That's theres an internet with all sorts of legal stuff to look at and use so you don't have to abuse little boys??? Not to mention sex toys that getting closer to the real thing. It may not be the real thing, but if the real thing is abuse...

It would be way easier, and not cost so much political capital for the Church everytime one got caught. If they don't come up with something, in today's world of information flow (i.e. we're no longer in the Middle Ages, Church), they'll find themselves a priesthood without a flock.

Or choir boys...

This is a classic case of a criminal conspiracy. We are always prosecuting mothers who have helped their sons escape or hid out. There are statutes which make it a crime not to report child abuse. Why are clerics above the law? This is not the middle ages. Both the abusers themselves and those that conspired to protect them and hide the abuse should be prosecuted.

The Pope when he was a Cardinal, was the one who instructed the bishops to hide this accusations from civil authorities. That is prove that the conspiracy to violate the law goes to the highest level. And that it was done intentionally. Now a Cardinal in Ireland is using the old Nazi defense, I was just following orders.

WHERE DOES THE BUCK STOP?

In a press release from the Holy See on March 9, 2010, "concerning cases of the sexual abuse of minors in ecclesiastical institutions," Director Fr. Federico Lombardi parrots out the church's predictable responses to the widening problems of sexual abuse, particularly that of minor children.

http://www.oecumene.radiovaticana.org/EN1/Articolo.asp?c=362995

The institutional Roman Catholic church has reacted to the continuing sexual abuse debacle neither rapidly nor decisively, contrary to what Lombardi states. The Vatican has attempted to distance itself from what has happened in country after country, first categorizing it as an "American problem," then as a "homosexual problem."

What was done by church leadership in the United States, for example, it was forced to do by the pressure of public opinion after records, files and correspondence were forced into the public venue in 2002 by Judge Constance M. Sweeney, a very brave, grounded and principled Catholic woman in Boston, Massachusetts.

The church's response continues to be re-active rather than pro-active while minimizing the systemic and endemic abuse of power and authority which has enabled and exacerbated it on the one hand while covering it up whenever and wherever possible on the other.

The "wide-ranging context" is that in countries from the United States, Canada, Australia and Ireland to Austria, the Netherlands and Germany church authorities have repeatedly and consistently disregarded its own moral and Canon laws as well as the existing laws of the countries' in which these horrific crimes against humanity occurred.

Lombardi does not mention nor does he admit to the well documented widespread cover-up of the sexual abuse of children by bishops and other church officials in many countries like the United States, that makes the church's sexual abuse problems particularly egregious. If church authorities had done the morally right thing initially how many children would have escaped being sexually abused by a particular priest?

When are people of good will going to say, enough!

When are state legislators going to change the laws so that justice can be pursued for the thousands upon thousands of victims of childhood sexual abuse who have been unable to access let alone obtain justice?

In most states and probably in most countries existing criminal as well as civil laws give more protection to sexual predators and their enablers then they do to victims of childhood sexual abuse - by anyone. This is deplorable and should not be.

The removal of all statutes of limitation in regard to the sexual abuse of children is the single, most effective way to hold predators and enabling institutions accountable before the law.

The state of Delaware in the United States is one of a very few states in the U.S. which has removed all criminal and civil statutes of limitation in regard to the sexual abuse of children - by anyone. It also legislated a two year civil window for previously time barred cases, again, by anyone. That window closed in July of 2009.

In a civil suit, unlike a criminal suit, the burden of proof that any sexual abuse took place is on the plaintiff. The burden is not on the accused individual or institution to prove innocence, at least not in the United States.

Every victim of childhood sexual abuse should have a right to the pursuit of justice at the very least!

If Delaware can do it other states and other countries should be able to do it and hold sexual predators and any enabling institutions responsible, especially those institutions which chose to ignore their own internal laws.

I was privileged to testify before the Senate and House Judiciary Committees in support of the 2007 Child Victims Law in Delaware.

No rules and no laws of any religious organization or denomination should be allowed to trump the laws of a civilized society where the protection of children is concerned.

The Roman Catholic Church should be held to the highest standard as a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, a Convention that by any objective standard it has grossly violated for decades.

Isn't it time to formalize those violations as the crimes against humanity they truly are?

