UNITED STATES
NJ.com
By NJ Voices Guest Blogger/For NJ.com
on May 31, 2013
By Bill Donohue
The anger that practicing Catholics feel when they hear stories about priestly sexual abuse is palpable. The anger is directed at the offending priests and his enabling bishop. Fortunately, this a problem that is practically nonexistent in the Catholic church today. The numbers don’t lie.
The timeline for the lion’s share of abuse cases is not in doubt: the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. This was when the sexual revolution hit our culture like a tidal wave, engulfing even Catholic seminaries; it ended soon after the discovery of AIDS in 1981.
Here’s the good news: According to the Annual Reports on the Implementation of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, prepared by CARA, a Georgetown University research institute, over the past 10 years, the average number of credible accusations made annually against approximately 40,000 priests has been in the single digits. In the 2012 Annual Report, there was a total of six. Too bad there was a media blackout of this story.
There is no organization in the nation today that has less of a problem with sexual abuse of minors than the Catholic church. But one would never know that by listening to late-night talk show hosts, and the likes of Bill Maher. They would have the audience believe that nothing has changed. To top things off, the media often fail to adequately report on this problem in the non-Catholic population.
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