A friend sent me a note with a couple of links:
While perverse homosexual/pedophile Catholic priests are the media’s favorite target these days, and as a Catholic I find the cover-up of these crimes against children profoundly despicable, the Church is only one of many institutions plagued with these scandals in our darkened world:
In that first link is this passage:
Charol Shakeshaft, the Hofstra University scholar who prepared the report, said the number of abuse cases-which range from unwanted sexual comments to rape-could be much higher…
[Her] figures led her to contend ‘the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.’
And then there is this list:
Most comprehensive account on Internet of women predators in schools
The Weekly Standard has a good article in this week’s edition by Joseph Bottum titled “Anti-Catholicism, Again.” In the article, he writes:
The general figures of child abuse in the world today are shocking. One widely reported study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence suggested the United States has 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. It’s a little hard to believe. More than 12 percent of the population were abused at least once as children? But Charol Shakeshaft’s respected study insists that 6 to 10 percent of recent public-school students have been molested.
Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, claims 10 percent is a conservative estimate. John Jay College’s Margaret Leland Smith says her numbers come closer to 20 percent.
All this, while (as the papal biographer George Weigel points out) the most recent audit found six credible cases of sexual abuse by Catholic clerics in 2009, in an American church of 68 million members, with all the perpetrators reported to the police and stripped of priestly faculties by their bishops.
And that this topic is –
-the story of a culture whose views of sexuality put its children at risk…
For some of the commentators on the current scandals, any stick is a good one if you can poke it at religion.
We report, you decide.
