The bottom line is that it's way past time for the Catholic Church to get a calendar and a clue; the Middle Ages were over a long time ago, and ecclesiastical privilege is no longer an option. The Borgias & Medicis could get away with this kind of shit, but it's 2002 now, and things have changed everywhere except within the Catholic Church.

Until they allow their clergy to have normal, healthy life experiences, they will never attract normal, healthy people (men AND women) to the clergy. So deviant a system can only lead to deviant behaviour, in my opinion. The idea of placing people who are forbidden the ordinary facets of life such as a healthy, mutually consinsual sexual partnership, parenthood, etc., in a position to council real people on anything would be ludicrous if it weren't so disturbing in this day and age.

The fact that the administrative powers-that-be were aware of these situations & not only covered them up but allowed them to continue by reassigning offending priests to places where they could destroy and pollute the lives of new & equally unsuspecting victims is so abhorrent and so far past anything suggested by so weak a term as "criminal" that words actually fail me to adequately express my disgust & loathing for so irredeemably corrupt an organisation.

That a person would so heinously abuse a CHILD whil hypocritically posing as a spiritual guide and leader is beneath contempt. There is no acceptable excuse or apology.