Prior to the '80's, as a rule, when these crime were committed, police didn't arrest, victims didn't/wouldn't testify, prosecutors didn't bring charges --it was an intricate system of evasions everywhere you turned, involving not just the churches, but every "helping" profession: counselors, youth workers, psychologists, judges, school administrators, therapists, public officials.
It was very much the muddled smooth-it-over "compassionate" thinking of the times: don't "re-traumatize" the victims by forcing them to provide courtroom testimony, what they need is counseling; don't "criminalize" the abusers, they need counseling as well; don't create a public spectable that envelops the church (the scouts, the sports program, the deaf school) because it destroys people's confidence in the helping institutions, etc. ad nauseam.
Now we can well say we're angry and disgusted with it all, and we know better: but for a long time this was not the way any institution, public or private, religious or secular, operated.
Now the thinking is more along these lines (paraphrase from my retired pastor): "First call the police, then the bishop--- then the press."
There is plenty of shame, guilt, bad judgment and anger to go around. It's 20-20 hindsight. How we wish ALL the offenders were tried on criminal charges and locked away from the kids forever.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to say that.
Precisely. The media is trying to judge the Church on present day standards, when those were not in effect ANYWHERE when most of this abuse took place. And again, to clarify, this is NOT a defense of those who perpetrated these horrors on young people, but it’s a point of clarification of why the Church should not be singled out for wrongdoing, when it was doing nothing differently than any other institution of its day and time.