phenomenon buttressed by political, cultural, and intellectual justifications; like them, anti-Catholicism has served as a means of ostracizing a social group to consolidate political and cultural power in other groups. Additionally, just as historians trace the origins of racism to the early modern period, so too anti-Catholicism dates from this period—a legacy of Reformation-era disputes and of the European religious wars prior to 1648. (With origins in the ancient world, anti-Semitism dates much farther back.) A distinguishing mark of anti-Catholicism is that it developed in tandem with the modern papacy, a religio-political institution whose activities were widely perceived as threats to non-Catholic religious and secular authorities. Significantly, since Roman Catholics were the largest U.S. religious denomination after about 1870, anti-Catholicism was thereafter aimed at a religious plurality, not a religious minority, within the national population.

Frequently anti-Catholicism was voiced as opposition to the Roman papacy, particularly to papal influence in political affairs. It was carried to North America by seventeenth-century Puritan settlers of New England, where anti-Catholicism retained vitality despite the dearth of Catholics in that region until the nineteenth century. In the absence of a Catholic population, anti-Catholicism resulted from two notable sources, and it developed in context with repressive Penal Laws in early modern England and Ireland. First, demonstrated opposition to the papacy and to the European "Catholic countries" (especially Spain and France, which also held North American colonies) was a key indicator of English national identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; affirming the separation from Rome of the English government and of the Church of England served as a statement of "Englishness" and a mark of national pride. Second, early New England Puritans viewed their colonial enterprise as a "holy experiment" by which they would provide for the world a "modell of Christian charity" and God-centered government; they believed their experiment to be the beginning of a new order in religion and politics, purified of every hint of papal influence and of the historical accretions of Catholic doctrine that perverted true Christianity. As the widespread influence of the papacy persisted and even grew after the seventeenth century, expressions of autonomy from Catholic Rome continued to be active elements of political and cultural identity in England, its American colonies, and, later, in the United States. Anti-Catholicism notably reared itself the "New York Conspiracy," or "Negro Conspiracy," of 1741: after a series of New York City crimes, thirty-five people were executed, most of them African Americans accused of conspiring to overthrow the white gentry; included was a white man wrongly suspected to be a Jesuit priest and thought to have planned a revolt among blacks and poor whites. Significantly, the Maryland colony represented an exception to colonial anti-Catholicism: founded by English-Catholic George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, in 1633, it was the first British outpost to endorse freedom of religion, including legal toleration for Catholics and Jews.

Between 1830 and 1930—a century of massive immigration into the United States—anti-Catholicism was an active element in many debates around immigration, and it pervaded popular literature and political humor in the United States, occasionally fueling violence against Catholics. Frequently references to Rome's despotic influence over immigrant Catholics served as a backdrop to outbreaks of anti-Catholic activity. Among well-known events was the 1834 looting and burning of a Charlestown, Massachusetts, Ursuline Convent at the hands of anti-Catholic vandals. More representative, however, were nonviolent deployments of anti-Catholicism such as the proliferation in the 1830s and 1840s of popular "exposés" about the repressive influences and deviant sexual activities of Catholic clergy and nuns, and the 1884 presidential election, wherein Republicans decried the Democratic Party's association with "rum, Romanism, and rebellion" (references to the party's stance on Prohibition, its heavily immigrant-Catholic base, and its strength in the secessionist South). Other notable examples included the activities of the American Protective Association in the 1890s across the northern and midwestern United States, which endeavored "to place the political position of this [u.S.] government in the hands of Protestants to the entire exclusion of the Roman Catholics"; the anti-Catholic rhetoric of the Ku Klux Klan in the early-twentieth-century South and Midwest; and the rhetoric used against New York governor Alfred E. Smith, an Irish-American Catholic, in his 1928 bid for the presidency. Later, during John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign, the same arguments used against Smith—particularly, the possibilities of political manipulation by Roman authorities—were resurrected.

