The Pope says that 2% of Catholic Clergy are paedophiles

[LONDONER]

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-2852610...a&ns_fee=0

[Pix]

All we can confidently say is that, firstly, the figures are imperfect - both for Catholic clergy and the general population. And secondly, that these imperfect figures are in the same ballpark.

Even if that's true it misses the point that clergymen typically have the irrational trust of the public and authority that enables abuse whereas that's not so true of the general public. Saying that there are "only about 2% pedophiles" in society is good news to me (since I figure it's much higher than that, and I'm using the strict definition of the word) but to say priests, teachers, Boy Scout leaders, and the like have about the same as the general population means they're not doing anything effective to make it much lower than the general population when they have an obligation to.

And I'm not even counting that when someone in the general population gets busted in pedophilia he typically gets crucified, but when say a priest does it then it seems he just gets transferred, which also means that not only is he guilty, but so are those who aid and abet him in addition to being a betrayal of trust to those who foolishly trust them.

[Aike]

Recall numerous cases of pedophilia that shatter the Catholic Church: when its representatives insists that these cases, deplorable as they are, are Church's internal problem, and display great reluctance to collaborate with police in their investigation, they are, in a way, right - the pedophilia of Catholic priests is not something that concerns merely the persons who, because of accidental reasons of private history with no relation to the Church as an institution, happened to chose the profession of a priest; it is a phenomenon that concerns the Catholic Church as such, that is inscribed into its very functioning as a socio-symbolic institution. It does not concern the "private" unconscious of individuals, but the "unconscious" of the institution itself: it is not something that happens because the Institution has to accommodate itself to the pathological realities of libidinal life in order to survive, but something that the institution itself needs in order to reproduce itself. One can well imagine a "straight" (not pedophiliac) priest who, after years of service, gets involved in pedophilia because the very logic of the institution seduces him into it. Such an institutional Unconscious designates the obscene disavowed underside that, precisely as disavowed, sustains the public institution. (In the army, this underside consists of the obscene sexualized rituals of fragging etc. which sustain the group solidarity.) In other words, it is not simply that, for conformist reasons, the Church tries to hush up the embarrassing pedophilic scandals; in defending itself, the Church defends its innermost obscene secret. What this means is that identifying oneself with this secret side is a key constituent of the very identity of a Christian priest: if a priest seriously (not just rhetorically) denounces these scandals, he thereby excludes himself from the ecclesiastic community, he is no longer "one of us" (in exactly the same way a citizen of a town in the South of the US in the 1920s, if he denounced Ku Klux Klan to the police, excluded himself from his community, i.e., betrayed its fundamental solidarity). Consequently, the answer to the Church's reluctance should be not only that we are dealing with criminal cases and that, if Church does not fully participate in their investigation, it is an accomplice after the fact; moreover, Church AS SUCH, as an institution, should be investigated with regard to the way it systematically creates conditions for such crimes.

- Slavoj Žižek (from "Tolerance as an Ideological Category")