Your sincerity and goodwill is duly noted, but you come across as an apologist. Considering that sex crimes with kids are always underreported, four percent is a staggering number. To speak of each as an individual unconnected to the church is forgiving, but it's sticking your head in the sand. If you can't see pattern of behavior that must be analyzed, picked apart and understood, then you're choosing not to see it. The culture of celibate priesthood obviously draws cerain types to it, or creates them. Time to pull heads out of the sand. You can forgive, but not forget and just put it behind you. Furthermore, even if you think the percentage is small, which it isn't, the massive, massive coverup job done by the bishops and other superiors is staggering. If you read the report in detail you'll find that in all of the correspondence analyzed, not one bishop ever wrote a letter of outrage or indignation at the alleged behavior of the priests. Not one. Just coverup and more coverup, move them to another disctrict where they could destroy more lives, rather than correct the problem or admit wrongdoing. This was a massive, conscious, and concerted effort by numerous bishops, who chose time and again to allow countless lives of young innocents to be destroyed rather than admit wrongdoing. Saying "hey, but 95% of the priesthood means well!" doesn't cut it.
The guilty priests from my hometown archdioese in Mobile, AL have prosecuted. I think that it was a monumental crime that the bishops concealed it, but does it mean that the whole church as an institution is damned? The church still does a lot of good, despite those priests and the ones who covered up for them.
There have been criminal investigations. The reason, as I understand it, that there have not been more prosecutions is that there simply is no proof. At least not the type of proof which would lead to a conviction. I really do not know the details, but that is my understanding. Without proof of the coverup, any terminations would lead to a lawsuit that the Church would lose. How is having countless wrongful termination judgments going to help anything? That's funny...I've been Catholic my whole life and have been around numerous priests. Never did I or any of the kids I knew have a single priest attempt anything inappropriate. Please present any evidence you have of widespread and rampant abuse by i high percentage of priests.
Good post. Like I said before, although I was (and still am) angry about the coverup, I know that as a whole the Church still does good work. The vast majority of priests are not sick perverts. But if you listen to the media, it is if every single priest is guilty.
Ref, no offense, but your eye-rolls contribute less than nothing. Your disdain for people criticizing the Church is easy to see in your prose. If I understand it correctly, the reason that priests are not allowed to marry comes from an edict in medieval times. The Church restricted marriage in this way so that it could start inheriting land rights after clergy members passed away. If allowed to marry, the priests' property would have gone to wives and possibly out of the Church's domain. So I don't think it's some purity angle, and I think the obvious answer is to let priests marry (even gay priests ).
I don't know what rock you've been living under, but this problem has been well documented and numerous priests have been convicted, particularly in Boston: http://alterboys.tripod.com/Faith/Convicted_andx.html But if you want anectdotal evidence: the pastor of my parish in Houston died of AIDS back in the 80's, doesn't mean he was a child molester, but he was doing things he shouldn't have been, at least according to the church. Also, several of the priests at my houston high school were a little, uhh, friendly, with the boys, and the priest/principal was busted for soliciting sex with a undercover policeman in an adult bookstore/gay porno theater in a well publicized incident back in the late 90's that was all over the news at the time. There's not really a credible reason to be in such denial about this.
