The stain on the church

From the Editorial Board of the Washington Post: The scale of the Catholic Church’s criminality still shocks

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH’S decades-long practice of enabling and systematically covering up the rape and molestation of children by priests is by now sickeningly familiar. Yet the scale of abuse; the breadth and depth of trauma inflicted by predators wearing Roman collars; and the coldbloodedness of senior church figures zealous in their resolve to protect the church but indifferent to the suffering of minors, retain their power to shock the conscience .....

Even as apologists for the Vatican and the clergy continue peddling the myth that the Catholic Church’s pedophile scandals simply reflect society’s problems, the weight of evidence is overwhelming proof to the contrary .....

[T]he pope has proved unwilling and possibly unable to take the sweeping steps required to implement a genuine zero-tolerance policy. In the United States, the church continues to block legislative reforms in state capitals that would allow victims and prosecutors to seek justice for abuse that occurred decades ago .....

This is one of the reasons I don't identify as Catholic anymore. Pope Francis and the others running the church are basically unaccountable - the Pope is a virtual dictator in the church, a dictator with his own country. Yes, the occasional priest may be charged by civil authorities and even go to trial, but all too often those being investigated for crimes get called back to the safety and immunity of Vatican City ... a recent example is Monsignor Carlo Alberto Capella, a Vatican diplomat being investigated for child pornography in the US and Canada: Amid Pornography Case, Vatican Recalls Priest From Washington Embassy.

Things could change inside the church in ways that would make clergy sex abuse less likely: there's evidence that Christian denominations that have women priests and married priests have much less clergy sex abuse than the Catholic church ...

[R]ates of reported child sexual abuse by priests and religious in the Catholic Church are many times higher than for clergy and paid pastoral staff such as youth workers, in other denominations .... The figure for the number of victims in the Catholic Church was exactly 10 times that in the Anglican Church ....

But things won't change because Pope Francis won't change them and no one else can. I believe there's just one thing that could make a difference - if priests/bishops/cardinals sttod together on this and challenged the Pope, if lay people stood together and refused to accept the current situation, then I think the Pope would have to listen. This tactic worked on a smaller scale to get the notorious Cardinal Law to step down. But in this instance, it just won't happen.

In this way, there's a similarity between the church and the Trump administration. There's no question that there's corruption in the organization - it's evident to all - but Republican politicians (and Catholic clergy) won't challenge their leader because they care more about staying in power than anything else in the whole world. And Republican voters support Trump almost completely in the same way that most lay Catholics support the Pope .... they don't care about the damage caused to others, because all that matters to them is that they get what they themselves need from the organization.

Meanwhile, the church continues to spend literally millions of dollars in the US on lobbying against the relaxation of statutes of limitation, which is what is keeping most clergy child abusers from being held accountable ... Why the Explosive Report on Catholic Church Abuse Is Unlikely to Yield Criminal Charges