Should the Catholic Church have to give any money to abuse survivors?

In recent times there have been a spate of lawsuits against the Catholic Church and the Church has handed out millions of dollars in settlements to persons who claim to have been sexually abused.

But here is a question: Should the Catholic Church have to give any money to these people?

Why should the Catholic Church have to pay money for criminal acts that were committed by individuals?

The Church as an organization did not encourage sexual abuse. The Church did not do anything to try to prevent the child or the child's parents from reporting the crime.

Some may try to argue that certain officials in the Church knew about the abuse but did not report it.

But should there even be a legal obligation to report a crime? You can argue there was a moral obligation, certainly. But a legal obligation is something different. If you know that a crime was committed, are you really the "cause" of anything bad happening if you do not report it? It seems to me that is a good thing that was not done, rather than specifically a bad thing itself.

If a child tells a priest about a crime that was committed against them, that child could also tell their parents. Why didn't the child tell their parents? Why didn't the parents tell the police?
It's very questionable whether a priest who does not report what a child told them to police is really "preventing" that child from getting justice.
It seems like a pretty tenuous connection, to be putting the blame on that priest for law enforcement not finding out.

A child would have to be pretty stupid not to tell police, or at least their parents.
Even most 11 year olds know the phone number to call the police.

Then some may try to argue that if the Church knew about abuse, they should not have allowed the priest in question to remain in a position of trust.
But that is not so obvious either.
Remember, the Church did not know for certain that this abuse occurred. They only knew there were accusations. Should the Church really have a legal obligation to remove an individual from a position based simply on an accusation? That might not necessarily be fair.
It is the job of law enforcement to respond and deal with the situation, not the Church.

The money paid out to these victims would ultimately be coming from donations to the Church, so it does not make sense to be diverting that money to pay for compensation for wrongs committed by some individual.

It's also, as a matter of public policy, not a good idea to be paying out financial compensation for sexual assaults, because it could create an incentive for accusers to lie. And nothing is a stronger incentive to lie than money.

Then there is the question of whether a huge amount of money can even really fully be equivalent to the damage of sexual abuse. Is money really the appropriate way to attempt to "right" this type of wrong?

I do not think the Catholic Church should be under any obligation to have to pay any money.

And even if you do feel the Catholic Church should in some way be held partially responsible for the abuse, it still seems that most of the blame for the sexual abuse should not be directed at them. The individual who actually committed the abuse is far more to blame. For that reason, making the Church pay money as if they are 100 percent responsible does not seem logical.
The way I see things, blame for something can only add up to 100 percent. If one person is 90 percent to blame for something, then another person cannot be more than 10 percent to blame for that same thing.

If you argue that the Church should be "punished", why not punish individuals? Why try to take money from the whole Church? And it is still possible to take money from the Church without giving all that money to the alleged victim, so even that argument does not automatically support the validity of these lawsuits.

 

yes

they were accessories after the fact to the crimes of their priests

 

YES....

 

Calling them "accessories" just seems like the use of a vaguely defined word to try to draw a connection.
That seems like what is called an equivocation fallacy in logic.
(certainly a "loaded word" at the very least)

Did the Church do anything that promoted or encouraged this sexual abuse?
I think the answer to that is no. The Church did not actually contribute to the cause.

Normally an "accessory" contributes to causing the crime.

 

not reporting it, transferring the priests to new locations, attacking victims, ect.... is enabling them

 

I tend to agree with your logic. Life is filled with the potential to hurt. And it's the Parents responsibility to guard their children. So to entrust them to a Church is no different than for the Church to entrust them to a Priest. So if the Church is guilty, the Parents are guilty too because it is common knowledge that evil can crop up anywhere. Bearing false witness is also a victimization of the innocent, and common knowledge as well.

 

In some sense yes. Perhaps in a moral sense. But I do not believe there should have been a legal obligation on the Church.
The difference is the Church only declined to act to try to prevent the abuse; it did not assist in causing the abuse.

Let's keep in mind that in virtually none of these cases did the Church actually see the abuse with their own eyes, or know for absolute certain that a specific instance of abuse actually occurred. The only way the Church knew anything is because reports were made to them - accusations that the Church was not even in a position to be able to substantiate. These reports ultimately would have come from the child themselves, or the parents of that child. Either of which could have easily also made reports to police.

If a report had been made to law enforcement and law enforcement declined to do anything, it begs the question whether the Church should have had any legal obligation to do anything either. Do you think some special law should be passed that if a priest, teacher, or childcare worker is ever accused by anyone they should never be allowed to be around children again? That would be another controversial debate, because there are a lot of people who get falsely accused.

