How do christens justify child molestation?

[Rev. Rye]

Hard to take you seriously, but I’ll have a go.

They don’t ‘justify’ it. They hide it, conceal it, and use the institutional mechanisms of the Church to cover it up and protect the abusers. This is how we know they know it’s wrong - if there was a dogma that allowed it, they wouldn’t take the trouble to hide it.

Boru

Well, the higher-ups do. I think he’s talking about the ordinary believers. And, in that case, it’s either ignored (because their power intimidates people, whether this is because they actively silence critics or because said believers are conditions to be blinded from their wrongdoings by the perps’ power) or minimized as being the result of a few depraved (and usually homosexual) priests. To be fair, they may be right, depending on how you define “a few depraved priests,” since, if the statistic quoted in Spotlight still holds true, 6% of all priests offend against children, which leaves a less fucked-up majority of 94% (although only about half of the priesthood actually stays true to the vow of chastity, just doing more normal affairs, the sort of mala prohibita that only the church would give a shit about.) However, if the estimate of 414,582 Catholic Priests worldwide I found on Wikipedia, that adds up to 24,875 child molesting priests worldwide, which may not jibe with many definitions of “a few priests.”