Never Forget … or Forgive: The Ongoing Catholic Church Sexual Abuse Scandal
The sexual abuse scandal surrounding Jeffrey Epstein is especially outrageous inasmuch as he used his political connections (and money) to escape prosecution for so many years. But if it’s outrageous when money and power enable impunity for horrible crimes, shouldn’t it be even more outrageous when the pretense of moral authority enables someone to commit even worse crimes? I ask because an ongoing sexual abuse scandal with a more significant number of victims has been swept under the rug through the assumed holiness of its perpetrator.
I’m speaking, of course, of sexual abuse committed inside the institutions of the Catholic Church. The media silence about this atrocity, in the face of the Epstein story and the recent election of a new Pope, cuts across American political loyalties and reveals as much about the corrupt moral thinking of the left as it does about that of the right.
Between 1950 and 2002, in the United States alone Catholic priests were responsible for at least 10,000 cases of sexual abuse (as reported by the Church itself). Some estimates are as high as 100,000. By the Church’s own admission, 22 percent of the victims were younger than eleven. We know of 48 suicides among the reported victims, and there were likely more among the unreported.
Worldwide, the Vatican continues to deal with 800 new abuse claims every year.
About four percent of Catholic priests and deacons—over 4,300 of them!—were known to have been involved in the scandal. And it wasn’t just the Catholic Church. There is substantial evidence of similar widespread abuse in other American Christian churches, although it hasn’t been as well-investigated. Cover-ups have emerged in the Southern Baptist convention in 2019 and the Mormon church as recently as 2023.
What makes the Catholic cover-up unique, however, is that the Church is an international organization with state sovereignty via the Vatican. Its cover-up of sex crimes amounts to a proven version of the international criminal conspiracy that QAnon conspiracists have imagined to be perpetrated by their political enemies in “the deep state.” This very real conspiracy involved not only commands from the Vatican to keep it secret (dating back at least as far as 1962), regular shuffling of priests accused of abuse from parish to parish, a secret network of “treatment” centers to keep it a secret, and even a plan to buy a Caribbean Island where the most criminal priests could be hidden from society.
Scandalously, 1,700 priests and other clergy accused of molesting children still walk free. Just before his death, Pope Francis ordered that their names not be publicized. The Church chose to hide these crimes—and continues to encourage us to forget them—because, I submit, it wants to maintain a false moral authority from which it draws its spiritual strength.
While many publicly crusaded to expose Harvey Weinstein and other prominent individuals, cries of “me too” were conspicuously missing during the recent papal conclave to replace Pope Francis. This was especially evident from the fawning reception by the liberal press of the succession of Robert Prevost to the papacy in May.
The media covered the drama around the Papal conclave as though it were Oscar night or the NFL draft, speculating who would win the great honor. Never mind that, to one degree or another, it is likely that all of the candidate cardinals were involved in covering-up or looking the other way in the face of damning evidence of sex crimes.
https://www.skeptic.com/article/never-fo...e-scandal/
The sexual abuse scandal surrounding Jeffrey Epstein is especially outrageous inasmuch as he used his political connections (and money) to escape prosecution for so many years. But if it’s outrageous when money and power enable impunity for horrible crimes, shouldn’t it be even more outrageous when the pretense of moral authority enables someone to commit even worse crimes? I ask because an ongoing sexual abuse scandal with a more significant number of victims has been swept under the rug through the assumed holiness of its perpetrator.
I’m speaking, of course, of sexual abuse committed inside the institutions of the Catholic Church. The media silence about this atrocity, in the face of the Epstein story and the recent election of a new Pope, cuts across American political loyalties and reveals as much about the corrupt moral thinking of the left as it does about that of the right.
Between 1950 and 2002, in the United States alone Catholic priests were responsible for at least 10,000 cases of sexual abuse (as reported by the Church itself). Some estimates are as high as 100,000. By the Church’s own admission, 22 percent of the victims were younger than eleven. We know of 48 suicides among the reported victims, and there were likely more among the unreported.
Worldwide, the Vatican continues to deal with 800 new abuse claims every year.
About four percent of Catholic priests and deacons—over 4,300 of them!—were known to have been involved in the scandal. And it wasn’t just the Catholic Church. There is substantial evidence of similar widespread abuse in other American Christian churches, although it hasn’t been as well-investigated. Cover-ups have emerged in the Southern Baptist convention in 2019 and the Mormon church as recently as 2023.
What makes the Catholic cover-up unique, however, is that the Church is an international organization with state sovereignty via the Vatican. Its cover-up of sex crimes amounts to a proven version of the international criminal conspiracy that QAnon conspiracists have imagined to be perpetrated by their political enemies in “the deep state.” This very real conspiracy involved not only commands from the Vatican to keep it secret (dating back at least as far as 1962), regular shuffling of priests accused of abuse from parish to parish, a secret network of “treatment” centers to keep it a secret, and even a plan to buy a Caribbean Island where the most criminal priests could be hidden from society.
Scandalously, 1,700 priests and other clergy accused of molesting children still walk free. Just before his death, Pope Francis ordered that their names not be publicized. The Church chose to hide these crimes—and continues to encourage us to forget them—because, I submit, it wants to maintain a false moral authority from which it draws its spiritual strength.
While many publicly crusaded to expose Harvey Weinstein and other prominent individuals, cries of “me too” were conspicuously missing during the recent papal conclave to replace Pope Francis. This was especially evident from the fawning reception by the liberal press of the succession of Robert Prevost to the papacy in May.
The media covered the drama around the Papal conclave as though it were Oscar night or the NFL draft, speculating who would win the great honor. Never mind that, to one degree or another, it is likely that all of the candidate cardinals were involved in covering-up or looking the other way in the face of damning evidence of sex crimes.
https://www.skeptic.com/article/never-fo...e-scandal/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
