What you have to remember is that hiding sexual abuse (especially against children) was the traditional way of handling it up until the late 1970’s.
My second grade teach molested one of my fellow students and was permitted to resign and move on with his teaching certificate intact. That was 1967.
You must also remember that the Catholic Church is like any old bureaucracy in that it is slow to change ways of doing things that has been successful for a long time with out good reason.
Transferring a Priest that has been caught violating their vow of celibacy worked for many decades if not centuries.
You can also think of Priest like any other society of professionals that police themselves (think of lawyers and Judges) they are not usually going to severely punish one of their own unless they are forced to do so.
Priest and Bishops (who are Priest don’t forget) are humans and can be expected to act like other humans in similar situations.
That’s fine to point all of that out. It still does not change anything. Frankly attempting to rationalize or be an apologist by using arguments whose basic premises are “That’s just how we’ve always done it” and “Others do it too” or “We were just following order to move them around” just don’t cut it. These were horrendous crimes to do to young people. I know of several teen boys in my own former parish who committed suicide because of their rapings by one of the priests there. These people have destroyed peoples’ lives because of this. I honestly don’t believe you understand the severity of the impact of this, because of the statements you have written.
It is rather sick to suggest these reasons to somehow diminish or rationalize what has been done here. You say this kind of behavior has gone on for centuries, priests breaking their celibacy vows for hundreds of years. Perhaps then the punishment should be even greater, if this despicable (and hypocritical) behavior has gone on for so long. You sound like you’re bothered that they are finally being called to account for permitting this kind of behavior for hundreds of years, and you’re defending it by saying it’s basically unfair to go after them NOW after all this time we let them skate by, like we’re somehow changing the rules on them in mid-stream, and also that other groups do this too and we’re not going after them.
Do me a favor and list the groups that are doing it to the degree the Roman church has, and have gotten away with it for hundreds of years, and I will take this list and pass it along to the FBI and my local police and get the ball rolling. I am not against going after any group who does this kind of stuff and institutionally sanctions and covers it up.
Further, how you can imply that this is how the Roman church has done things for hundreds of years and have gotten away with it by covering it up, up until recently, first the church has never approved of sodomy calling it sin, and rape sin, and the secular world up until recently also had laws against sodomy (and still do with rape), and you somehow because they’ve escaped detection and punishment that regular citizens would and have gone to jail for, that we’re somehow picking on them? That is how your statements come across.
All my prior statements about this still stand. The Roman church has very little ground to adopt a defensive attitude about this as you are stating, now is the time to be sincerely sorry about it and repent and get all the homosexual priests purged from this denomination.