Sorry, Raggytash, but that's not the way I see it. I can't say that you personally have put any blame on me, and I respect you for that - but I still think you're obsessed with this matter.

But there are plenty of others who have heaped all sorts of bullshit on me. You don't have to look far in this thread to see it.

For the record, I acknowledged this sex abuse scandal and have been following it closely long before most of you ever heard of it. I have never denied the crimes or the coverups if they were supported with reasonable evidence; but I have also heard a lot of rumors and conspiracy theories that just don't make sense. And I have seen many, many 30-year-old stories reported here at Mudcat as new evidence, when in fact the same stories have been the basis of hundred-message threads a year or a month before.

So, all this hulabaloo makes it appear that there are new sex crimes happening in the Catholic Church every moment, when the fact of the matter is that it all happened thirty years ago. The crimes happened, and they are serious - but this is not the primary thing that goes on in the Catholic Church and most Catholics never experience or witness any of this.

I experience a very similar phenomenon in my community, a small town of maybe 20,000 people and about 250 homeless people. Yes, it's true that the homeless people can be bothersome at times, and they do commit petty crimes on occasion. There is an organized group in town who are absolutely obsessed about the homeless situation, and they make it seem that the town is under constant attack by homeless people. Some people get all upset if they even see a homeless person within a few blocks of their home, and there are leaders who take delight in getting people upset about the "plague" of homeless people in our community. I'm one of the most vocal advocates for our homeless shelter, so I'm the target of a lot of angry verbiage. People have accused me of all sorts of horrible things. This week, I gave a man an old sleeping bag that had my name on it - I wonder what trouble is going to happen once the sleeping bag gets left behind and somebody finds my name on it.

I saw an old homeless man in a wheelchair at our church choir practice, and then he went over to the school gym next door. The next day, I heard a kid at the gym had been assaulted by a homeless man. Turns out, the guy in the wheelchair yelled at a kid, and this was termed a "verbal assault." But when the kid's anti-homeless father told the story, he neglected to mention the wheelchair and the fact that the "assault" was only verbal. A year later, the father told the story at a county Board of Supervisors meeting, and he blamed me by name for the incident because I hadn't called the cops when the man was watching our choir practice.

That's what I mean. Crime does happen, and it is a serious problem -
but most often it's not anywhere as serious as people think it is. Stories of minor incidents get repeated over and over again and distorted into something far more serious than the reality. Stories of serious incidents are changed and repeated so often, that people get the impression that they are surrounded by crime.

So it is in the Catholic Church. In everyday life in Catholic parishes, there is very little awareness on the sexual abuse of children by priests. Everybody acknowledges that it happens on occasion, but very few people have and direct knowledge of such incidents. But from the outside, there's a distorted view that child abuse is an everyday occurrence in the Catholic Church, and Catholics are covering the whole thing up.

That's what these constant threads do - they present a very distorted view of the Catholic Church as some sort of evil mind-control place. In actuality, a Catholic parish is just a place where people go to play bingo on Wednesday and have fish frys on Friday and spend an hour at Mass on Sunday. For the most part, Catholic parishes are disgustingly normal, but they're nice communities to be part of.

So, you bigots go on with your obsessions. But I think you're crazy.

-Joe-