The Worst Defense of Catholic Child Molestation You Will Real Anywhere

I came across this on the internet and I thought to myself - is this guy for real? I was shocked by the statistic that he cited, namely that "the Catholic figures show that between about 4% of priests and deacons serving in the US between 1950 and 2002 had been accused of sexual abuse of someone under 18." I really didn't know it was that high. But the manner in which he shrugs this aside is simply unbelievable to me:

The Catholic figures show that between about 4% of priests and deacons serving in the US between 1950 and 2002 had been accused of sexual abuse of someone under 18. In this country, the figure was a 10th of that: 0.4% But whereas the victims in the general population are overwhelmingly female, the pattern among American Catholic priests was quite different. Four out of five of their victims were male. Most were adolescents: two out of five were 14 or over; 15% were under 10.

This is vile, but whether it is more vile than the record of any other profession is not obvious. The concentration on boys makes the Catholic pattern of abuse stand out; what makes it so shocking is that parents trusted their children with priests. They stood in for the parents. But this isn't all that different from the pattern in the wider world, either, where the vast majority of abuse comes from within families. The other point that makes the Catholic abuse is that it is nowadays very widely reported. It may be the best reported crime in the world: that, too tends to skew perceptions.

There are, however, some fragments of figures from the outside world suggesting that not many professions do better. Last year, it was reported that half of the girls fostered in social democratic Sweden in the 50s and 60s had been abused; according to Camila Batmanghelidjh 550,000 children are reported to the social services in this country every year.

Okay, so if I am correct in understanding the author's argument, the Catholic Church's record on child abuse is only bad if your a boy. If you're a young girl you will fare a lot better in the Church than you would in a government institution in Sweden.

But what's the business about blaming the Catholic parents for leaving their children with the priests? This is a little different than the Michael Jackson case. The faithful were led to believe that these religious figures had supernatural grace.

It is very difficult - if not impossible - to defend the molestation of children by an institution let alone a religious body. This author develops one bad argument after another. He should have quite while he was ahead ...