D1B wrote:JoltinJoe wrote:
Oh yea, Jeffrey Anderson doesn't care about the money.
You are ridiculous.
Joe, how can we come to some kind of understanding between us? I don't want to fight and genuinely like you.
Are you willing to concede anything about this scandal that is uniquely catholic? The cover up, the victim per priest ratio, etc...
Just one?
You know, the truth of what happened is bad enough. But there is a lot of hyperbole, and Anderson fans the hyperbole.
What is uniquely Catholic about what happened is that, in a number of dioceses, most notably Boston, but others too, a reckless bishop, for whatever reason, routinely reassigned to active ministry a few priests who were mass predators, even after it became apparent that they were non-curable recidivists. This was, at best, gross negligence, and more likely reckless disregard for the safety of the children in the parishes to which these priests were assigned. It was done to shield scandal and protect the good-name of the Church, at the expense of the well-being of children.
But the hyperbole has created the impression that this happened everywhere. It did not.
In order to give some context to this, you have to go back to the 1960s and 1970s, when psychiatrists believed and instructed that child molesters could be cured; that their crime was usually situational, and not of orientation; and with proper treatment, they could be returned to their positions as teachers, ministers, etc. When you couple this with a predisposition on the part of Catholic clergy to urge repentance and forgiveness, it was not surprising that many bishops would return an offending priest to active ministry after he had gone through treatment. Indeed, this is how child molesters were handled throughout society. Psychiatrists approved of this.
What distinguishes the Boston-type situations from the more common cases is that, in most dioceses, a bishop would keep an accused child molester on a tight leash. If a second accusation was made after a priest was returned to ministry, most bishops would remove the priest from active ministry, subject to him to additional treatment, but then send him to a monastery or some other "vocation" that did not involve ministry with children. I know, as a fact, that this how Archbishop Boland in the Archdiocese of Newark (NJ) handled such matters in the 1970s -- a second strike, and you would never be returned to active ministry anywhere near a child.
In the hysteria, the distinction between the actions of most bishops and the reckless bishops has been completely obscured.
Additionally, in the hysteria, the bishops in the non-Boston type of situation have been accused of covering up crimes, but this is plainly using modern values to assess the actions of those in the past. In many cases, by not reporting these crimes to authorities, the bishops were honoring the wishes of the parents who asked them to hold the information in confidence. Parents, understandably, wanted to protect their child from public knowledge of what happened to them, and the bishops honored those requests. Today, of course, it is a crime not to report information about the endangerment or abuse of a child, but that was not the prevailing standard back in the day.
There is no excuse for the conduct of the likes of Cardinal Law. But not every bishop, or every diocese, f'ed up on that level. Most didn't. But a guy like Anderson makes money painting with a very broad brush. As I said at the beginning, the truth is bad enough. There is no reason to exaggerate.
I think I have some good information. I have heard it directly from attorneys involved that most cases are nowhere nearly as bad as the cases which gain all the attention. Some cases are clear: the priest involved has multiple accusations, and these are the ones that get the press attention (although the cases which a priest has more than three accusers are not as common as you think). The vast majority of cases are plausible (i.e., the priest has two or three accusers), and whether they could be proven by a preponderance of the evidence is open to debate on a case-by-case basis. And there are a number of accusations which have been made against priests with no other accusations, and many of them are now dead.
Not aware a sophisticated network of enablers and cover up pros existing in the swim clubs and school districts, well non-catholic school districts, to allow that to happen, for decades in some cases. 
