"Whenever we lump all members of a group together and condemn them all for the misdeeds of a few,"
Once again you are evading the issue of what has happened and is still happening Joe.
Yes, a few clerics abused children (we don't know how 'few' yet; this week another 190 cases of abuse have been revealed in Ireland, dating as far back as 1950). The condemnation of this that has rightly followed these revelations is not aimed at all Catholics, but, firstly at the abusers, then at the own Church's reaction to these abuses; some of the sharpest critics of the behaviour of the church here at present have been practicing Catholics.
The church, as an organisation, hid the abuses and allowed the abusers to continue raping children, bullying the victims into silence with spiritual blackmail - it became an complicit to crimes, before and after the fact. Apart from a few bland murmerings of sympathy, at no time has the church (as an organisation) taken any responsibility for the abuses carried out on children under their care and it's own failure to act on the abuses, either in preventing them or bringing the abusers to justice.
While this continues to happen the ordinary, good Catholics and the non-abusive clergy will be caught in the crossfire and will have become victims themselves.
Why aren't you screaming this message from the rooftops rather than persistantly putting the whole affair down to a few bad apples?
Jim Carroll