WISCONSIN
Urban Milwaukee
By Bruce Murphy – Dec 2nd, 2015
Probably no city has gotten more attention for its clergy sex abuse problem than Boston. It’s been called “the epicenter” of the crisis, and it is once again in the Spotlight, which is the name of a widely acclaimed new movie that dramatizes the Boston Globe’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative series on pedophile priests.
The newspaper reported that the Boston archdiocese quietly settled child molestation claims against at least 70 priests and routinely transferred abusive priests to other parishes. The series blew the lid on a scandal that soon became a national and even international one, as more victims came forward and newspapers began aggressively reporting their stories.
In America alone, more than 6,900 priests have been accused of pedophilia, as USA Today has reported. By 2012, 16,787 people had come forward to say they were abused by priests as children, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the church had spent more than $2.6 billion in civil suits in the U.S. But that figure turned out to be an underestimate: the National Catholic Reporter tallied the data and found the total payout has been $4 billion.
The sheer scale of the scandal is astounding. The Conference commissioned a study which concluded that 4 percent of all priests who served from 1950-2002 had been accused of molesting minors. If the rate was that high for teachers in the U.S., that would equal 120,000 pedophiles.
But Peter Isely, the Milwaukeean who is Midwest director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, believes the percentage of pedophile priests is much higher. “If you look at federal reporting where there have been grand juries investigating this, the percentage gets near 10 percent.”
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