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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (122600)	5/13/2010 9:42:57 PM
From: Freedom Fighter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

skeeter, I more or less agree with you. But like I've said before, this a very difficult situation that has to be dealt with on a case by case basis. If a few decades ago some Pastor/Bishop/Cardinal was told by psychiatrists to treat an offending priest and reassign him because it was safe, you can't excommunicate, abandon, or even arrest him for being an ignorant naive fool. The correct thing to do is perhaps remove him from power over things where good judgment is required and reassign him to some administrative task elsewhere in the Church etc... If a Pastor/Bishop/Cardinal knew exactly what he was doing and knowingly put other kids at danger to protect the church from scandal he needs to be prosecuted if there was illegal activity (as opposed to immoral) and removed in either case. If no kids were in danger because all the offending parties had already be dealt with or died of old age etc.., the Church has to consider protecting it's wealth from lawyers that are interested in enriching themselves at the expense of Catholic parishes everywhere (and not just where the cases occurred). Then the correct thing to do would be to reach out to victims and help them privately so the entire church isn't bankrupted. I'm sure there are many other scenarios also. There are no one size fits all answers because many (if not most) of these cases occurred decades ago and involve men that were dumber than a rock about sexual issues. You have to know the details of what happened in each case like how old the abused children or teenagers were, why it happened, who knew what when, who was advised to do what by who and when etc... and then decide how to treat that specific case. That's why I've been so upset about the reporting. The press could have done an enormous service to the Catholic community and Church itself by reporting on this properly, but it went into biased attack mode instead.