Sister Maureen Paul Turlish
Victims' Advocate
New Castle, Delaware, USA
maureenpaulturlish@yahoo.com

I was in a catholic orphanage for many years and I was terrorized and beaten by nuns. In every case, indivuals made the decision to lash out on a helpless terrified child. These people should be prosecuted indiviually. the catholic church should be help responsible for not removing them from their positions , for not property supervising them and for covering up and paying people for their silence. All of these things were done in the name of God. If only I could be a fly on the wall when sister loretta of Saint Pauls home for boys and girls meets her Lord and tries to explain her actions.

And all this flies in the face of the crimes commited by the catholic church as they helped Nazi's escape their crimes after wwii. no excuse. no excuse.
their fault, their fault, their most grievous fault.

And they wonder why they are irrevelant.

My take on it as an American is that the problem is just beginning to be addressed in England and Ireland as well as in Europe and we are in a second phase of "putting money where mouth is" here in the US. We went through the pain but the pain only begins to cleanse the hurt. I feel for the good priests who educated me and cared about me in grad school and who don't deserve the kind of blowback that this causes. One solution is to make sure that candidates for the priesthood have had at least one successful relationship with a woman -- married priests might do that -- and do careful psychological testing of all aspirants. Beyond that, however, we need to stop demonizing women in the seminaries. One of my dearest professors said that one of his teachers at seminary said that he would meet the woman who "had his number." That's absurd. Celibacy is not refusing something rotten and unsuitable but rather giving up the great privilege of loving adult women as a gift.

To claim the Roman Catholic Church condones sexual abuse is a mindless distortion.

The interest of older males in boys and youths is as old as time. What has changed is society’s attitude. In the past, sex was merely one of many failings and did not hold the singular place it has in the Western world today. The attitude of the Roman Catholic Church has ever been that all sexual activity, outside the sacrament of marriage and for the bearing children, is a sin demanding of confession, genuine repentance, and penance, before earning absolution; the penance consistent with the nature of the sin and the purpose being salvation rather than retribution. The concept still lingers in aspects of the parole hearing.

The Church has not changed and become an abuser of children, rather
Western social attitudes changed. Look at some of Caravaggio’s paintings; The Musicians, in the Met, painted in 1595 for the Cardinal Del Monte, or Boy with a Basket of Fruit in the Borghese Gallery in Rome.

Around the same time in England, John Aubrey was writing of James Butler, physician to the Prince of Wales: He would many times (I have heard say) sitt among the Boyes at St. Maries’ Church in Cambridge (and just so would the famous attorney general Noy in Lincoln’s Inne, who had many such froliques and humours).

Social attitudes began to change with the arrival of Puritanism and its prurient preoccupation with sex, particularly what other people get up to. Half the passengers on the Mayflower were Puritans.

Demonising the natural affection of adults for children, and sweeping every tactile manifestation into a big NO NO called abuse is absurd and, by suppressing natural responses, more than likely fosters the worst excesses of paedophilia.

Of course believers, even priests, fail to live up to the highest standards of the Church, but at least they know it, and know that the consequence of unrepentant sin is eternal damnation beside which civil retribution is soda pop. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa would hardly be in the litany were that not so

As for discipline, it used to be harsher. When I was five or six, which would be about the time some of these recent cases were occurring, punishment was to the palms of our hands with none too gentle strikes from the back of a hairbrush. At a later age it was three or six (rarely more) of the best on the butt, administered in a quasi-ritual manner. Times change. The Pope today will doubtless advocate that such offences, having been dealt with in the ecclesiastical manner, need to be notified to the appropriate civil authority in those countries where this is expected.

Vatican figures, by the way, show the proportion of Catholics in Africa increasing faster than population growth,

Benedict has shown himself to be provocative religious leader. He is prone to gaffes, IE, the Qu'ran quote controversy made in Germany early in the first year of his reign; bringing the egregiously Archbishop Lefebvre and his excommunicated schismatic Society of Pius X back into the fold along with holocaust denier, Bishop Richard Williamson (which cost him the ire of the Jewish community); and telling the faithful in Angola and Cameroon that abstinence and fidelity, not condoms, were the means to tackle the AIDS epidemic. Though Benedict was Bishop of Munich during the alleged abuse cases, whatever inaction he may be accused of, the decision to remain silent had to come directly from the Vatican. The pontiff efforts and promises to proactively address the critical mass of abuse will now seem hypocritical and feckless. The Holy See's spin doctors must be burning the midnight oil in hopes of controlling the damage if not the fallout. This is the church's final wake-up call!

