The Tidings
When the issue of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church broke open in the media in 2002, the focus was rightly placed upon the suffering of victims, the duplicity of the abusers, and the mistakes that church leaders made in past decades in understanding and effectively dealing with the problem of abusive priests.
In the three years since the crisis gained national attention, however, very little media attention has been focused on the tremendous strides the church has made in creating safe environments for children. And more troubling, the persistent focus of media attention on the scandal itself has helped create an impression in the public's mind that the Catholic Church has done almost nothing to deal with the problem, and that sexual abuse is a problem largely limited to the Catholic Church itself.