Sexual Abuse in Social Context: Clergy and other (Secular) Professionals.

[Rev. Rye]

I'm kind of surprised that nobody brought up Crimen Sollicitationis. It outlined the RCC's official procedure for this sort of thing. It should go without saying that it prioritised keeping the whole thing secret more than actually punishing the priest responsible. Indeed, secrecy was to be maintained on pain of excommunication. It had been SOP since (at the earliest) 1922 and it stayed in effect until 2001. I was 11 when this stopped being the Church's default means of dealing with predatory priests.

Read an English translation here.

And, even if other Christian denominations have a worse problem of per capita child abusers (The Jehovah's Witnesses seem to have a system that makes even the RCC seem like Chris Hansen), that's still nothing to defend. Especially when, within living memory, their official procedure for dealing with it involved hushing the scandal on pain of excommunication of any whistleblowers. There's almost certainly higher-ups in the Church still in power who actually played a part in enforcing this doctrine, and I know for a fact that their victims are still out there, having to pick up the pieces of their lives.

And to say that other people do this like this is some sort of defense, well, I've been watching A Series of Unfortunate Events on Netflix recently. Near the end, Count Olaf has been put on trial for his crimes, and this is what he has to say in his defense. I can't provide a video, but I did find the transcript:

I've always been honest about my desires to you orphans: you maimed or dead, and your fortune in my rarely-washed hands. That's more than the rest of these people can say. [...] Help you? Look around! I see a banker who cares more about a promotion than three orphans! I see a man who was too afraid to protect you, and a woman who values paperwork over peoples' lives! I see a vice-principal who was more than happy to let me into his school, as long as I stroked his ego! I see rich people who only cared about you because you were "in", and villagers who only took you in to do their chores! I see volunteers whose complicated codes and pretentious literary references are useless against the real treacheries of the world! And presiding over them all, a justice so blind she let me marry you! These so-called decent people have done more to help my schemes than any of my associates. They should be up here! Yes. But you are up here too, Baudelaires. You are not the innocent orphans you've let these people think you are. You've lied, you've stolen, you've abandoned people, you've set fires. Time after time, you have relied on treachery for survival, just like everybody else. Because here is the real truth that nobody is willing to tell you: There are no noble people in the world!

Should I be checking you for a monobrow and an ankle tattoo?