Some perspective

As I have been reading, and listening to, news reports about the Catholic Church and molestations, I have thought that there needs to be some perspective on this terrible problem.  One account of molestation is one too many; and the devastation it causes is beyond measure.  From the way the problem is presented, however, it looks as if it were solely a Catholic Church problem.  What is still being ignored is the millions of young people outside of the Church that are still being abused.  What has happened in the Catholic Church is only the tip of the iceberg of what has happened, and  continues to happen, in our wider society. I suggest that the Catholic Church, though pressured into dealing with this problem, is the only institution that is confronting this horrible curse.  Here's some more perspective:

"The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking. In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child’s mother—thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture. Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years—some 290,000 between 1991 and 2000. According to other recent studies, 2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests—a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared (six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members)."

 

This set of facts is is a short quote from an article by George Weigel in the March 29, 2010 issue of First Things.  Click here to read the whole article.