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
For a century now, the option has been at some point between 7 and 16, at the diocese’s discretion. I received mine around 16; 13 sounds like an outlier, to me.
I truly wonder what’s going through someone’s head when they downvote purely factual statements. I didn’t even give an opinion here.
I can explain what’s going through my head for you. I downvoted you because your purely factual statement seems to completely miss and is entirely irrelevant to my point – that coercing a child to declare themselves an adult in the eyes of a particular social group, to declare that they have the agency to consider such a thing that is supposed to be a LIFE LONG decision, is straight up wrong.
Doesn’t matter if it has been in place for a century, if age 13 is an outlier, or if you think 16 is old enough because that’s when you had to do it. It’s whack, and your justification is whack. I downvoted you instead of engaging because most of the time it’s not worth entertaining someone who justifies the cult I was indoctrinated into as a child, from which I had to spend many years deconstructing the hate for others – often the lowliest groups of individuals – that Catholicism had fomented in my child and adolescent heart. Forgive my harshness, but I’m not going to act like this thing that made me into a spiteful hateful kid – towards the exact groups of people that Jesus tells us to love the most – is a good thing.