Vatican Sex Scandal

How in the name of God can the Roman Catholic Church put the wave upon wave of pedophilia scandals behind it? The Washington Post’s E.J Dionne Jr. investigates. He says: “The church’s problem is, above all, theological and religious. Its core difficulty is that rather than drawing on its Christian resources, the church has acted almost entirely on the basis of this world’s imperatives and standards. It has worried about lawsuits. It has worried about its image. It has worried about itself as an institution and about protecting its leaders from public scandal. In so doing, it has made millions of Catholics righteously furious and aggravated every one of its problems. So instead of going away, the scandal keeps coming back, lately in a form that seems to challenge Pope Benedict XVI himself. It was sickening to read Thursday’s New York Times story reporting that Vatican officials ‘did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church.’ The priest, the Rev. Lawrence Murphy, worked at a Wisconsin school for deaf boys from 1950 to 1974. He died in 1998.”