After 1930, unabashed expressions of anti-Catholicism increasingly gave way to more reasoned debates, especially debates regarding Catholicism's relation to the autonomous individual. Concepts of American identity have long enshrined the notion that Americans are democratic by temperament and individual, autonomous actors free from undue pressures upon their moral choices. Given its history of definitive pronouncements upon moral issues and its connection to the papacy, Catholicism was thought by many to be antithetical to individual autonomy, thus antithetical to "being American"—a view fueled by the 1870 official proclamation of papal infallibility in certain matters of faith and morality. Prominent twentieth-century intellectuals like the philosophers John Dewey and Theodor Adorno commented on Catholicism's inherent authoritarianism and its potentially debilitating effects upon the human psyche and personal autonomy, suggesting that it weakened individual moral conviction and shaped the sort of "followers" suitable for totalitarian regimes. At the popular level, church teachings on matters of sexuality received much attention throughout the twentieth century, and American commentators on birth control, abortion, and homosexuality—including many Catholic commentators—criticized as repressive the prohibitive church teachings on these issues, emphasizing the centrality of personal choice in matters of sexuality and the church's disrespect for individual autonomy. Certainly not every expression of disagreement with official church teaching can be understood as "anti-Catholic"; nonetheless, many U.S. church leaders and lay Catholic commentators have noted the persistence in these debates of centuries-old distinctions between Catholicism and national identity, suggesting that modern anti-Catholic attitudes have assumed greater subtlety to conform to the norms of civil public debate.

Since the late eighteenth century, the majority of church leaders have responded to anti-Catholicism by appealing to American values of religious freedom and toleration and encouraging Catholics to affirm the compatibility of being both patriotic Americans and loyal Catholics. In consequence, Catholics sometimes have portrayed themselves as hyper-American, culminating in innumerable public affirmations of patriotism, especially during World War I and the early Cold War era, when suspicion of "un-American" activities reached high points.

[sass_in_the_pants]

Yeah..the Majority...& they do GREAT WORK...I have been allied with several of them in the past...the problem is, that the "boy-touching-clergy" is doing all the same things that a normal Priest does...feeding/clothing/sheltering the hungry...Mass...I know a GOOD-Priest that payed a Ladies rent for a season when she lost her job...not loaned..GAVE.

But you can not tell a book by it's cover..

SO true. Sad. You'd hope it would be easier to figure people out.

And then, there's people like my a-hole neighbor, who cuts the lawns of all the little old ladies.

You just never know a person's heart I guess.

But there were a whole slew of instances when the Vatican moved BAD-Fathers from 1 place to another...leaving emotional devastation in it's wake..

By now, the Vatican should have Mandatory screening for ALL Rectories...(that's my opinion.)(& I think it is a good one.)

That's the rub - I don't think the Vatican CAN make it mandatory. I was wondering myself whey they didn't make it mandatory. So I started thinking and I was trying to find a reason NOT to make it mandatory. Priests go through all other sorts of discernment, why not make this mandatory, too? It just didn't make sense. But I will hazard a guess, and this is just a guess, and it is that priests are ordained EVERYWHERE in the world, including developing nations where, I would imagine, access to psychologists is not an easy thing to manage.

Again, that's my guess.

*shrug*

But, general rule is, if the pope says its a good idea, and you think the pope is the vicar of christ, well, you'll probably do it, even if it's not strictly required. I mean, shit, you aren't required to believe in ANY personal revelations but you see MILLIONS flock to Lourdes, cuz the pope said you COULD. Not even recommended, just that it aint no big if you do.

We'll see how it all plays out I suppose.

Some really interesting facts...

Perhaps they should let their Married men be Priests as well...

The number of priests in Africa rose by nearly 85 percent. Asia also showed a huge increase of 74 percent. It's Europe and US which are dragging down the average. I think there's alot of reasons for that, actually, and of them is certainly that celibacy is a very tough cross to bear.

Besides, it's only Latin Rite Catholic priests that can't marry. Maronites and Melkites for example routinely marry.

Still, I wonder if Latin Rite will change the rules and allow priests to marry.

I think you'd find many current priests still not choosing to marry, but they may, indeed attract more men to the vocation.

Trying to verify...

...& though I know it may waver a BIT off topic, I include an interesting article about the history of "anti-Catholic" sentiment...it is a BIT long...but VERY informative.

You're right. That WAS long. But, really, really interesting. At least I thought so.

[Rev.Reverence]

You're right. That WAS long. But, really, really interesting. At least I thought so.