Ed, you fail to define the flaw in my analogy between a family and a church where child molestations occur. Where's the flaw?

What happens in a family when Sweet Uncle Chester molests a child? At first, the child or children say nothing, because they're confused and maybe scared. Then, when they say something, adults don't understand. When the adults begin to understand, they can't believe that such a nice man would molest children, and they're sure the children must be confused somehow. And when they finally understand, Chester's wife puts up a fuss and stops the family from doing anything for a while, because she feels she and her husband have been betrayed by the family. Finally, somebody calls the police - but years may have passed since the first incident. Many molestation cases are hidden in families for generations.

Well, the same dynamic happens in a church - except that in a church or any institution, the institution gets blamed and the molester is largely forgotten; and the church ends up with a damaged reputation and a big bill to pay.

The big difference between molestation in a family and molestation in a church, is that the family is not financially liable for crimes that take place within the family. They may have to pay bills for treatment, but not million-dollar settlements.

That being said, yes it is an absolute shame and a scandal that such things happen in churches, and coverups and callousness are inexcusable. The Catholic Church should have had systems in place that made it easier to detect, report, respond to such crimes.

But don't think for a moment that any program is going to stop molesters. Most likely, any molester will commit a number of crimes against a number of victims before he is caught. There are no sure-fire methods of detecting potential molesters; and there are no sure-fire treatments to cure molesters, either.

In 1968, the members of my seminary class were the first in the diocese to go through a battery of psychological tests and interviews that were supposed to root out people with psychosexual problems. The process was only moderately embarrassing and demeaning at the time, but it got worse. I understand that in later years, psychologists required seminarians to look at child pornography and other types of pornography to see if the young men would be sexually aroused by it. And there is no evidence that any of this extensive and expensive testing did much to prevent child molestation. However, I have to admit that I felt there was an unhealthy sexual "charge" to the atmosphere when I was a college seminarian - guys hitting on other guys and such. After the testing, six or seven members of my class didn't show up for class one Monday morning, and we learned they had been asked to leave the seminary. And the sexual charge disappeared, so maybe the testing DID do some good.

In the US in the 1970s, the Catholic bishops built several treatment centers for priest with sexual or alcohol problems, and they spent millions on treatment programs and believed these programs would "cure" errant priests. Well, the treatment programs didn't work, either.

So, Ed, it's not that people didn't care or that nothing was done. It's that the programs the bishops believed in, didn't work. Yes, there were far too many coverups and far too much callousness, but this really didn't happen in most cases. More often, people just didn't know how to handle these problems, and they made horrible mistakes.

Ed, you seem to think that the all-powerful Pope should have stepped in and told those nasty molesters not to molest, and they should have obeyed since they were priests and supposed to be obedient - and since they didn't obey, the Pope was a failure. It just doesn't work that way. Nobody knows how to prevent child molestation, and nobody knows what's the right thing to do once it happens.

The whole thing was a horrible mess, and the Catholic Church handled it horribly - there's no doubt about that. The Catholic Church in the U.S. has developed all sorts of controls that are supposed to prevent such a scandal from happening again - but who knows if the controls will work? And will these controls be implemented in other countries, and will they work there? Who knows???

Ed, you say the pope should take charge of this whole thing, but I don't think that's a good idea. It's much better handled on a national level, because there all sorts of cultural implications to take into consideration. That being said, the current Pope has dealt quite sternly with national councils of bishops who have not dealt with this problem seriously. John Paul II did very little, and barely even acknowledged the problem. For the last ten years of his papacy, he was probably too sick to function as Pope. He should have resigned, but he saw himself as a living martyr, suffering for his people. Give me a break....

If you want to get a good perspective of the child molestation scandal in the Catholic Church, watch the Meryl Streep movie Doubt. Maybe then you'll understand that there are no easy answers.

-Joe-