"Jim, you seem so reasonable and analytical on most topics - but on this one, you come out with a shotgun. I'd like to see a rational discussion of this topic, but all you can do is blast away with your blanket condemnations."
Joe,
Please look at what happened and is still happening here.
Over at the very least fifty years members of the church systematically and without check brutalised and raped children in their care.
This behaviour, (only when it leaked to the outside world) was dealt with with secrecy by the church, despite the fact that the clergy involved had commited criminal acts. The officers of the church bullied the victims and their families into silence.
The priests involved were moved on to continue their abuse.
It transpires that many leading churchmen were part of the cover-up, yet, the few who have eventually resigned did so reluctantly and with extremely bad grace.
While expressing 'sadness' at no time has the church leadership taken responsibility for the crimes committed under the cover of the church.
A couple of weeks ago a group of victims stood up in church to protest the presece of a clergman who was involved in the cover-ups - they were booed and barracked out of the church by the congregation.
If this didn't happen, please tell me where I have got it wrong.
I find all this utterly and completely outrageous - what is unreasonable about that? What, of what I have just written, did not happen?   
You did not answer my earlier question; (if I have missed it, please point your answer out) if this had taken place within the education system, what would your reaction be?
I grew up in non-catholic England where the power of the church was much less than it is here in Ireland - even so, as the child of an excommunicated Catholic father (for opposing fascism in Spain), I was fully aware from an early age of the fear invoked by the church and the clergy. I saw that fear in my mother and in my Irish relatives when I visited them here and in the UK.
I have no wish to see the church disappear - I have associated with older Irish Catholics enough to know the important part it played in their lives. But I never again want to see it attain the hold over peoples minds and lives that it once had.
In the light of past events is that unreasonable?
Jim Carroll