The Catholic Church has issued a warning to its clergy in Washington state: Any priest who complies with a new law requiring the reporting of child abuse confessions to authorities will be excommunicated.
https://www.newsweek.com/catholic-church-excommunicate-priests-following-new-us-state-law-2069039
Congratulations. You fell for propaganda by stupid framing.
This is not actually about child abuse per se. It’s also not about “warning” priests.
This is a simple and factual reminder: Confessions are part of a protected sacrament and the seal of confession is absolute and always has been (or at least for nearly a millenium). To violate it means excommunication.
I wonder if you would react with the same outrage when this was a bar association reminding their lawyers of the disciplinary consequences of violating confidentiality agreements.
No, you just don’t like their conclusion. The article explains what confessional is, which only alters your opinion of the case if you care more about the religious ‘right’ of a child fucker to talk about their child fucking in secret with someone who promised to not tell than you care about the wellbeing of the child victim.
Your lawyer line of reasoning is also based on a misconception: that attorney-client privilege universally extends to knowledge of child abuse, outside representing a client specifically on child abuse. This isn’t the case, there are states where attorney-client privilege doesn’t apply in this scenario. Bar associations in general also allow breaking confidentiality if they have reasonable belief that someone is going to be seriously harmed or killed.
Sorry, no amount of secret handshakes gets you out of being a terrible person for not reporting child abuse that you are aware of.
What an unbelievably stupid take.
A) Do you actually know what excommunication means? It’s not a permanent sentence to Hell. It’s a temporary separation from the Church that can be reversed after penance. Do you think a “time-out” is so unbelievably painful that it warrants protecting child abusers? If so, you are fucking disgusting.
B) You analogy ALREADY HAS agreed upon laws about violating confidentiality, including when the lawyer believes an extreme crime might be committed in the future. So no, we would not be reacting with outrage because we are not psychopaths.
It’s hard to state how stupid your post is.
Doesn’t the bible say to obey the emperor and follow the law? So reporting abuse to the authorities shouldn’t be a sin since there’s a law compelling priests to violate the confessional for specific issues.
Who cares?
This is a simple and factual reminder: you’re arguing to protect child abuse. Shut the fuck up.
No, I am arguing for a church law established nearly 1000 years ago and upheld ever since that indiscriminately protects all confessions. If you want to argue for changing this (as you should) go along.
But pretending that this is about protecting child abuse or even -as multiple comments here do- hallucinating how the catholic church “goes out of its way” (by doing exactly the same aus in the last ~900 years) is insane.
And nobody cares about church law. It’s entirely irrelevant.