It could in the end turn out to be no more than ugly rumor mongering, but somehow the notion that when the current pope was a bishop he winked at such drastically personally injurious practices in situations where he could have intervened, has to be credibly answered. It’s way past the point of keeping it quiet to avoid driving people out of what they believe is the only place to get a gospel of salvation.
The answer is not something like, “the members of the Southern Baptist Convention have an equal proportion of pedophile clergy.” (No I am not a Baptist.) Those hurt children in the former case didn’t go to the Baptist church. They went to the Catholic church. They are still crying in pain.
I agree. So let the anti-Christian left provide all the verifiable, credible evidence they have to prove this "story." Unless they can, then they are guilty of slander, and they deserve to be beaten back hard by the Vatican.
We can't simply presume that someone is guilty of something when the accuser won't provide credible, verifiable evidence of any wrongdoing and the party being accused won't mount a defense as a result.
Generous settlements have assuaged much of their pain and that of their lawyers; entire dioceses have been bankrupted over this.
There has been explanation after explanation, new policy after new policy, apology after apology...and nothing is ever enough because the whole point is not to deal with the problem of child abuse, but to destroy the Church.
There is no way to go back in time and change things. Many of the responses of the Church were, unfortunately, just the same as the responses of the secular world at that time(therapy and a way too trusting treatment of offenders with children, and nearly complete tolerance of gay ephebophiles). The Church should have been different from secular society, but it wasn’t.
Curiously, I see no cry for apologies over Board of Ed policies that left sex offenders teaching in schools (because the unions protected their employment records), no apologies from courts that for years in the 1970s and 1980s gave laughably light sentences to child molesters and sexual psychopaths, no demand for apologies from people like Obama’s education administration candidate who was in favor of child sex...the people who are so “concerned” about child molestation are curiously selective in their outrage.