I hate the abusers and those that protected them. But to me they are not the Church. They bring great shame and scandal to the Church and I think it is long past time for some very serious house cleaning. With rules that allow no wiggle room when credible accounts of abuse are received and where the victim does not request not involving the police (I mean adult victims who are reporting long ago abuse not children who report current abuse) the authorities must be informed. If there is a separate investigation by the Diocese all information that is pertinent to establishing the facts in the allegations must be shared with the civil authorities.
If a priest is found guilty either by internal investigation or by the courts he should be removed from any public ministry. There should be no transfers unless that is the only way to assure he is not in public ministry.
But mainly we have to pray that good men don’t balk at becoming priests because of the scandal and because of the hatred it instills towards the Church.
For many it has little to do with hating the Catholic Church. It has a lot to do with seeing the abuse happen to school mates and seeing the devastation in elderly parishoners who are incredulous that such a thing could happen.
Credit? The problem only continues to grow.
It's who Rome is.
sucker-punch
lol. Ah, yes. All information not vetted by Rome is a lie.
Wake up, Roman Catholics. Your children are being destroyed, physically, mentally and spiritually.
Well, I am a new Catholic and, since I was raised with a protestant sensibility and I did not experience a childhood filled with reverence for the clergy, I have a few observations:
1) The Church contains all truth, and, as such, is holy and indefectible.
2) There is a longstanding homosexual subculture among the clergy in Western Europe and the United States (at least). The men who belong to, or are sympathetic to, this subculture are not being reached quickly or effectively by the criminal process, and, as long as they remain in place, they continue to protect each other and cause enormous harm.
3) The extirpation of this evil, while to some extent the job of the civil power, is much, much more so the responsibility of the Church.
4) The Church, for reasons which must seem cogent to the men of our time charged with shepherding her forward, is not doing a very good job at exposing these criminals, nor is she presenting a coherent theological accounting of their sins and the consequences thereof.
Defensiveness on the part of Catholics is understandable, in a human sense. Enemies of the Church are wielding the scandals like a club, and the desire to deflect their blows is only natural. But this natural defensiveness is both obstructing the complete removal of what the Holy Father correctly calls "filth" infesting the priesthood, and is relocating responsibility for avoiding further harm onto small children through diocesan "safety" programs, when the only safety program that needs doing is the removal from the priesthood and the episcopate of all sexually active homosexuals who desire relations with young men and boys, the identities of whom are surely known widely throughout the entire institution.