4-5% of all American priests. 2/3 of all American bishops. I wish I could say they were out of context - but IMO they're not. I think we can all agree that some bishops tried to stop the crisis, while others perpetuated it. We know there were some bishops (Weakland in America and Vangheluwe in Belgium) who not only moved perpetrators around knowingly, but were perpetrators themselves. Despite that, the John Jay report assigns only five categories to sum up all of the bishops' responses - innovators, early adopters, early majority, later majority, and laggards. The John Jay study was commissioned and paid for by the US bishops, making it telling that no category was created for "bishop perpetrators".
[Faithful Departed author Philip] Lawler points out that while less than five percent of American priests have been accused of sexual abuse, some two-thirds of our bishops were apparently complicit in cover-ups. The real scandal isn't the sick excesses of a few dozen pedophiles, or even the hundreds of priests who had affairs with teenage boys -- the bulk of abuse cases. No, according to Lawler, it is the malfeasance of wealthy, powerful, and evidently worldly men who fill the thrones -- but not the shoes -- of the apostles. In case after case, we read in their correspondence, in the records of their soulless, bureaucratic responses to victims of psychic torture and spiritual betrayal, these bishops' prime concern was to save the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar and mortgages. Ironically, their lack of a supernatural concern for souls is precisely what cost them so much money in the end.
-- from the thread Kneeling Before the World"The Dublin Archdiocese's preoccupations in dealing with cases of child sexual abuse, at least until the mid-1990s, were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church and the preservation of its assets," said the report. "All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities. The archdiocese did not implement its own canon law rules and did its best to avoid any application of the law of the state"....
-- from the thread Pope calls Irish church leaders to Vatican to discuss abuse report
A deeper problem is Dolan inability to defend the Church’s position about homosexuality. He is afraid of looking intolerant, and this prevents him from say, yes, homosexual sex is a grave sin, like other forms of human lust, and to organize politically to protect this sort of behave is something that the Church ought to oppose. Gay rights is like Leper rights: rights to infect others.