I care about all churches.
If you notice I’ve even posted recently about some non christian ones like the FLDS just last week or were you paying attention?
The Catholic Church and Sexual Abuse, Then and Now
The institution of the Catholic Church finds itself in a period of extraordinary crisis.
An August 2018 grand jury report on clerical sex abuse in six Pennsylvania dioceses gave a detailed, often graphic account of decades of criminal offenses against minors by Catholic priests. Other states have since launched their own investigations. Evidence that church superiors—bishops, archbishops, and even popes—failed to address abuses effectively has only amplified the outrage.
Some church leaders were found to have engaged in such acts themselves. A leading figure of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the former cardinal and archbishop of Washington, Theodore E. McCarrick, had a long and widely rumored history of misconduct against priests, seminarians, and several minors. Pope Francis ordered McCarrick to observe “a life of prayer and penance in seclusion” before accepting his resignation in July 2018. In an extraordinary measure, he was removed from the priesthood in February 2019.
All of these tragedies are tinged with a sense of déjà vu. Similar patterns of abuse have been front-page news in the United States since an explosive 2002 investigation by the Boston Globe (subject of the 2015 Academy Award-winning film Spotlight), but the problem was known decades earlier.
The intractability and pervasiveness of the problem suggest that it is deeply rooted in the Church’s own history. In fact, several explanations proffered in heated debates about the current crisis—especially among Catholics—are wrapped in historical judgments, particularly about the development of the Roman Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).
Some Church critics point to an ossified church structure and antiquated norms of sex and gender, including clerical celibacy and a male priesthood. Others denounce the subversion of the clergy by an assumed gay subculture or, more broadly, changing sexual mores since the 1960s.