When a priest rapes a child, he teaches his victim this lesson: Hell is here, now, on this planet. God was, is, and forever will be absent from your life.

Or so I have been told.

I have interviewed more than a dozen victims who say they were taught that lesson. Most were afraid to let me use their names. Only a few, like John Waddington of Groton and Donna Rolfe Walker of New London, had the courage to do so.

But they all had certain things in common. They were intimates of emptiness, of a world without God. True, some would come to find solace later in life in another church, but not before many of them had tried to end that emptiness with drink, drugs, even suicide.

Last week, the tens of thousands of victims of sexual abuse by priests could turn on their TVs and watch the world mourn a pope who had seemed indifferent to their plight; a pope who, apprised of the crisis at least as early as 1985, did nothing then to address it; a pope who rewarded one of the most heinous figures in the whole sordid affair with a sumptuous sinecure in Rome.

When things got so hot in Boston that Cardinal Bernard Law had to get out of town, Pope John Paul II took him in, granting him the position of chief priest at St. Mary Major Basilica.

It was Law, you will recall, who admitted to covering up numerous cases of child rape by his priests, the most infamous of whom was John Geoghan, accused of raping as many as 150 children.

It was Law, who, whenever one of his priests was caught, would move that priest to a new parish to work with new children, effectively loosing the wolf on a fresh and unsuspecting flock.

It was Law who, last week, stood before the eyes of the world in St. Peter's Basilica to deliver a Requiem Mass for his benefactor.

And it is Law who, this week, will be one of the cardinals selecting a new pope.

For people like Donna Roffe Walker the message is all too clear: Either the Vatican just doesn't get it or the Vatican doesn't care.

"I am saddened by the pope's death, but it does anger me to think that the church continues to ignore the victims' wellbeing,' Walker says.

She doesn't want to "bash" the church, "but the actions of the people in the church and the people that were responsible to protect us, I'm angry at that."

Of the pope, she says, "Apparently, the man did some good things for some people, but I felt that he had blinders on when it came to the sex abuse crisis in the church, and that's exemplified by his treatment of Cardinal Law.

"It's basically saying crime does pay. He gets a raise for his behavior. He was elevated as a result of his behavior in the United States. What kind of message does that send to the young people of the Catholic faith?"

Indeed. When, in 1985, Father Thomas Doyle tried to warn the Catholic hierarchy of the scope of the problem, he was ignored.

And when, in 2002, a group of survivors of sexual abuse asked to meet with the pope on his visit to Toronto for World Youth Day, he refused to meet with them.

It wasn't, they were told, on his schedule. This is the opinion of Kenton Robinson.