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	Guest View: the Catholic Church Needs to Tell Everything Troy Record April 12, 2010 http://www.troyrecord.com/articles/2010/04/12/opinion/doc4bc0ee3dc6c3a356653437.txt This time, the Catholic Church must open all the doors to any sordid behavior that has gone on within its walls. New accusations of child sexual abuse make it clear that lessons from the last round of disclosures went unlearned. It's shocking even to have to write a paragraph like that. Sordid is not a word that anyone should comfortably associate with a religious faith, especially one as established and revered as Catholicism. Nor, for that matter, is the word criminal, which also has been used in these cases. Yet such words must be faced. If any other organization evinced this decades-long pattern of conduct — sexual abuse, coverup, more abuse, more coverup - there would be demands for outside investigation and justice. The church cannot just lament an attack, it must act more strongly to confront and end the abuses. Enough has been made public in recent weeks that many observers wonder how high in the church hierarchy the policy of coverup reached. In 1980, the German portion of the church presided over by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI — allowed a pedophile priest to be transferred between cities to undergo therapy. That priest abused more children. Later, when he was an aide to his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, Ratzinger's office halted internal judicial proceedings that could have led to the defrocking of a priest who molested some 200 deaf Wisconsin children over a 24-year span. Defenders say Ratzinger himself may never have seen letters outlining the abuse — an important point, and one that should be weighed carefully by critics of this pope as the stories continue to unfold. Catholics are complaining to the Vatican about the way the church has handled both the subject of sex abuse within the priesthood and the recent revelations of its scope. Catholics and non-Catholics alike are demanding to know what the church knows, when it knew it and what is going to change. The Vatican has been resistant, criticizing the coverage instead of focusing on the continuing problems that threaten its existence, not to mention the childhoods of thousands of innocents. The intensity of media coverage can and should be open to criticism; the problems of pedophilia and other sexual abuse aren't limited to the Catholic Church by any means, and the number of accused priests is minuscule compared to the number of priests serving faithfully and well. While the number of abuse complaints dropped by more than a third in the United States last year, to a relative handful of credible cases, the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center notes that there were 290,000 reports of abuse in American public schools and that between 40 percent and 60 percent of such crimes occur within families. But the Catholic Church rightly is held to the very highest of standards, and these sins did not originate with the media. They were indeed sins and crimes by individuals, but they became an institutional problem because the hierarchy — schooled to avoid causing scandal to the church above all — thought that in this information-intense era it could still deal with such issues quietly, even if that exposed more victims to potential harm. No institution now can handle these kinds of revelations without instituting far-reaching changes. That is the flip side of being established and revered: Organizations have cultures that are hard to change and which, in fact, many adherents don't want to change. But that is what is urgent. Without that kind of overhaul, along with a full and public accounting of what has gone on over decades, the stories will continue to drip out for years to come. More children will be assaulted, more questions will be asked and for many the church's foundation — belief — will crumble.
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