POPE IMPLIES IT USED TO BE OK FOR PRIESTS TO SEXUALLY ABUSE CHILDREN

Regarding the sexual abuse of children by priests, Pope Francis says the Catholic Church should not be judged by modern standards

Pope Francis, returning from a 4-day trip to the Baltics, told reporters on his plane that the Church should not be judged by modern standards because attitudes towards sexual abuse have changed dramatically over the years. That clearly implies it used to be OK for priests to sexually abuse children.

Francis also said:

“In olden times, these things were covered up, they were even covered up in homes, when an uncle raped a niece, when a father raped his children. It was covered up because it was an enormous shame. That was the mentality in the last century. In more recent times the number went down because the Church realized that it had to fight in a different way, Look at the proportions (in Pennsylvania) and you will see that when the Church started becoming aware of this, it spared no effort. Priests are supposed to take children to God, not to destroy them. If just one priest abuses a child, it's monstrous.”

Monstrous indeed, but only today, not yesteryear.

The Pope’s Baltic tour came in the wake of a new report released in Germany on Tuesday showing that almost 3,700 German children, mostly boys, were sexually assaulted by Catholic priests between 1946 and 2014.

It has become crystal clear that countless children have been sexually abused by priests in every country where the Catholic church is present.

It seems to me that a new church policy of letting priests marry is way overdue. That would significantly reduce, if not eliminate, the sexual abuse of children by the priests. And when the Church receives a sexual abuse complaint, it must report the offense immediately to the police. That’s by any standard, not just today’s.

And if the Pope wants the Catholic Church to be judged kindly, he should start off by firing and excommunicating all the bishops who helped cover up these atrocious crimes. The cover up is almost always worse than the crime … and in sexual abuse cases it is!