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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 4 page reaction paper that describes the reader's thoughts on reading chapter 8 of Philip Jenkins's text Pedophiles and Priests, which is entitled "The Legal Environment." The writer argues that Jenkins' presentation of this topic is biased in favor of the Catholic Church. No other sources cited.
Page Count:
4 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_khreaped.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
explaining the various social factors that have influenced the legal elements associated with child molestation cases prosecuted against priests. In so doing, Jenkins offers a balanced account of these prosecutions
against the Church, as he describes cases that both detrimental to the Churchs image, and ones that appear to support the authors observation that many of these cases are spurious.
However, throughout the chapter, Jenkins focus on the legal world and his use of language tends to be overwhelmingly supportive and sympathetic towards the Church. Considering that child sexual
abuse elicits an almost visceral negative reaction from most readers, Jenkins approach to the subject is somewhat surprising, as his focus is consistently on the Church, rather than on the
victims or their families. For example, he recounts the history of how child abuse was handled in the past, beginning in the 1960s. He uses this as a rationale
for explaining the Churchs responses to known cases of child abuse. Jenkins points out that the 1970s, it was a "virtual certainty that minor cases of molestation would not lead
to legal consequences" (Jenkins 133). While "minor" is put in quotation marks, the overall message is that the Church got caught up in "New concepts of the appropriate response to
abusers" (Jenkins 133). This use of language paints Church officials as innocent victims of social change, rather than being knowingly complicitous in covering up child abuse and protecting pedophiles.
Nevertheless, Jenkins describes how priests in the 60s and 70s often confessed their misdeeds to their superiors, and frequently did so in writing. He then describes how the Church responded
by sending such priests to a retreat where they were offered the opportunity for meditation and counseling, but then were sent back to parishes where once again they had unsupervised
...