When will the Church stop forgiving child abuse among the Clergy?

These examples are quoted to scotch another favourite "fib" by the apologists, that the sex abuse occurred decades ago, and that the Churches have it in hand nowadays.

Another lie is that the Church didn't understand. The Catholic Church has existed for 2000 years so it is its business to understand. In modern times: "The first [U.S.] public discussion of priest sexual abuse of minors was at a meeting sponsored by the National Association for Pastoral Renewal held ... [at the U.S.] Notre Dame University in 1967. All American Catholic bishops were invited to that meeting." -- A. W. Richard Sipe, psychotherapist (member Benedictine order 1953-70), in the Sipe Report, paragraph 22. This professionally-prepared report gives enough facts to alert even the doziest of bishops that the sex abuse of minors cannot be "cured" by present-day Church methods, nor by modern science.

The situation was so bad more than 15 years ago that the US independent newspaper, the National Catholic Reporter, on June 7, 1985, named every convicted US priest, in an effort to get the bishops to stop the clergy corrupting young people - but the "forgiveness", "repentance", and transfers of serial paedophiles continued. That same year lawyer F. R. Mouton, Church canon law expert Father T. P. Doyle, and Father M. Peterson wrote a scholarly report on the problem, and sent it to every Catholic bishop in the USA. The report was discussed at their national conference.

In 1986 Jason Berry won the U.S. Catholic Press Association Award for his coverage of clerical sex abuse. In 1992 Berry published Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children. It won the Wilbur Award and a Catholic Press Association Book Award.

In 1993 the US R.C. bishops seemed to accept a special report on the sex-abuse scandal, and adopted reform rules.

In the US the problem had started years before in some outrageous breaks with traditional holiness in their training establishments (seminaries), and a book about that aspect Goodbye, Good Men by Michael S. Rose was published in 2002 in Washington.

The global sex problem includes even teenage and adult abuse (including mistresses and nuns, both of whom have started organisations in various countries seeking redress!).

Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), which started in Boston early in 2002, estimates that U.S. Catholics have been deprived of tens of millions of dollars in payments to victims (both "hush money" and real compensation and counselling), plus huge legal fees, plus giving the afflicted priests new addresses and funding.

Insurance companies refuse to cover all the costs now, because they rightly say that the Church leaders have brought the problem on themselves by repeatedly "forgiving" predatory repeat offenders.

In my view, many bishops have no real idea of ruling, possibly because they are recruited from celibate ranks. It is a truism that celibacy attracts too high a percentage of the wrong applicants, including those who are timid, and is a "snare" to the devout. Celibacy is not the whole cause, however.

Some of the other religious establishments also have problem clergy (a married rabbi, Israel Kestenbaum, 54 or 55, of Highland Park, New Jersey pleaded not guilty on February 21 in an "internet date" entrapment, and in Britain a mosque staff member was accused in recent years).

There is a daily stream of reports of arrests, discoveries of incriminating documents, compensation payments and "hush money," attempts by Church lawyers to claim defences of religious liberty and separation of Church and State under the US Constitution, criticism of the Church from the judiciary, attempts to remove Church assets from the power of the courts, suicides (latest is Jeff Alfieri, 43, February 18, at Kirkland), attempted murder, etc. arising out of clergy paedophilia.

In Ireland some years ago a government fell because of a cover-up of clergy paedophilia. In February 2002 it was revealed there had been a secret attempt to make the taxpayer foot the bill for the abuses in orphanages, even while a body was being exhumed regarding a suspicious death of an orphan.

It can't ALL be a result of "mass media obsession," or even of "deep-seated anti-Catholicism" as one apologist put it.