I thought you were on vacation. Take a break - they'll be raping kids in August, and for the rest of your days.

The Church is Eternal.

At least Francis is on record with some plausible number rather than the sort of 1/5,000 rate implied by previous Church statements about how it was just a few bad apples.

I ponder a "concentration factor" from the general population to the Catholic clergy. You're gay, closeted, and need to hide - you need a reason Mom will accept for why you aren't going to marry (a woman) and knock out a bunch of kids. Not surprisingly, there are many more gays, percentage-wise, in the clergy (and convents) than outside. Maybe 5-fold more? Likewise for pedophiles - where else are you going hide? And might the "concentration" multiplier be even higher? 10-fold? 50-fold? What other marginalized people would choose that particular closet versus being out in society? Cross-dressers? Trans people? I suspect the greater than discrimination in society, the higher fraction go into the Church.

Gone, centuries ago, are the days in which only the Catholic Church offered lodging, food and education - things once quite spotty in secular life - things appealing to mainstream members. Now, it's mostly a respectable closet for tortured souls. We need to eliminate the effectiveness of the church-as-closet: you're a Catholic priest and it is just assumed that, duh, you're gay, a pedophile, a closeted zoophile, etc.

It's amazing how a few fairytales can fend off RICO.

And the church is still paying for and protecting them!

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scotti…

When you hire people specifically because they say they won't have sex, you are kidding nobody with those ridiculous numbers. Two percent my ass.

The Anglican Church functions just fine with married priests. It's hard to fathom how the Catholic Church wouldn't. The oddest thing is, the Catholic Church considers the Church of England some merely disobedient child of theirs, and will readily accept Anglican priests "back" into their own priesthood. The relationship is something like China and Taiwan ("just a breakaway province"), I guess.

Dan is right. No one should trust their kids around a man who voluntarily took a vow of celibacy and cloistered himself in the Church at an early age. The presumption must be that there was a high probability he thought he would be unable to live in society on his own because of whatever demons he thought he harbored.

Yes. The Church attracted people who are sexually stunted or sex-phobic for whatever reasons.

Also, people who are repressing their sexual urges -- even if they are perfectly traditional heterosexual urges -- will very often be forced to act out those urges. And they will do so with whomever they can find who are vulnerable to predators (like young altar boys).

Pope Francis himself noted that the Catholic Church didn't demand celibacy for its priests until about 900 years after its founding. The argument has been that priests and nuns should be married to the Church. (Can one not have multiple loyalties -- God, country, and family?)

But it should be remembered that celibacy and chastity are two different things. People assume, incorrectly, that celibacy means you can't have sex. Technically, though the word has probably evolved, celibacy simply means you can't marry, while chastity means you can't have sexual relations. Presumably, Catholic priests are bound by both. But you can imagine a religion that prohibits its priests to marry (to prevent divided loyalties) but allows them to have sex, perhaps in ritualized manners. And in Orson Scott Card's science fiction universe, his priests were chaste without being celibate -- they could marry but they couldn't have sex. Another indication of his broken, twisted psyche.

The pope has said a lot of things about a lot of subject. Has he actually taken any action other than talking, or is it all still just diplomacy with this one? This ex-Catholic still doesn't buy any of the bullshit he's trying so hard to sell. And frankly, it's more than a little embarrassing to see other people continue to eat this crap up.

The Onion once had a proposal that the church try to get the molestations down to acceptable levels.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/pope-vo…

Is that still to optimistic?

Conservative religious right.....So how many gay republicans are there? C'mon now, don't sidestep the issue.

@3 Totally! RICO seems like a pretty damn good option.

I have to wonder what the pope has actually done, aside from his lip-service, toward solving this crisis. And I absolutely reject the idea that allowing priests to get married is going to solve it. Sexual repression can certainly make people behave in sexually unhealthy ways, but if they're jumping right to kid-fucking there is definitely something else at play. If it was just a matter of priests repressing hetero-normative sexual urges than you'd think there would be a lot more priests fucking vulnerable parishioners, prostitutes, nuns or each other. I'm sure those things happen from time to time, but the amount of actualized pedophelia is well beyond the realm of simple sexual repression.

The only difference between the Vatican and NAMBLA is that NAMBLA doesn't get their asses kissed by heads of state.

I've just defected from the Catholic Church, on the grounds of its cruelty towards children and females.

They've sent me a letter deploring that I had decided to become an apostate, but they didn't dare to pass any remark regarding whether it was adequately grounded.

Unregistered @15 made an excellent point: what is the percentage of bishops who covered up for a child molester? Certainly the numbers involved in this are much higher than 2%, adding all those who abused children, covered for the abusers and those who knew but failed to report... as Dan said: If any other institution was involved in something like this...

It would be considered child abuse to leave them in that organisation's care