0.01% of Clergy Are Abusers

Catholic League
May 23, 2016

http://www.catholicleague.org/01-of-clergy-are-abusers/

Bill Donohue comments on the 2015 Annual Report on clergy sexual abuse that was released last week by the National Review Board of the United State Conference of Catholic Bishops:

Between July 1, 2014 and June 30, 2015, there were seven substantiated allegations against clergy for the sexual abuse of minors that were made by current minors. Given that the data covered priests (35,987) and deacons (16,251), this means that .01 percent of the 52,238 members of the clergy had a substantiated allegation made against him; conversely, 99.99 percent did not.

Why is this not being widely reported by the media—including the Catholic media?

Reuters is so dishonest that it reports on the 838 persons who came forward with an accusation (mostly about offenses years ago), saying that is a 35 percent increase from the previous year. What it doesn’t say is that last year there was a 5 percent increase in the number of false accusations made against the dioceses and eparchies, and a whopping 86 percent increase in false accusations made against religious institutes.

Some things, of course, never change. As usual, 81 percent of the victims were male, and most were postpubescent; 16 percent were under the age of 10. Which means that homosexuals accounted for the lion’s share of the problem, though no one will mention this fact. The John Jay researchers certainly will not: they said in 2011 that the high rate of male victims in the 1960s and 1970s was due to priests not having access to female altar servers. Nonsense. They have had plenty of access for years, but it is still the gay priests who are doing the molesting. This was never a crime of opportunity. That’s pure propaganda.

Similarly, psychologist Dr. Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea predicted in 2003, “You will see some kind of bubble in 2005, when the people who were abused in the 1990s come forward.” She could not have been more wrong—the bubble never surfaced, not then and not now. She’s been wrong all along.