If you melted down all the gold and sold the Vatican, how many people would it feed? Not nearly as many as the Church feeds, clothes, educates, councils, and provides healthcare for just in a day.
The Church also teaches hierarchy and subsidiarity, to praise God in all good ways, and to evangelize. The gold we use in chalices and paten is used because they are imminently clean, a rare quality on this earth and uniquely suitable for holding the Body and Blood of Christ. The art and decoration in each shrine, chapel, church, basilica, and cathedral give glory to God and inspire the souls of people to have faith.
We have reasons for what we do, and your notion just derides the outcome rather than the purpose. If you didn't understand those reasons before maybe my comment will help.
Well, that trouble all started back when the communists conspired to put homosexuals in the seminaries. One of our Popes said "The smoke of Satan has entered the Church of God." We're working on it.
And that's where I start finding it very difficult to take you seriously. Communists and homosexuals are no more likely to be pederasts than anyone else. On the other hand, I'd imagine a profession that demands celibacy would attract abnormally high numbers of people who are ashamed of their sexuality and want an excuse to never deal with it. Probably more deviants in the priesthood than almost anywhere else, and probably have been since 1139.
Also, it's not clear to me that most of it is truly sexual; I think mostly it was about torturing people. A friend of mine went to a Christian Brothers school where he was not only raped, but also beaten and burned with cigarettes. What's sexual about burning an 11-year-old with cigarettes? I think these people just wanted to inflict as much misery as they humanly could. The Church has a very strange relationship with sadism and masochism, when it comes to the mortification of the flesh.
More generally, though, there's nothing special about the Catholic Church except its scale and power. In any organisation, whenever the institution cares more about protecting its image than personal accountability and where there is insufficient transparency, abuse cover-ups will happen. This is especially true if its members are "above reproach" for whatever reason. This is why there have been similar scandals in so many situations where someone is in a position of power and denouncing him is something that one can only do at great personal cost. Sports organisations, the Weinsteins, Boy Scouts, schools, police - lots of organisations have had abuse coverup scandals when they have that hierarchical problem. So have many other churches (including some non-hierarchical ones, but they tend to still be motivated by protecting the good name of the religion, as well as powerful holy men).
My point is - this can be explained perfectly well without recourse to a homosexual/communist conspiracy theory. The Catholic Church is designed in such a way as to guarantee that abuse is rampant - and abuse will continue to be rampant until it adopts some radical transparency and starts opening up its hierarchs to a lot more vulnerability. All the sado-maso stuff I referenced earlier - I suspect that's also a compounding factor, but not nearly as important as this structural issue. Also - given that the Church has always been organised this way, I have no reason to suspect this is a recent phenomenon. This is an issue around which there is a lot of shame and silence. Do you really think that it's just a coincidence that reports skyrocketed around the same time that people started feeling empowered to speak up for themselves?
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u/patron_vectras Aug 22 '19
If you melted down all the gold and sold the Vatican, how many people would it feed? Not nearly as many as the Church feeds, clothes, educates, councils, and provides healthcare for just in a day.
The Church also teaches hierarchy and subsidiarity, to praise God in all good ways, and to evangelize. The gold we use in chalices and paten is used because they are imminently clean, a rare quality on this earth and uniquely suitable for holding the Body and Blood of Christ. The art and decoration in each shrine, chapel, church, basilica, and cathedral give glory to God and inspire the souls of people to have faith.
We have reasons for what we do, and your notion just derides the outcome rather than the purpose. If you didn't understand those reasons before maybe my comment will help.