And after Guidry’s church honored him with a goodbye luncheon for which the diocese was forced to apologize, he received a seven-year prison sentence.
“Be sure to make it to Father fuck-face’s We’re sorry our favorite sexual predator has to leave us luncheon!”
This is why I left the church. They don’t give a fuck about their victims. Complete ass-backwards priorities, Jesus would be flipping tables and whipping motherfuckers
The ridiculous thing here is that the Catholic Church has basically sewn up all the charities in this town. I want my family to volunteer, but there’s basically nowhere to do it, especially if I want to include my kid.
Food bank? Catholics.
Homeless assistance? Catholics.
Domestic violence shelter? Catholics.
Low-income school assistance charity? Catholics.
Etc.
And most of the other places where we could volunteer are run by other crazy churches. It doesn’t help that we have a monastery, a nunnery, a Catholic university, a Catholic high school and at least a half-dozen Catholic churches. And there aren’t even 100,000 people in this town.
These charities undeniably do a lot of good, but how can I ethically support them?
I have done a lot of volunteering through Catholic charities and I do think they legitimately do a lot of good work, it’s a shame they work so hard to cover for animals like this priest. Pope Francis doing his best Pope Pious XII impression recently has helped me feel validated in my decision to walk away.
I know they do good work. It’s not about the good work they do. It’s about my being able to ethically support them because of what the church in general has been guilty of (not just covering up child rape either) even though they do good work.
I assume you wouldn’t volunteer to build houses for the homeless if it turned out the organization building the houses was an arm of the KKK.
I think we’re in agreement; they haven’t seen a dime or hour of my time since I walked away over a decade ago.
This story just gets worse and worse… 40 clergy credibly accused of sexual abuse in the diocese, “patient zero” in the whole abuse scandal, and then this is the icing on the cake-
Michael Guidry later pleaded guilty to abusing Oliver Peyton, who was an altar boy. And after Guidry’s church honored him with a goodbye luncheon for which the diocese was forced to apologize, he received a seven-year prison sentence.
“I am aware that your family has suffered a trauma but the answer does not lie in leaving the Most Holy Eucharist,” Deshotel wrote in his excommunication decree.
By excommunicating him, you’ve banned him from receiving Eucharist. He didn’t leave.
This is absolutely to punish him for bringing the corruption to light. I’d wear this excommunication as a badge of honor, but I’m not Catholic.
Let us all excommunicate ourselves from all churches.
And make them pay taxes.
It’s actually remarkably difficult to get officially excommunicated from the Catholic Church. You have to track down where you were originally baptized, and if they don’t have your records because of churches closing or because it was just too long ago, you won’t get a response from your local church.
The standard response is that once you are baptized, it cannot be undone. You can “self-excommunicate” but you can’t get a certificate saying that you’re no longer a member. I think it’s easier to get kicked out by the Mormons or Adventists, but the Catholics are weirdly clingy.
Just say bye. Done. At that point who cares?
Peyton called Deshotel’s actions against him “very malicious”, adding that he has seen no indication the diocese ever sought to excommunicate any of the more than 40 priests and deacons whom it has included on the organization’s list of credibly accused child molesters. Among those on that roster is Gilbert Gauthe, who pleaded guilty to abusing numerous boys before being sent to prison in the mid-1980s in a case that is widely considered to be “patient zero” of the US Catholic church’s ongoing clerical molestation scandal.
“It’s totally unnecessary,” Peyton said of his excommunication, which was first reported by the Lafayette news outlet KADN. “And I’m afraid it will make abuse victims and their families afraid to come out.”
[…]
“[This] has deeply shaken my faith and trust in the institution to which I have dedicated a significant portion of my life,” Peyton said in his resignation email to Deshotel, which was shared with the Guardian. “This decision is not a rejection of my faith in God or my commitment to living a life guided by Christian principles. Instead, it reflects … a desire to distance myself from an institution that, currently, falls short of the values it professes.”
[…]
“That’s not Christ-like,” Peyton said. “That’s … a fancy way of the bishop … telling me to go to hell.”
Will they learn the right lesson? I doubt it.
One of the reasons that we have problems with the far-right is that they keep getting fucked over by institutions (just like the rest of us), but they fail to see the writing on the wall. They ascribe the reasons to Woke, Trans People, Diversity, Whateverthefuck. They rebel against society rather than rebelling against the system itself. The system stopped working for me. Something broke the system. Rather than, The system stopped working for me. The system is bad.