The pope can say he is SORRY. But it's us victims that have gone through hell and back and then cycle through it over and over post traumatic stress. Which up until just lately we have had no hope of overcoming PTSD. Although they do have a treatment for it, there has not been enough time to find if the results are a true success or a temporary let up of the pain. On top of that, the cost of therapy has been unbelievable. An example, it cost us our home, because our $12,000 a year health care plan only allowed 10 visits to mental health professional. I was going three time for 3 years a week, and I am still in therapy, now with the latest information using EMDR. It's that same nightmares that the soldiers come home from war with. Only, they have one incident, we had many nightmare times with the priest.
Needless to say, I am no longer Catholic, nor do I believe in organized religion any more. these people hide the truth, how can anyone trust them with the Word of God?

My impression has never been that moreCatholic clergy commit abuse proportionally than in other groups. What has so enraged and disgusted so many has been the revelations about the lengths to which the church protected itself with secrecy at the cost of the children involved. More chilling was the idea put forth originally that this was an "American Problem", somehow contending that this sort of thing only happened in America because of some peculiarly American type of corruption of the spirit. Any one who gave it thought knew that if this much was hidden for so long in a society with a very free press, other revelations would follow from other places. Now news is coming out of Ireland and Germany, again with wide press freedom. What troubles is what may be happening in the countries where there is little or no press freedom and accountability is weak. Has the church shown us any evidence of assessing what may have happened in such places? Little or nothing. Again, it is the press and law enforcement who are forcing answers from the church rather than the church openly seeking answers and telling what is known about. The church is on weak ground in Europe already, and now look what it has done to itself. Its credibilty in the eyes of many is long gone. When priests care more for the institution than the people, they have lost their moral authority.

One thing I note is that people are presuming that the claims are all to be accepted without hesitation. I am less interested in how many claims there are than in how many lead to criminal charges. Admittedly in many cases a statute of limitations could mean that there can't be charges, but please remember that most European nations have a presumption of innocence until proven guilty.

It's a terrible thing when a Church acts on the basis of principles like forgiveness, absolution, redemption and the power of grace obtained through the sacraments to bring penitents back to God. Now we are putting the Catholic Church back in its place as an active participant in the criminal justice syatem of the State.

The Catholic Church has a history of children abuse everywhere it is present. Latin America is not the exception, perhaps on the contrary is the place where the greatest abuses occur and are tolerated. Some of them have recently surfaced:
In Brasil, a video showing a 82 year old Monsignor Luiz Marques Barbosa having sex with a teenager was recently shown on tv.
In Mexico, Rev. Marcial Maciel, the deceased founder of the Legionaries of Christ, was accused of abusing minors.
In Peru, the priest Martin Sanchez Teran was suspended in 2003 after he was accused of abusing minors. Although he was found by the police having sex at the beach (with an adult) and his e-mail was found in the list of a child pornography ring, he continues to manage orphanages.
Perhaps not in the same category, Paraguay's President Fernando Lugo has recognized he fathered children while still a priest.

I'd offer two things...
The primary issue isn't simply that priests and higher ups sexually (and otherwise) abused children. The issue is that when these abuses came to light, bishops and heads of monasteries moved the abusers to other parishes, etc., where the abuse continued. This pattern has been proven again and again, of the church hierarchy putting children in the hands of their abusers. This isn't ancient history -- these men are still in power in the church.

Secondly, despite this horrendous and sinful reality, this unholy church holds itself up as an arbiter of sexual mores, fighting openly to keep choice away from women and LGBT people devoid of rights and dignity. As a child, I was told that my masturbation was a nail in Jesus's hands. Though I believe I was never touched inappropriately by a priest or nun, I know that I was abused sexually in having my budding discovery of my hormone-fueled body be condemned as a mortal sin deserving punishment forever in hell. It took me years of hard work to throw off the terrible effects of this twisted teaching.

Were the church truly in touch with its sins, it would turn inward and heal itself so that no children would be abused before dictating morality to others.

I went to a church for a time in the 90's and the priest was moved for Orange County, Ca to Hawaii. We had heard rumors that it was due to abuse of children. I was shocked but accepted it. Now I understand that this is how the Church dealt with this problem. All this succeeeded in doing, was making sure that kids in another state were abused. They should all be in prison for what they did - locked up and the key thrown away. They were no better than pedophiles....... They took advantage of their position and ruined kids lives. Because of this, I will never set foot in the church.