[Yaelle]

While yes, I am sure there are fraudulent cases, please don’t close your hearts to all the victims there ARE. I have some association with SNAP, and there are wonderful grown men (and women) who can give you excruciating details and names as to their abuse at the hands of clergy (or other authorities). And though the Catholic Church gets the worst rap (I believe because some pedophiles CHOOSE to fake their calling and go Into the priesthood to avoid trappings of normal marriage and to have a higher than thou vantage point and access to young victims), there are pedophiles in the Protestant and in the Jewish — even the orthodox — clergy too.

To use your power, and abuse Gd’s, in order to destroy children is so evil, no house of worship should ever focus on some who want to get in on a scam when there are living, breathing, precious people who have been abused.

[Salvation]

I agree that prayers are needed for all.

[bitterohiogunclinger]

“grown men (and women) who can give you excruciating details and names as to their abuse at the hands of clergy (or other authorities).”
The problem that I have that the story brings into focus is the very fact that there exists a “forum” where the details and names are bandied about among potential litigants.

[metmom]

And though the Catholic Church gets the worst rap (I believe because some pedophiles CHOOSE to fake their calling and go Into the priesthood to avoid trappings of normal marriage and to have a higher than thou vantage point and access to young victims), there are pedophiles in the Protestant and in the Jewish — even the orthodox — clergy too.

Which is exactly why the Catholic church needs to reevaluate its *Once a priest, always a priest* mentality and defrock those who are convicted of abuse or who admit it.

The church's handling of known cases of abuse is inexcusable at the most basic level and their failure to act on it only allowed it to continue.

By defrocking those who are known abusers, especially those who went into the priesthood under false pretenses in order to have access to children, it will eliminate that element from the priesthood.

If a marriage can be annulled because one of the parties went into it with false intent, thereby making it not a legitimate marriage as defined by the church, then how can the ordination of a pedophile who went into the priesthood under false pretenses be valid and how can the sacraments said deceiver administered be valid?

The mental gymnastics Catholics go through to justify this situation is unbelievable.

[Prince of Space]

These priests are not pedophiles, they are homosexual men. Eighty-five percent of the victims were boys, and most of those were young adolescent males.