Essay:Sorrow for children or just hatred against the Church?

It seems to me that the media coverage of the pedophilia cases within the Catholic Church has little to do with solving the problem. Or even trying to solve the problem. The liberal atheistic media showed its ugly face when it used the horrible pedophilia cases for nothing else than depicting the Catholic Church as an international association of perverts. It is to say that the problem lies not in the few local priests and bishops but is the systematic work of the whole church.

Why that might not be the case?

Pedophilia in secular schools and other churches is far more likely
Junk such like New York Times writes stories even about cases that are over ten years old - but only if it offers a chance to blame the Catholic Church itself on everything. Pedophilia cases in secular schools and in other churches are left completely unnoticed.

Sources:


 * Sexual Abuse by Educators Is Scrutinized

"A draft report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education concludes that far too little is known about the prevalence of sexual misconduct by teachers or other school employees, but estimates that millions of children are being affected by it during their school-age years. /... / Yet despite the limitations of the existing research base, the scope of the problem appears to far exceed the priest abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, said Charol Shakeshaft, the Hofstra University scholar who prepared the report.

To support her contention that many more youngsters have been sexually mistreated by school employees than by priests, Ms. Shakeshaft pointed to research conducted for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and released late last month. That study found that from 1950 to 2002, 10,667 people made allegations that priests or deacons had sexually abused them as minors. ("Report Tallies Alleged Sexual Abuse by Priests," this issue.)

Extrapolating from data collected in a national survey for the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation in 2000, Ms. Shakeshaft estimated that roughly 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a public school employee from 1991 to 2000—a single decade, compared with the roughly five-decade period examined in the study of Catholic priests.

Those figures suggest that "the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests, contended Ms. Shakeshaft, who is a professor of educational administration at Hofstra, in Hempstead, N.Y."

The report itself is here

It is also argued that pedophilia cases are more likely in Jewish and Protestant Churches (see here and here), but we barely hear about that.

"Despite headlines focusing on the priest pedophile problem in the Roman Catholic Church, most American churches being hit with child sexual-abuse allegations are Protestant, and most of the alleged abusers are not clergy or staff, but church volunteers."

Why some Catholics are pedophiles, if it's a sin according to their religion?
Liberal atheist's tragedy is to argue that pedophilia is the byproduct of some distinctive features of Catholic life: a celibate priesthood, a church governed by male bishops, a demanding sexual ethic. "Modernize" the church by changing all that, they argued, and these horrible problems would abate, even disappear.

Nice try, but as demonstrated in the previous section, there is no empirical evidence that it is a uniquely, predominantly, or even strikingly Catholic problem. The sexual abuse of the young is a global plague. Ironically, the Catholic Church has taken more rigorous action since 2002 to protect the young people in its care than any other similarly situated institution, to the point where the church is in at least some parts of the world (America for example) likely the safest environment for young people.

More likely explanation is that pedophiles become priests not because they share the Catholic faith but because the job simply offers many easy ways to abuse young boys - all the altar boys etc.