"And your supporting evidence, Chris?"

Because they continue to have to be dragged to the courts screaming, kicking & biting. Crying all the way about monetary limits & caps on payments aside from hanging on to books & evidence that they covert & have their lawyers shield until they have no other choice. They should've come clean from the start but they always put themselves before their victims, at least untilthey're shamed & have their backs up against the walls,,,, in the same way they held their victims. They still to this day won't come clean.

"What about the orphanages Dickens wrote about in Oliver Twist, or the workhouses in England and Ireland"

Joe, could you point to any evidence of sexual abuse in Dickens or are you lumping child abuse & child labor as a catch all? Child abuse & child labor belongs in all our backgrounds.

My thoughts so far are that there is no proof yet that the sexual abuse in not a modern system wide (20th century) happening. That's because it wasn't a haven for predators until the system failed in where it wanted to go & how it was to get there in modern 20th century society & what it wanted to go after.

"The Catholic Church cooperated with slavery in the United States, and with the cruel dictatorships of South and Central America. Again, a terrible shame, but by far not the only source of such cruelty. All of our ancestors were complicit to some extent in such atrocities - it was not merely a Catholic phenomenon."

Think Native Americans & Native Hawaiians as the tip of an iceberg & the Cathloic (though they were not alone) as the first wave in the conquest. While colonizing far off lands they attracted a certain element of pious preachers hell bent of stealing resources. It was the same attraction then the only difference was the focus of the desires. Then it was resources now children, all done in the name of the Lord.
If the focus were saving souls maybe they would still be in the business.

So where, what & when was the start of the predators gravitating to become beacons of the church? What was the timing & where were they (the church)going when this all got beyond what would be rational (because at the moment it way beyond out of control)? They went off course somewhere. I always believed that the Catholic Church always had it's dark sides, ever since mid-evil :0) times as did other religions but not to this point there was a balance of give & take. "We take your________ we save your soul" but now it's way past the taking & not much in the giving.

If the predator percentages inside the church were the same as those outside the church it would not be this far out. I don't belive the percentages quoted above as 4% are true. Most of those were from the studies done in the early 90's when this 1st came to light. I mentioned a quote in the above links where LA was at 10%, this was in 2008 a much more recent study. Add to that that very few incedents go reported & very few victims (I think I read 5%) report so the suspected percentages are suspected to be much higher than prviously thought. Which to me makes perfect sense.
There is just to many cases for those privious 4% numbers to even be close to the mark.

Barry