Yeah, with the top job comes a lot of responsibility, and the pedo thing would be my first priority, for sure. Michel is right though, while the Catholic church has been the main focus of media attention, any organisation where adults have direct contact with kids (other churches, schools, scouts, military cadets, etc) are a "breeding ground" (pun intended) for pedophilia.
And yes, the results of these situations are horrible. When I was a young soldier, I had a friend called Rick Lawson, who was a very quiet guy but always seemed a little angry, and it didn't take much to set him off, so he had few friends. As happens a lot in the military, we both got posted to different states, and lost contact. Many years later, I was watching a day time "Current Affairs" type program, and there was a story about pedophilia in the church (not the catholic church, in this case) and one of the victims who'd come forward, was Rick Lawson. The poor bugger (no pun intended) was now in his late 30's, no longer in the military, and a mess. He burst into tears several times describing how one of the church elders raped him on several occasions when he was in his care, and it upset me so much I had to turn the TV off.
I'm lucky, I come from a good family and I only have happy memories of birthdays and christmases and long hot summers from when I was a kid, and it upsets me to think that there are so many adults who are tortured by their childhood memories.
So what's the fix? Getting rid of the "Vow of Celibacy" would go a long way to solving the problem, but it's not going to weed out the pedo's, as from many cases I've seen outside the church, a lot of pedo's are happily married hetrosexual men. (and occasionally women too) The most important thing is to seek out, and prosecute these creeps who have given an otherwise very good humanitarian organisation such a terrible name.
What I hate is the fact that the church has protected these monsters in the past, and pedophile priests have been transferred to other parishes, rather than punished for their crimes, so the church seriously needs someone like me with no "skeletons in the closet" to take on these grubs, and expose and prosecute them, at any level. I know that the problem will be the "Burden of Proof" thing in a relatively secret society like the church, but I'd be prepared to prosecute purely on the "Balance of probabilities", i.e., if a priest is rumored to be a pedo, then that'd be good enough evidence for me to kick them out of the church and prosecute them. It might not be fair, but I'd rather err on the side of caution than put another kid in danger. Because that would piss me off. Cheers, Terry.
