Useful,informative and brave post Joe.

On the question of ratios, I've seen the proportion of offending priests put at 0.3 per cent, and that was said to be marginally lower than society in general and significantly lower than in some other movements which are traditionally targetted by paedophiles, eg scouting. But as I think you acknowledge, abuse by a priest is a betrayal of trust on a different scale from almost anything you could think of, and should have been dealt with much more pro-actively and aggressively by the hierarchy.

Joe, if you follow up that BBC link I gave earlier, you will find an edited transcript which includes an interview with a Fr Tom Daly, who was (by his account anyway) kicked out of the nuncio's office in Washington when he failed to go along with a cover-up policy. He said (I know I'm repeating this but it bears repeating) that victims were treated not just arrogantly but aggressively.

I had direct personal experience of the arrogance bit when I tried to raise the question of Archbishop Ward continuing in post in Cardiff, Wales, after two of his priests had been convicted of criminal behaviour that the archbish knew about (he actually recruited one of the two, knowing him to have been kicked out of another organisation for child abuse).

Ward himself had been suspended for a year while police investigated rape allegations against him, and was finally sacked by the pope last year. My journalistic enquiries, supported by two victims and eventually made via recorded delivery and including stamped, addressed envelopes, evoked no acknowledgement at all, either from the primate for England and Wales or from the apostolic nuncio.

Re the "what to do" question, I don't see that the newspapers come into it. Any suspicion of criminal behavioiur should be reported to the police, and if that results in newspaper coverage or encourage civil claims on the church coffers, frankly those should not be factors. Informing the police should be mandatory, yet it is not even mentioned in church guidelines. (In a recent UK case a bishop did indeed notify the police but also tipped off the suspected priest, giving him time to reformat his computer etc. The bishop's action in this case was itself criminal, but again the church guidelines should be absolutely explicit.)

Your point about control is fair enough, Joe. But America is simply not typical in this respect. In what I think I called "primitive" rural communities eg in France, southern Italy, etc, and notably Ireland, the authority of the church has been pervasive. As I said maybe in another thread, Dev actually allowed Archbishop McQuaid to dictate significant chunks of the Irish constitution.

McQuaid in fact effectively ruled the roost for more than 20 years. Perhaps none of his successors would have succeeded (as he did) in getting a public librarian sacked for being protestant, but his baleful influence has been in evidence until very recent times. In Dublin, if not so much beyond the Pale, there has now been a pronounced and I think irreversible reaction against catholic influence. I would guess this is also true in the post-totalitarian regimes of the Iberian countries, but don't know.