I pretty-much agree with John MacKenzie, too. I completely agree with John that people are personally to blame - that it's people who committed the crimes, and not the Church. And it's people who should be prosecuted. HOWEVER - my point about organizational theory is to illustrate how the Catholic Church operates, which is more-or-less the same as every organization. Most organizational heads live under the illusion that they have moral authority, that they have control of their organizations, and that they have a complete understanding of the essence of their organizations. Most often, that's not true - all they know is management. A bishop's office is no place to learn compassion, because bishops do not have direct contact with situations where compassion is required - mostly what people learn in bishops' offices is organizational structure and the use of power. I referred to the organizational structure of the Catholic Church in response to someone's statement about the Catholic Church "allowing their priests to homosexually (and otherwise) abuse children" [it's interesting to study how the word "allow" is used in this thread]. If we are to understand and fix the problem of child molestation in churches, it's important to understand the authority structure of the churches, which is far different from what many people think it is. Very few churches are able to get complete obedience from their clergy and members, and that's certainly the case in the Catholic Church. It's completely ludicrous to think that the Catholic Church can "allow" its clergy to commit crime; or to think that it can "forbid" such crimes and expect to be obeyed (despite the fact that some bishops DO expect to be obeyed). In understanding all this, it's important to understand that Catholic bishops and clergy and nuns and parishioners are just people - some are bad, and most are mediocre, and some are good. That fact has not been acknowledged in many of the threads discussing this problem, and that is my main objection to these threads.

Yes, there are evil bishops and evil functionaries in bishops' offices, but most of the people working in those offices are simply mindless bureaucrats. Yes, there are bishops and functionaries who have committed crimes and deserve prosecution - but there are many others who just didn't see or understand what was happening and followed the demands of the bureaucracy rather than the demands of compassion. For the most part, these latter people paid settlements and dealt with complaints as required, ands even removed most of the offending priests; but failed to do the hard work of setting up procedures that would help prevent this problem from happening again.

So, yes, there were bishops and church functionaries who committed crimes by covering up the crimes of molesting and abusing priests (and to make hairsplitting Peter/Fionn happy, I suppose that at this moment there ARE bishops and priests and functionaries who may be committing crimes at this very moment, but most likely most of them did it last week or earlier). Then there were many who more-or-less did what was required and really did nothing criminal. And there were a few who took strong, assertive action at the root of the problem. Interestingly, one of the bishops who did take strong action against child molesters was Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, a homosexual who paid a former lover a blackmail payment of some $486,000. But it appears that Weakland had actually loved the man who eventually blackmailed him, so that's another matter.

-Joe-