I don't see destruction as an appropriate response to wrongdoing. Even if a person has committed a crime, I don't think it's a good response to destroy or kill the criminal or what he/she has created. There has to be a better way for a civilized society to respond to crime.

I've been working for jail reform since 2008, and I worked with correctional institutions on the job from 1974-99. I've always had this question - how can we respond to crime in constructive ways?

I've known about the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church since my seminary days in the 1960s, and I've always pondered about the way to respond to it. At the time, US Catholic bishops treated child molesters as mentally ill, and they spent millions on treatment centers to rehabilitate priests who had molested children. After the centers certified the priests as "rehabilitated," the bishops reassigned the errant priests to new parishes. Obviously, that didn't work.

Since 1983, the National Catholic Reporter newspaper has been reporting child abuse by priests, but bishops have largely dismissed the newspaper as a "liberal rag." I've been a subscriber since the 1960s, so I guess I'm suspect. In response to the Spotlight investigation by the Boston Globe in 2002, US Catholic bishops instituted strict controls on the sexual abuse of children, and offenses dropped dramatically. Actions against abusing priests took place in other countries over the next ten years or so. The trouble was, no criminal prosecution could be made against many of the offenders, because the offenses took place beyond statutes of limitations. Civil lawsuits followed, and increasingly the lawsuits were filed against the churches, since the offenders had little money to pay reparations. Reparations were first thought to be generous when they were in the tens of thousands of dollars, and then it increased to hundreds of thousands, and then to a million bucks per victim.

The trouble is, those payments didn't heal the harm done to the victims. No amount of money and no amount of offender jail time can heal the victims. I do think that stricter controls on priests has helped. But nowadays, men are removed from the priesthood under very weak suspicion, and sometimes I wonder if this is fair.

Sexual abuse of children continues to take place in families, in schools, in youth organizations, and in churches. We haven't found the solution yet. And I don't know what the solution is.

It's really a stupid thing to suggest that anyone would support the molestation of children or the covering up of such a crime. That just doesn't happen. Such crimes are repulsive. Get that, Raggytash?