{"id":527851,"date":"2010-04-14T18:12:48","date_gmt":"2010-04-14T22:12:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/seattletimes.nwsource.com\/html\/northwestvoices\/2011607869_vatican.html?syndication=rss"},"modified":"2010-04-14T18:12:48","modified_gmt":"2010-04-14T22:12:48","slug":"vatican","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/527851","title":{"rendered":"Vatican"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Defrocking means removing a layer of supervision<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Contrary to popular belief, a Catholic priest cannot be unordained any more than a person can be unbaptized. As stated in paragraph 1583 of the Catholic Catechism, \u201cordination is forever.\u201d [\u201cVatican defends handling of priest\u2019s case,\u201d News, April 11.]<\/p>\n<p>Canon law does recognize \u201cdismissal from the clerical state.\u201d This generally means a priest is dispensed from his priestly vows and the bishop is relieved from that point forward of his responsibility for and obligations to the priest. With respect to a priest charged with molesting minors, such dismissal is advantageous to the church in the sense that the bishop will no longer be responsible for supervising and monitoring the priest\u2019s activities and will not be liable for future misconduct.<\/p>\n<p>However, dismissal could be disadvantageous to the public, as one control for keeping the offenders away from minors will no longer exist. The offender will be a \u201cfree agent,\u201d released from the bishop\u2019s supervision, and subject only to one restraint \u2014 the law. Before dismissal, there were two restraints \u2014the bishop\u2019s supervision and the law.<\/p>\n<p><em>\u2014 Peter Anderson, Mercer Island<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Defrocking means removing a layer of supervision Contrary to popular belief, a Catholic priest cannot be unordained any more than a person can be unbaptized. As stated in paragraph 1583 of the Catholic Catechism, \u201cordination is forever.\u201d [\u201cVatican defends handling of priest\u2019s case,\u201d News, April 11.] Canon law does recognize \u201cdismissal from the clerical state.\u201d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2861,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-527851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2861"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527851\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}