I personally do not believe an employer should be held responsible for the illegal actions independently committed by one of their employees.

Also, if officials in the Church are so guilty of crimes, why are they not being arrested? Why do you think money is an appropriate way to deal with this, and not putting people in prison? Is it because you know what they did was not actually against the law and was not bad enough to justify putting them in prison?

 

Maybe the child did report it to their parents and the parents did not do anything. If so, the parents would be equally as much to blame as the Church. Probably even more to blame than the Church. But then the former abuse survivor does not tell the courts that he told his parents. Because he is trying to sue the Church, for the maximum amount of money. If he reveals that he told his parents at the time, then everyone will know that the Church was only a fraction as much to blame for police not being informed.

So there is another possible injustice in all of this.

 

Does transferring the priests to new locations make the Church more guilty than if they did not transfer the priests to new locations, in your opinion?

 

if a corp caught an employee raping customers children and then just transferred them to another location to keep it quite, would the corporation be liable?

well in this case it was many employees, not just one

 

they helped them avoid prosecution by relocating them for that reason, and maybe caused even more victims

 

Does that really help them avoid prosecution? How does it do that?

 

if they move the priest and throw it under the rug and try to silence the victim... yes

we saw it, they got away with it for years

 

No, now you seem to be trying to conflate together two different issues. You avoided giving an answer to the question.

 

Please explain in detail how just transferring the employee to another location would "keep it quiet".

(I think you seem to be referring to rumor, rather than law enforcement actually finding out)

And why would or should the corporation be liable for that.
Many individuals in other jobs could move around to different locations on their own. I don't think it should be illegal for an employer to move where their employee works to a different location.

I think it's absurd to say that the employer should be held financially responsible for that.

 

That is a legal term that is well defined.

And, the RCC absolutely DID contribute. They moved pedophile priests around to avoid their prosecution. Those priests assaulted children wherever the RCC tried to hide them.

That's not all the RCC did, but it is well proven they did that, and that is far and away enough to warrant civil suits in recovery of damages - as well as criminal prosecution.

 

By moving the offender to a different state, prosecution becomes FAR harder.

When those movements are designed to prevent prosecution (as they were) and when the pedophile then continues sexual assaults on children, how can anyone claim the church isn't aiding and abetting the life long crime spree of the perp in question?

 

I don't think that is true.

Let's also remember that the employer is not actually physically moving the person, they are moving that person's place of employment.

Shouldn't it be the employer's right to move a position of employment to whatever location they wish?

Your argument sounds very contrived, like you think an employer has some obligation to keep the employee at the location they already are if the employer has any reason to suspect criminal wrongdoing.
I think that's totally absurd.

Please explain how they would prevent prosecution.
Give us some detail or substance to that assertion.

 

Let's try to deal with more specific numbers. What percent of the blame do you think the Church has for what happened, and what percent of the blame do you think the actual perpetrator has for what happened?

You do agree that those two numbers should not be able to add up to more than 100 percent, don't you?

I'm saying that even if you view the Church as partially responsible, they are still not the one who is mostly responsible; and therefore these multi million dollar payouts are absurd and ridiculous, very disproportionate to the amount of total blame the Church actually had.

 

You are clearly unfamiliar with the evidence in criminal investigation of the RCC.

Priests were moved around to avoid prosecution. And, the new locations were sometimes not warned by the RCC and sometimes simply chose to provide no monitoring.

Also, remember that this went all the way up into the international religious hierarchy of the RCC.

 

That is not the issue, and never has been the issue.

The issue is whether ANYONE who is a known perpetrator or one who aided and abetted the crimes in these cases of sexual assault on children may be sued for damages in civil court.

Civil suits almost always have to weigh levels of responsibility. That is not an excuse as YOU want it to be.

 

The logic of your argument there entirely hinges on the exact meaning of "aided and abetted". Like I covered in my fourth post, that can easily lead to an equivocation fallacy.
That's where you use one terminology, which is technically not completely untrue, but you then use that terminology to insinuate a different meaning.

Right now it seems you are just throwing out vague loaded words.

You're going to have to be much more precise what you mean if you actually want this argument to go anywhere.

 

I'm going with the legal definition.

If yours is somehow different, then it is you who need to fix that.

 

I suspect the judge and juries in these cases are heavily biased and prejudiced, and do not actually care about logic or real justice. Their decision was based on emotion.

They made the confused logical error of believing just because the Church did something wrong that the Church should be held responsible for what happened. They also confused together what happened with what the Church actually did.

 

Then your argument is simply one of semantics and is irrelevant to what justice should be.