I too have taken care of people who were sexually abused. But I find your post overly naive as to the accusers of priests.
I don’t respect any “victim” who has something financially to gain by making a decades old allegation, frankly. Nor their lawyers, with dollar signs clouding their vision.
If they are not guilty then it will be revealed in the courts, we would hope, if they are quilty then they should have to pay. If the church is found to have hid their crime then they should have to pay the price....and I truly don’t care if it was twenty years ago...God doesn’t release us from sin just because time has passed...
What I won’t do is play into the role people who were victims are just going after cash cows. It has been the Vatican who has agreed a price in dollars warrents being given...I will stand with them on that and let the courts and those going thru the process determine the severity of the abuse and the appropriate dollars if any for each case. The idea is a penalty for the crime. What I would rather see is jail time.
I have family that are Priests...I’ve been a catholic all my life...known many Priests that are close friends of mine.I’ve never known any of them to abuse anyone. Our Priests have a bullseye on them and the shooter is the devil. Also I have known about the homosexual problem in the church before the scandals broke because of a catholic site I was visiting discovered this info on the net...and gave links...quite shocking, I couldn’t read the entire site and look at the graphic pictures...they also had a Yahoo Chat room, I don’t know if it exists today. Personall I believe our Church is on the road to gethesemane. When I saw the Pope attacked these past couple weeks..reminded me of when Christ was scandalized. All of us too are going to answer to God for our Priests. So many times I have had Priests ask me to pray for them. They need our constant prayers. They are such attacked both spiritually and mentally. They need our prayers. Look at Parish, the Priest, the parishners, divorce, children under the influence of drugs etc? Tells you the Priest needs prayers. A Holy Priest, the Parish flourishes and everyone is Blessed. Our Pope warned we would be going to a smaller church and asked for prayers against the wolves. We have to pray for our Priests to stay Holy, become Holy because without them we would not have the Eurcharist and we couldn’t survive in the world.