Gee, ollaimh, I think I AM pretty calm in this discussion. I don't deny that that there has been abuse and sexual molestation of children in the Catholic Church, and I don't deny that many of those in authority have covered up crimes or at least have responded to the crimes with appalling ineptitude. It is a scandal, and it is indeed a horrible scandal. Many who should be prosecuted and imprisoned for these crimes have not been prosecuted, and that is wrong.

The scandal hit first here in the United States, and we went through the embarrassing stage of "official" denial that the Catholic Church in Europe is now going through. As you can see on this page, the bishops of the United States met in 2002 and commissioned a third-party study of the scandal. The U.S. bishops also instituted a system of strict controls intended to prevent future sexual molestation of children. It wasn't a perfect response and it was far too late, but it was a good and strong response. By 2005, the number of new reports of molestation had dwindled, and generous settlements were paid to most victims within a year or two after that. We still get waves of press reports of sexual abuse cases in the U.S. Catholic Church, but most of these reports pertain to abuses that were reported and compensated years ago.

No, we still haven't heard of all the incidents of abuse in the United States. I'm still shaken by a new report I heard last week that I haven't seen in the press. This report, which was "deemed credible" by church authorities, was against a now-deceased priest I knew and liked when I was in the seminary in high school and college.

But most of the U.S. incidents have been reported and dealt with. Many of the victims were given generous settlements decades ago, when the "going price" of a settlement was $25,000 to $40,000. Many of those victims received additional payments in recent years, at the "going price" of a million dollars. The US cases reported in the press now, are generally cases that were reported and handled and compensated thirty years ago - but now the press questions whether the response was fast enough and generous enough and whatnot.

In the US, the response has now taken place. Now is the time for study and for rational discussion, to find out why the problem happened, how church authorities should have responded, and how to prevent the problem can be prevented in the future. The press has done its job - over a number of years, it has exposed the problem, in all its ugliness. In the Catholic Church in United States, now is the time for study and for healing.

The scandal was first exposed in Ireland much more recently, maybe only in the last 2-3 years, and I'm sure that there will be many more reports of abuses. And within the last year, the scandal has come to a head in Great Britain and the European Continent. The "denial" stage hasn't ended in Europe. At Easter, there was a barrage of statements from highly-placed church officials, attempting to downplay the scandal or shift the blame. I heard a number of bishops and cardinals make statements that were incredibly insensitive, incredibly stupid, or both. One wonders where they got the nerve to say outrageous things like that. You'd think they would have learned from the scandal in the US, and that they would have developed a rational and sensitive way of responding by now. But no, several European bishops said outrageous things at Easter, and I can't figure out WHAT they were thinking. Maybe their irrational Easter responses are a good thing - maybe it's an indication that the guilty ones are scared shitless, as well they should be. The shit has hit the fan in the European Catholic Church, and the next few years aren't going to be pretty.

OK, so I'm a seminary-trained Catholic lay leader and teacher, and I've worked in the Catholic Church all my life. For the past ten years, I have worked in a women's center run by Catholic nuns, and it's a wonderful place. The parishes I have belonged to have generally been quite good - and when they had problems, I worked hard to solve them. So, what do I do now, in the midst of all this? Do I stop working for the poor? Do I stop going to church? I acknowledge the bad in the Catholic Church and I deplore it, and I have worked against it for years and put up with abuse from Catholics who call me "unfaithful" for raising questions and objections. What am I supposed to do now? Stop everything, and throw out all the good I've known in the Catholic Church, along with the bad?

I have been aware of the problem of priests abusing children for thirty years, and I first became involved in working to resolve the problem in about 1985. Now, after all this time, I see that there is now an international wave of outrage against the child abuse and molestation. But, as often happens, the outrage comes like buckshot, and is directed even at those who worked to solve the problem thirty to fifty years ago. The same thing happened to black and white people who worked in the early years of the Civil Rights movement in the US - white civil rights volunteers were condemned because they were white, and early black civil rights leaders were condemned as "Uncle Toms" because they preached tolerance and nonviolence. Americans were condemned as a nation during the George Bush administration, even though more than half the voters cast their vote against Bush in 2000. Americans were condemned for the Vietnam War, forgetting all the dedicated American people who worked so hard and so long to oppose the war. Whenever we lump all members of a group together and condemn them all for the misdeeds of a few, that's bigotry. And yes, that happens frequently here. Certainly, it's not in every message and it's not expressed by every Mudcatter, but there certainly IS a lot of bigotry here, and it often overwhelms attempts to discuss issues rationally.

And that all I'm asking for, a rational discussion, one that argues from the facts and gives credit where credit is due. I seek a discussion that actually attempts to understand and resolve the problem, rather that just wildly firing the shotgun of blame.

-Joe-