Catholic Child Abuse: Decades of Disease

According to a recent report, authorized by the government of Ireland, the Catholic  Church in Dublin has been covering up the crimes of its priests for decades. Child abuse, rape and molestation have all been committed under the watchful eye of the church and its figure heads. Individuals who felt they could control the systemic problem by dealing with it in their own way, fully acknowledging they had broken both civil and canon law.

Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, who handed over more than 60,000 previously secret church files to the three-year investigation, said he felt deep shame and sorrow for how previous archbishops presided over endemic child abuse – yet claimed afterward not to understand the gravity of their sins.

The church has a widely accepted stance against homosexuality and abortion, which they consider to be immoral acts, much more dangerous than “average” sin. (Even though the Bible clearly states no sin is greater than another.) Then again, I suppose you would have to read the whole thing to really grasp that concept and let’s be honest, the Bible is boring as hell.

The report included 46 priests who had a total of 320 complaints documented against them, with one priest admitting he molested over 100 children, while police have a feeling it was much more. Another case involved a priest who had admitted he molested a child every two weeks for nearly 25 years. Several of these priests were convicted of their crimes, albeit decades after they had been accused and 14 of them passed away before ever being held accountable. Astonishingly, 6 of them are currently still active priests. However, I think we can all agree that child abuse is acceptable, as long as we stop gay marriage.

Three Dublin archbishops – John Charles McQuaid (1940-72), Dermot Ryan (1972-84) and Kevin McNamara (1985-87) – did not tell police about clerical abuse cases, instead opting to avoid public scandals by shuttling offenders from parish to parish and even overseas to U.S. churches, the commission found.

It was not until 1995 that then-Archbishop Connell allowed police to see church files on 17 clerical abuse cases. At that time, Connell actually held records of complaints against at least 29 priests, the report found. Connell later pursued a lawsuit against the investigators in an abandoned bid to keep them from seeing more than 5,500 files documenting the church’s knowledge of abusive priests.

The report said all four archbishops sought “the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church, and the preservation of its assets. All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities.”

The investigators lauded a handful of priests and mostly low-ranking police who pursued complaints and prosecutions, almost always unsuccessfully, from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Senior police officers “clearly regarded priests as being outside their remit” and handed “complaints to the archdiocese instead of investigating them,” the report said.

The best part of all of this hypocrisy is that I just recieved this is in my email from the Catholic News Agency

I guess Jesus was a hypocrite and God is a child molester.

Read the entire article at The Huffington Post