LEXINGTON (KY)
Lexington Herald Leader
August 30, 2018
By Paul Prather
In mid-August, a grand jury in Pennsylvania released the latest revelation of the worst scandal to mar any Christian denomination in our collective memories.
That scandal, of course, is the ongoing, seemingly never-ending story of the sexual abuse of children within the Roman Catholic Church and the systematic cover-ups of that abuse by bishops and other church leaders.
The grand jury detailed abuses by more than 300 predator priests in Pennsylvania over a period of 70 years. Its report, which covered six of the state’s eight Catholic dioceses, found 1,000 victims, but said there were thousands more the grand jury failed to identify.
Although the Pennsylvania report is the most extensive yet by a governmental agency in the United States, the crimes it exposed shouldn’t surprise anyone.
For three decades, countless cases of sex abuse by Catholic clergy and other forms of child abuse by church workers have been exposed across the country and around the world, including locales as far flung as Germany, Ireland, Chile, Australia, the Dominican Republic, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and Brazil.
The church’s die-hard defenders argue the Catholic Church is getting a bum rap, that child abuse happens everywhere — in Protestant churches, in public schools, in secular universities such as Penn State, in youth sports, in families.
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