re: #18 SixDegrees

Correct. The Church has, for a very long time, tried to deal with this problem internally. As complaints start piling up, they sweep everything under the rug and reassign the offender to a distant church, often after a short stint at a closed monastery for retraining and admonitions - none of which are effective.

They need to turn such complaints over to the police and open their doors and records to law enforcement so offenders can be prosecuted and imprisoned if found guilty.

Hospitals, (secular, religious, profit or nonprofit, there isn’t any difference) have a longstanding pattern of doing the same when it comes to doctors or nurses who murder patients. They smell a rat, and they know the pattern cannot be just an accident, but there’s no ironclad proof and they’d rather not see it come to that. So they write a glowing recommendation of the offender to the next institution, and send him or her far away. And wait for the heat to die down.

This suggests the need for a new approach in law enforcement: if an institution shines a light on such a situation when it first comes to their attention, the institution is held immune from civil and criminal penalties. Sure, they get off without paying. But the law catches the wrongdoers much faster. The damages to the victims can be covered from government funds—-it’d be well worth the cost, to head off what would have become a long and well hidden crime spree.