It happened too much and in too many places for it to be mere isolated instances of rogue priests.In my view, it’s systemic. Something is rotten to the core.
Sex-abuse scandals have taken their toll on the Catholic Church from Canada to Australia. But nowhere has been harder hit than Ireland, which specialised in exporting priests worldwide until the 1980s.
The church’s moral standing, Mass attendance and enrolments to the priesthood have plummeted in Ireland since 1994, when the first major scandal involving a paedophile priest triggered the collapse of the government of then-Prime Minister Albert Reynolds.
Since then, both church and state have struggled to come to terms with the scale of abuse being committed by parish priests and in church-run schools, orphanages and workhouses.
From Arianna (emphasis added)
Over 11,000 children were sexually abused and close to $1 billion in settlement money has been paid out, but the pope did not go much beyond decrying “the sins of some of our brothers.” He never met with any victims, he never offered practical solutions to dealing with the problem, he never addressed the decades-long cover-up of the abuse. He even rejected a “zero tolerance” policy calling for the immediate removal of molester-priests, concerned that it was too harsh.
Too harsh?! This is a man who wouldn’t allow a priest to become a bishop unless he was unequivocally opposed to masturbation, premarital sex and condoms. So, in his perversion pecking order, you had to be dead-set against “self-love” but when it came to buggering little kids, there was some wiggle room.
Victims of priest win $1.9 million in punitive damages, the first time such damages have been awarded in California.