The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #152856   Message #3578195
Posted By: Joe Offer
22-Nov-13 - 07:27 PM
Thread Name: BS: The Pope's Survey
Subject: RE: BS: The Pope's Survey
No, mg, there is no direct mention of child molestation on the UK version of the survey, the only official one I've seen. There's plenty of room for people to make comments on the matter if it's pertinent, however.
In the United States, this matter was studied extensively in the late 1990s, and reforms were put in place in 2002. The matter is on the agenda of every U.S. bishops' meeting, but usually only for updates on the progress of the reforms. Similar reforms have more recently been put in place in the rest of the world.
I think if you look at the dates of the offenses on the bishop-accountability.org Website, you'll see that very few offenses were committed after the year 2000 - and those were dealt with swiftly and severely by church authorities. The Catholic priest child molestation scandal is more-or-less behind us, although the consequences will linger for a long time to come. Note, by the way, that bishop-accountability.org is a lay organization established to confront Catholic bishops with the reality and scope of the scandal they were responsible for. For the most part, the bishops finally got the message and took action.

But I just looked through the list of Wisconsin priests who were accused. I knew a lot of them when I was in the seminary in the 1960s, and some of them were people I liked very much. That's very troubling to me.

-Joe-