I think we're talking a different language, Smokey - or maybe we have a completely different understanding of the authority of the Catholic Church.
Crime exists in all societies - and the Catholic Church is a society. Crime is an aberrance, a type of conduct that is socially unacceptable. It is not to the advantage of any society or organization to accept aberrant behavior, because it interferes with the operation of the organization. Bishops (with few exception) don't want child molestation or abuse to exist within their domains - it just doesn't make sense for them to want such a thing.

Bishops are the Upper Management within the Catholic Church, and there's an interesting phenomenon about Upper Managers - they expect to be obeyed (and outsiders expect that they will be obeyed) - but they measure obedience by success, not by actual obedience to their dictates. Now, if you've worked in a bureaucracy for any amount of time, you know that's absurd - subordinates pretend to accept whatever a manager says, and then they go and do whatever they think is best. If that didn't happen, organizations would never survive the harebrained theories that managers come up with. Managers live in a different world, so most often this passive-aggressive disobedience of management desires happens very smoothly (and it's a good thing it does). And more often than not, the results are successful, because the people who do the work want their work to succeed.

There's a problem with this, though: miscreants can also take advantage of this system of operation. In the Catholic Church, the child abusers and molesters are ostensibly the most obedient to the dictates of the hierarchy. It's well-known that child molesters are very charming and convincing - that's how they get kids to go along with them. Their charm also works with Upper Management (read: bishops). Child molesters and abusers are experts at ass-kissing, and bishops (and all Upper Managers) are very susceptible to ass-kissing. Upper Managers aren't programmed to react positively to people who say, "Hey, wait! This is wrong!" - so they're much more likely to respond positively to the ass-kissing of the miscreants.

This absurdity works the same in any large bureaucracy - it's just that the Catholic Church is the Ultimate Bureaucracy, since it is old, huge, and entrenched in tradition and illusions of authority. So, not only is the Catholic Church the Ultimate Bureaucracy, it is the Ultimately Absurd Bureaucracy.

I don't think most of the bishops are bad men, even though they mishandled the child abuse and molestation scandal so miserably. It's just that they are Consummate Bureaucrats, people who are almost completely incapable of thinking outside the box. Child molestation and abuse isn't supposed to happen - when it does happen, the Catholic bishops are utterly incapable of dealing with it.

And so, we have this horrible mess. Since the 1960s, many brilliant and dedicated people have spoken out against the problem of abuse and molestation in the Catholic Church. And for the most part, the bishops didn't begin to listen until the beginning of the millennium, when it began to cost them money.

But most of these bishops aren't bad people - they're just incompetent.

I guess I have to put this in strong language so people understand: the Catholic Church is profoundly fucked up - but that doesn't mean the people in it are bad. The administration of the Catholic Church is a huge, absurd bureaucracy. But it's not bad. It's just fucked up.

-Joe-