roddy116catholic priest's as well as other denominations are put right in front of your face because it makes for a good story from the medias point of view, as well as catholic priests who do this are condemned immediately from the church and turned over to the proper authorities.
Um, what? This is complete and utter bullshit. Half of the problem with the sexual abuse scandal wasn't just that the abuse was happening, but that the Church was actively covering it up, and transferring the perpetrators to different parishes where they could abuse more and different children. Worse, in some cases they actually got the kids to sign vows of silence, basically telling them that if they told anyone about being raped, they'd go to hell. And this isn't just a few incidents; the Church itself commissioned a report on the US alone that found 4000 different priests investigated for child molestation. The report from Ireland alone on this is about 3000 pages long. It's insanity.
And the vast majority of perpetrators will never even be known about, because this has been going on for centuries.
Just to quote the opening from one of the better write-ups on this scandal,
"I confess that, as a critic of religion, I have paid too little attention to the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. Frankly, it always felt unsportsmanlike to shoot so large and languorous a fish in so tiny a barrel. This scandal was one of the most spectacular “own goals” in the history of religion, and there seemed to be no need to deride faith at its most vulnerable and self-abased.
Even in retrospect, it is easy to understand the impulse to avert one’s eyes: Just imagine a pious mother and father sending their beloved child to the Church of a Thousand Hands for spiritual instruction, only to have him raped and terrified into silence by threats of hell. And then imagine this occurring to tens of thousands of children in our own time — and to children beyond reckoning for over a thousand years. The spectacle of faith so utterly misplaced, and so fully betrayed, is simply too depressing to think about.
But there was always more to this phenomenon that should have compelled my attention. Consider the ludicrous ideology that made it possible: The Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behaviors taboo. Indeed, this organization
still opposes the use of contraception, preferring, instead, that the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives. As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy — or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty, and death by AIDS.
Add to this inhumanity the artifice of cloistered celibacy, and you now have an institution — one of the wealthiest on earth — that preferentially attracts pederasts, pedophiles, and sexual sadists into its ranks, promotes them to positions of authority, and grants them privileged access to children. Finally, consider that vast numbers of children will be born out of wedlock, and their unwed mothers vilified, wherever Church teaching holds sway — leading boys and girls by the thousands to be abandoned to Church-run orphanages only to be raped and terrorized by the clergy. Here, in this ghoulish machinery set to whirling through the ages by the opposing winds of shame and sadism, we mortals can finally glimpse how strangely perfect are the ways of the Lord."