re: #16 webevintage

This is not a place for three strikes and you`re out. It is not a place where Christian sympathy should go to the adult abuser of this trust between child and churchman. It`s the place where the first, indeed overwhelming claimant to our sympathy and to justice must be the child, the vulnerable young boy who finds himself under the power of a priest of Jesus Christ, an heir to the disciples, a servant in the tradition of the Apostles.

If there was ever an easy moral question, it should have been what to do with priests who molest children. You fight for the victim. Then you remove the perpetrator. You end the occasion of sin, so the priest, in this case the moral felon, never has the opportunity to act again.

I would add what I said last night.
I want to hear repentance.
I want 2011 to be the year The Church goes though a deep and meaningful penance.
I want the Pope and the Cardinals and the Bishops to throw off their vestments and wear some form of sack cloth and ashes for that year.
I don’t want the Pope to resign, I want him to take responsibility.
I’d like to see the church bring any victim to Rome who is willing and have the Pope personally apologize to them.
I want them all to say over and over again (and I don’t care that it is no longer happening or that most of them were never involved or that a good amount of the perps are dead):
“We have sinned grievously”

This is perfectly said. I am appalled by this situation. When I first started hearing about pedophile abuses in the Church some years ago, my default assumption was that this was a case of a very small number of very bad apples being used to unfairly smear an entire faith. While I never once doubted any given victim of one of these crimes, I never appreciated the true widespread scale of the problem or the complicity of the Church in covering it up. Again, my default assumption was that we were talking about a few isolated cover ups. I had that default assumption because I would ask myself how I would feel if G-d forbid, a rabbi were involved in such a scandal. I didn’t want to be unjust to decent Catholic people everywhere and hurt them with an unfair shot or stray comment.

However, enough is enough. It is now utterly obvious that there is a huge problem endemic in the Church. I don’t care to speculate why so very many pedophiles end up in the priesthood. What ever my hypothesis on such a thing would be is irrelevant to the larger issue that we are not talking about a few cases or even a few hundred cases. We are talking about tens of thousands of cases and a massive and incompetent cover up and culture of returning these predators to positions where they can abuse.

All of those Silent Catholics who pretend the problem does not exist, need to clean their own house even if this is a very painful thing to even look at. This formerly neutral and sympathetic (to Catholics in general about this issue) observer has come to blame you for doing so very little about what is now something obvious. How can you possibly stand for this?

This is also a wonderful case of where I adore the Separation of Church and State. At some point, a simple application of the law as it stands that would put these fallen priests and the bishops or higher that covered it up in prison for a few years would do the job. Individual Catholics should be the first people demanding this. I applaud those who are speaking out and I am disgusted at the weakness of those who say nothing.