So Much For Protecting Children

I've always thought Christianity was a pedophile religion. It's nice to see the Catholic Church fully admitting that.

Here's the thing - priests are perfectly willing to go to jail over this. The seal of confession is extremely important to Catholic practice, and a priest would rather go to jail than break it. I am not a Catholic, but the seal of confession has been long respected by US law as it pertains to religious freedom, and it's such a long established part of Catholic practice that it's hard to imagine Catholic life without it. I think this is a serious blow to religious freedom, even if I don't personally agree with the practice it is attacking. Realistically all this will do, even in the "best case" scenario where priests actually comply, is make people not confess to these things in the first place. From a civil standpoint this is essentially equivalent to the situation where confession is sealed, but according to Catholic beliefs this is horrible as it removes the possibility of redemption for the perpetrator. Now you or I might think that child abuse is an unforgivable sin worthy of eternal damnation with no possibility of forgiveness, but that's not what Catholics believe. They believe that everyone should have a chance to confess their sins and atone for them, which is impossible without telling a priest about them.

"Forced" so... you dont want to volunteer report information that can save children from abuse... jesus must be very proud.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I feel like, if somebody admits to molesting a child to a priest, then the priest should report that to the correct legal people to deal with that.

But on the other hand, as a person who has religious practices ingrained into my behavior, I can understand, it's like I don't imagine that the people that are evil pedophiles are the kind of people to go and brag about it with their pastor.

What the ideal scenario in this case would be is that the pedophile confesses to the priest and then turns themselves in.

The next best scenario would be that the pedophile confesses to the priest, and then at least does not ever commit pedophilia again.

I'm not expecting clemency for pedophiles. Don't get me wrong.

But making it so that pedophiles can't even confess their sins without immediately being hauled off to The nearest jail cell is not going to actually decrease the amount of pedophilia in the world. Instead, it's going to convince pedophiles with religious leanings to accept that their souls are condemned to hell and some of them are gonna choose to go out with a bang.

There's only one kind of person who wouldn't be on board with this

Lmao fuckin christ, they just wanna cosplay and abuse the weak not snitch on the bros. Stuck 2 the code huh

The Bishop’s objection to the law is that there is no exemption for information learned in Confession ceremony specifically.

I don’t see any objection in the article for reporting information gathered anywhere else.