How do christens justify child molestation?

[Rev. Rye]

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.”

See, I didn’t get that at all. He mentioned dogma and protection from the secular authorities, both of which would apply to the church hierarchy, not the laity.

Boru

That part could potentially apply to the laity, but only if you ignore how heavily the cards have been stacked against them in cases like this, whether it's the standard issues in holding "pillar of the community" offenders accountable, or how, until shockingly recently (like, it was only abolished twenty years ago recently), the Church had an official procedure for this sort of thing which actually treated it internally and barred the victims from going public about the abuse under pain of excommunication under the seal of confession (which normally only applies to the priest who heard the confession and not the sinner who said it). And, as a rule, until about 2002, the legal authorities tended to just leave it at that. So, there was a good chance many were convinced that trying would just lead to the justice equivalent to this:





With them as the whites.

And while it's not quite that bad anymore, prosecuting a pillar of the community (which a local priest tends to be) is depressingly difficult, even more than usual. Just study the downfall of Larry Nassar for an example:



The most germane difference in this case (besides the stupefying scale of abuse uncovered from just one abuser) is that Nassar put himself in the insanely good position of being able to justify his abuse as part of medical procedures that are  just legitimate enough that they can be published in medical journals but not well-known end that the victims and their families can easily call bullshit on it.

Or, for that matter, read this transcript of the Surrey Police's interview of Jimmy Savile, the closest that one of the biggest sex offenders in history ever came to being brought to justice. And, even then, a lot of the time, the coppers seem more like they're talking to the famous TV personality they knew he was and not the nonce he was being accused of.