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	If Half of This Is True, How Is It Possible to Take the Catholic Church Seriously? By Greg Krehbiel Crowhill Weblog March 18, 2009 http://crowhill.net/blog/?p=5509 See this review of Leon Podles’ book on the sex-abuse crisis, or read excerpts from the introduction. When the abuse crisis flared up several years ago I decided that I would not give any money to the archdiocese until I saw genuine reform — “pink palace” seminaries closed, bishops sacked, enablers exposed and tried, etc. There hasn’t been genuine reform. I think the Catholic Church’s strategy is to wait until the problem simmers down and people forget about it. That seems to be working, by and large. I’ve heard the excuses offered by defenders and apologists. * Everybody focuses on priests, but the problem is even worse in public schools * We’ve always known there are sinners in the church, this is nothing new * The church was misled by the “experts” — psychologists who told them pedophilia could be cured * Why focus so much on the negative — there are so many good priests * etc. etc. The excuses are largely true, but … irrelevant. It seems logical that abusers would be drawn to jobs where they can find victims, so any job where people work with kids is going to attract a disproportionate number of creeps. It’s sick, but it seems to be true. The existence of creeps in the priesthood is somewhat of a scandal, but the real scandal is what the church has done about it — and failed to do. If I were to list the charges, it might go something like this. 1. From seemingly reliable accounts, there are notorious seminaries that promote rampant sexual license. To my knowledge there aren’t similar places that train teachers. 2. The bishops moved abusers from place to place without notifying the lucky recipients of these precious gifts. We haven’t similar behavior by school systems. Again, I might be wrong. Maybe this has happened, but I’m not aware of it. 3. There seems to be evidence of a “lavendar mafia” in the Catholic Church that protects homosexual interests. We haven’t seen evidence of the same in the school system. 4. When victims of clerical abuse have come forward, they’ve received nothing but grief from their “shepherds” and their hired legal guns. We haven’t seen the school system exerting similar pressure on the parents of abused children to hush the story up. 5. When credible accusations have been made against popular, effective “leaders” (like Fr. Maciel), they were (for quite a long time) ignored or swept under the carpet by the Vatican. We haven’t seen the school system do anything like that. Again, this is just my perception. Maybe I’m entirely wrong on this and the schools have been guilty of the same sort of crap. But I haven’t seen any word of it. Maybe I’m completely off on this, but it seems to me that all the excuses add up to one great big nothing. The Catholic Church is institutionally guilty. At the highest levels. With all this stewing in the back of my mind I read today about the pope going to Africa and saying that condoms are not the solution to the AIDS problem. I don’t have a dog in this fight. Maybe they aren’t. I don’t know or care. But if you’re interested, here’s an interesting article that touches on the subject. I’ve studied the anti-contraception arguments to death and I find them ponderous and unpersuasive. I would rather try to defend Nixon’s wage and price controls than the Catholic Church’s position on contraception. But whatever you think about contraception, condoms and AIDS, the one thing that’s certain is that the Catholic Church has lost all credibility on the subject. Not with the faithful. I’m not talking about them. There are some who believe the dogmas about the Catholic Church’s infallibility on faith and morals, and that infallibility is not threatened by the existence of predatory priests, useless bishops, clueless popes and institutional wickedness. I’m talking about the rest of the world’s population. Why should they believe the church on condoms, or priestly celibacy, or a male priesthood, or any number of other issues when the church has such a dreadful track record? How can anybody even attempt to defend all this with a straight face?
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