Usually, it's the conservatives who dwell on crime, recycling their outrage time and time again. Benghazi comes to mind. I just realized the other day that only 4 Americans died in the attack. The story has been repeated and amplified so many times, that nobody knows what happens. I do have sympathy for the families of those four diplomats who died, but I really don't want Mrs. Clinton to go to prison for their deaths.

In my community, we have a group that is very strongly organized in opposition to our homeless shelter. Anytime a transient is arrested, the group will beat the story to the ground, repeating and amplifying it over and over again. There was a wheelchair-bound homeless man in a cowboy hat who came into our choir practice one night. He was a little intoxicated, but not bad; so we let him stay and listen. I was afraid I was going to have to force him to leave when I was locking up the doors, but he was already gone. The next day, I learned that he had left the church and gotten involved in a disturbance next door. The father of a teenage boy said the homeless man had "assaulted" his son. I learned later that it was a VERBAL assault, a detail the father managed to omit, along with the fact that the assaulter was in a wheelchair. In other words, an old man in a wheelchair yelled at a kid. The father repeated the story at a hearing before the County Board of Supervisors almost a year longer, adding that Joe Offer was responsible for the crime because he failed to call the police when the man was listening to the choir practice.

But it seems we have our little group here who dwell on crime, too. I was wondering about the Abuse Tracker that mg reads daily. Turns out, it is part of the bishopaccountability Website that I use as my main source of information.

I do believe that justice must be done in these cases, that criminals should be prosecuted and punished, and victims should be compensated. But I think a reasonable statute of limitations would be 20 or 25 years after the victim reaches adulthood. Even after 20 years, evidence gets very stale and it becomes impossible to reconstruct what happened with any accuracy.

And I really don't think that this feeding frenzy of abuse trackers is a healthy thing for anybody. Life goes on. We can't live our lives obsessed with crime. I agree with Donuel about the value of the movie "Doubt," and I think "Spotlight" was excellent. We need to come to an understanding of all this and do our best to ensure it does not happen again. But dwelling on the whole thing and repeating it over and over, is just like the Benghazi addicts do. This obsession with Catholic sex crimes does seem to be an addiction for some people.

-Joe Offer-