Vatican Sex Scandals

by Erica Buchman

According to The New York Times, the Vatican posted online yesterday, for the first time, a guide to the procedures it requires bishops to follow in abuse cases. They said, “civil law concerning reporting of crimes to the appropriate authorities should always be followed.”

This irritates me to no end. The Catholic Church has a long history of priests sexually abusing children left in their charge, so why is all of this only coming out now? In 1985, the future Pope Benedict XI had resisted pleas to defrock a California priest with a record of sexually molesting children, citing concerns including ''the good of the universal church". Spare me. These men took a vow of chastity and when Jesus said, "Suffer the little children, come unto me" that's NOT what he was talking about!!!

Ignoring these pleas to spare the man shame is no better than spitting in the face of the abused children. Forget the Church and remember the law. There ought to be hundreds of priests in prison right now serving time for the blatant crimes they have committed. I'd like to see a priest with a history of molesting children share a jail cell with a convicted rapist and see how he likes bending over.

I absolutely hate it when the Church learns of a clergyman who deliberately and repeatedly abuses children, and yet they do nothing. They might send the pervert to therapy and claim that he was "cured", but then he'll go back to do exactly what he was doing before. They all claim that they have asked God's forgiveness and he has bestowed it upon them, but I don't think I want to believe in a God who can so easily forgive these evil men.

The Church will do anything to protect their reputation, but how quickly they forget how unethical they're being when they choose not to involve the police. Not only is it unethical, it's downright illegal. The clergymen who protect the guilty should all be arrested with obstruction of justice. It doesn't matter that the Church is shelling out $2 billion dollars in damages. What about the psychological damage done to these poor children?

It doesn't matter how much publicity is shone on these cases of sex abuse and it doesn't matter how much money the Church doles out to the victims and their families. There will always be men of the cloth who can't keep their hands to themselves and their pants zipped up; it's only a matter of time before this whole thing blows over and then we wait another twenty years before another scandal comes to light.