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	Opposing View: 'Every Catholic Is Now Paying' By Joseph Bottum USA Today April 5, 2010 http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2010/04/opposing-view-every-catholic-is-now-paying.html UNITED STATES -- But that's not enough for critics who want to destroy the church. There are two parts to the scandal that has obsessed Europe in recent weeks. The first part — the most evil, disgusting part — is over. Every group has a small percentage of members with sick sexual desires. By their very calling, Christian ministers ought to have a lower percentage. For a variety of reasons, however, the Catholic Church suffered through an astonishingly corrupt generation of priests, centered around 1975, with a percentage of sexual predators at least equal to the general population's. Thank, God, that part is finished. European churches are now putting in place stringent child-protection procedures, and even with the anti-Catholic obsession raging in Europe, no cases of deliberately suppressed incidents less than a decade old have emerged. Besides, the new generation of priests, formed in the light of John Paul II's papacy, seems vastly more faithful to Catholic moral teaching. Still, the second part of the scandal remains, for it involves not the mostly dead criminals but the living institution. The bishops who ruled over that corrupt generation catastrophically failed to act. Some of this came from the shortsighted and anti-theological advice of the lawyers and psychologists who dominated Catholic institutional thinking in that era. But much came simply from a desire to avoid bad publicity. And for the bishops' failures, every Catholic is now paying — in a hundred years' worth of donations lost to court judgments, in suspicious faith and in deep shame. But that's not enough for those who want to destroy the Catholic Church. And so the call has gone out to implicate the pope. European publications have offered rewards for documents that mention him. American newspapers ran as a front-page story the old story of a corrupt Wisconsin priest — only because, for a moment, it looked as though it might touch the pope. Benedict XVI has proved a weak administrator, devoting his pontificate mostly to writing theological encyclicals. But evidence of his involvement has been tangential in a few cases and non-existent in the others. That hasn't stopped the news media, however, which are closing in for the kill. And they may achieve something. Benedict won't resign, and he shouldn't. But he clearly doesn't understand why no one has paid attention to, for instance, the heartfelt statement of apology and change he sent to the Irish churches. And recently, he has looked ill and miserable. At 82 years old, I doubt he will long survive this, and the loss of Pope Benedict will be one more penance Catholics pay for that corrupt generation of priests and the bishops who failed to confront them.
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