Jim sez: I would have thought that handling this in a correct and open manner is a matter of self-interest for the church

I think so, too, Jim. But I think that since about 2002, the Catholic Church has fairly quickly turned itself around on this matter. Yes, there are still some offenses and some coverups - but I think that the tide has turned and that Catholics are insisting on full disclosure about everything that has happened.

I said that the offense named in the original post - the Regensburger Domspatzen offenses - was first reported in 2010, and then re-reported in 2016 and again in 2017. In earlier posts in this thread, I said that my diocese was aware of a problem in the late 1960s and responded to it then by giving us seminarians rigorous psychological testing, and that other U.S. dioceses responded by building treatment centers in the 1970s, and that the National Catholic Reporter began reporting church sex offenses in 1983 and has published hundreds of critical articles since then. How is that misleading?

I think we need to examine the hundreds of individual offenses one by one, in detail, and determine exactly what happened and why. What's happening is that people are getting the distorted impression that sexual abuse happens all the time, everywhere there is a Catholic church. Catholic priests are incredibly disheartened because they're all suspects of crime now, and yet only 5 percent of them have actually committed the crimes - maybe up to 10 percent in some places, but the most credible percentage I've seen is 5 percent.

In the U.S., http://bishop-accountability.org/ has a database that reports on every diocese and every priest. It's not a pretty picture, but it reports the truth. And part of the truth is that at least 90 percent of priests are not guilty of sex offenses.

Presenting a distorted view of crime, whether it's shoplifting or child abuse, doesn't help anyone.

-Joe Offer-