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	Church Abuse Crisis Tests Faith of Area Catholics By Troy Moon Pnj April 8, 2010 http://www.pnj.com/article/20100408/NEWS01/4080325 Tammy Dully was thinking about going to church on Easter. After all, she was raised Catholic. But the more she heard about the ongoing abuse scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, she decided against it. "You don't want to be affiliated with that," she said, adding that she was disgusted with allegations that top church officials, including Pope Benedict XVI, have shielded priests accused of sexual abuse of children and teens. "You don't want them to tell you how to raise your kids and live your life." Dully, 39, and a downtown bartender, said that what she sees as a pattern of covering up negative issues in the church is "driving people away from the church." But not all of them. Even as the Vatican upped its defense of the pope this week, many area rank-and-pew Catholics, as well as a top diocese priest, said the scandal is discussed more in the media than in local parishes. "Easter was beautiful, and no one even talked about it," said Pattie McCormick, 53, a member of Holy Spirit Catholic Church on Gulf Beach Highway. "It's interesting to me that we are talking about things that happened 20 or 30 years ago. But all of society dealt with issues differently then than they do now." Benedict himself has come under fire recently, as critics have charged that a priest accused of abuse in Germany was transferred to another jurisdiction by the current pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Abuse problems have plagued Catholic churches in Ireland and Brazil, similar to the abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church in the United States in 2002 and 2003. Monsignor James Flaherty, judicial vicar of the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee, said the problem of the sexual abuse of minors is not just a church problem, it's a societal problem. When numerous Catholic priests were accused of abuse early last decade, many in the European faction of the church pointed to the scandal as an American problem. "They have skeletons in their closet too," Flaherty said. "If you look at some of the statistics, there are higher numbers of abuse in other churches and society as a whole than in the Catholic church."
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