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isabella R

BATTLE FOR SOULS, THE | CABLEready.net - 0 views

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    While the world is focused on Islamic fundamentalism, a similar revolution is occurring in the spread of Christianity throughout the world. We investigate the modern techniques being employed by Christian missionaries to convert entire communities. The program was shot on location in Nigeria where Christianity and Islam are facing off in a direct struggle for power, with often-violent results. Premiered on Discovery Times Channel, USA
isabella R

Bilgrimage: Richard Sipe on Sexual Abuse as Product of Clerical Culture - 0 views

  • "The context of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic bishops and priests is the culture of the priesthood."
  • clerical culture centers on the maintenance of a club whose boundaries are impermeable to non-ordained outsiders and are premised on the assertion that everything one does to keep those boundaries intact is done for God and the church--even when that "everything" comprises keeping noxious secrets, telling toxic lies, and maintaining absolute silence when faced with demands for transparency and accountability.
  • Sipe writes:  If a priest is apparently compliant with the demands of the culture he receives automatic status regardless of any individual merit. The culture provides an assurance of employment and continued material compensation for the duration of his life. The identification with the power system and subordination to it relives individuals of responsibility for the consequences of their individual actions. Truth telling is curtailed and subjected to the welfare of the organization (the good of the church). The prevailing rationale is that clerics’ first duty is to the higher law of God. Secrecy and loyalty are essential binding elements operative to the function of clerical cultural. Men within the clerical culture are labeled "special" since ordination confers an "ontological" superiority. Clerics thus incorporated into the culture often demonstrate qualities of dependency, entitlement, superiority/arrogance, variable degrees of psychosexual immaturity, but in many cases "they possess enormous powers of empathetic discernment—albeit for purposes of self-aggrandizement." And he concludes:
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  • The fundamental causes of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy are within the clerical culture.
  • That is, after the gentlemen running things get done with their bashing of Girl Scouts.  And gays.  And women in general and nuns in particular.  And abuse survivors.
  • Anybody but their own sweet selves.  And the super-rich right-wing men on whose behalf they are doing all this theatrical staging
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