To say that 350 priests were discharged last year alone, and that the scandal is mounting, is not enough to condemn the entire ecclesial body.
350 priests is not even 1% of the total in pastoral service in the U.S. If you extrapolate from those 350 (a number I will confirm, in any case) to an assumption that the majority of priests are guilty of the same thing, and you do so with no other data, that is prejudicial and unwarranted.
I won't disagree that many bishops have done grave harm to individuals and the Church. But at the same time please recall that Abp. Law, perhaps the most visible of offenders, was merely following in most cases the advice of psychiatrists treating offenders in the Boston Archdiocese. I will also admit that preventing scandal at great cost to victims is not right, but it is also not accurate to protray most of what happened as unthinking or deliberate. In Boston in particular, medical advice prompted returning offenders to pastoral service.
What if this had happened to any but the Catholic Church? Well, it has, and in greater frequncy. Those stories did not become big because those churches did not have the power or wealth of the Catholic Church.
Promoting the stories of Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, and myriad of sectarian ministers charged with the same sins and crimes won't sell papers or damage public morality nearly to the extent that sensationalizing a Catholic Church scandal may. You have been led to believe that the problem is far greater than outside, objective data has so far revealed. Can harboring that angry belief help anyone?
In any case, know God, know peace.
You've got to be kidding! A priest molests a young boy, a report is made to the bishop, and, in almost every case, the bishop did nothing!
Only when it appeared that a priest had a "problem," (i.e., he raped more than one boy), was he referred to psychologists.
I don't think this was unthinking at all; it was one hundred percent deliberate!
Bishops moved priests who had molested young boys, allowing them to continue to molest.
Read that again.
If a priest had an affair with a woman, and then another, he would be asked to reconsider his vocation.
These guys? "Here Father. A chance for a fresh start!"
Your attempt at de minimis in comparing Catholic clergy to others is a smokescreen.
It is not the number involved, after all, but the way the offenses were handled.
In the case of Protestants, they were turned over the law.
In the case of Catholics, they got a nice, shiny new assignment.