Father Thomas Nelson, executive director of the Institute on Religious Life and professor of philosophy at the Norbertine seminary in Orange, California, states that fewer than 2% of priests have been involved in pedophilia, as compared to 4% of married people and 7% of the general lay population. The statistics show that the problem of pedophilia is no greater among priests than among the general population.
How many teachers, policemen, fathers, firemen, and others are involved in such problems?
Breaking news yesterday was that a R & B singer had filmed sex with a 13 year old. These things are getting to be common occurrances.
Our society is very, very sick.
To imply that people are saying that, "it just happens in the Catholic Church" is a lie. To claim that "MANY" much smaller churches have "MANY" more incidents than the Catholic Church is very suspicious.
Hmm… after a brief Google search I found this stating that the pedophilia rate of the Catholic Church is 4% compared to 1% in the general population. Here's a quote from what's probably a more balanced analysis putting the levels all over the place for priest and the population.:
"One of the first efforts to study the rate of child abuse in the church came in a 1992 Canadian survey by John Allan Loftus and Robert Camargo. They studied 1,300 Catholic priests and brothers at one treatment center. They found that 2.7 percent had sex with children up to age 13 and another 8.4 percent with teen-agers up to age 19. However, the study subjects were not representative of the whole priesthood.I think the key sentence from the article is that," There is no definitive research on the frequency of such abuse in either the church or society. Few abusers will talk."Other researchers, including those within the church, have offered lower estimates. A study by the Chicago Archdiocese looked back at personnel records of 2,252 priests over 40 years. Only 40 of them -- about 2 percent -- were reported as offenders, according to Philip Jenkins, a Pennsylvania State University historian who has studied sexual abuse in the priesthood. "
I think the 7% pedophilia rate among the general population that you quote is garbage. That's just not who we are. Just like the Catholic Church, America has its problems and constantly needs renovation. Still this is the absolute best society in the world, and we prove it every day. Despite the crime and corruption, we feed the world, we defend the world and we have more happy, healthy and long lived people than has ever existed in all of recorded history.
I generally respect the Catholic Church. Sometimes it's unfairly treated, but in this case it deserves most of what its getting. Even if the Church's pedophilia attack rate on its young members is no higher than that of their parents, that doesn’t excuse them for allowing those attacks to take place. Like any other very large and very old organization, they're slow to make reforms. They're never had to operate in such an open and litigious society. I'm not surprised that it takes perhaps a billion dollars in lawsuits to get their attention. I don't expect its clergy to be saints, but I do expect them to quickly correct this tendency to blame their own problems on us. Just like I resent your puny accusation that, " Our society is very, very sick." Don't blame your personal problems or problems of another on America! That's weak.
I've stated on Free Republic before that because of the Catholic Church's size and diversity, what people read into it says more about themselves than the Church. Perhaps the same thing can be said about what we read into America …