re: #1 HappyWarrior

I say this as a baptized Catholic, the church needs to be more worried about this than gays marrying. The protection of pedophile priests is a disgrace.

Utterly disgraceful. The part of the Church making the decisions about these priests is out of touch with real people and they don’t get it, nor have they, IMO, tried really hard to understand the core issues.. Thank goodness the jury gets it.

I have a friend who is very active in the Church, and she has friends who are young, fairly newly ordained priests. One of these friends told her that he did not realize the full impact of these scandals as regarding how it touches ALL priests, even those good ones, until he had to take a flight somewhere and when he got on the airplane, he was seated next to a young boy whose mom and other siblings were across the aisle. The Mom saw the clerical collar, and traded places with her son, and told the priest, “There is no way I will allow my child to sit next to a Catholic priest”.

This touches every one who is Catholic. I wish I knew what it’s going to take to get the Vatican to understand the horror of the actions of these priests; and the parallel horror of their cover-ups.