Am I saying ALL PRIESTS are doing this crime?
Read this FYI!
In 2002, criminal charges were brought against five Roman Catholic priests in the Boston area of the United States, (
John Geoghan, John Hanlon,
Paul Shanley, Robert V. Gale and
Jesuit priest James Talbot) which ultimately resulted in the conviction and sentencing of each to prison.
[1] The ongoing coverage of these cases by the
Boston Globe thrust the issue of
sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests into the national limelight.
[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] The coverage of these cases encouraged other victims to come forward with their allegations of abuse resulting in more lawsuits and criminal cases.
[12] (see
Sexual abuse scandal in Boston archdiocese). As it became clear that there was truth to many of the allegations and that there was a pattern of sexual abuse and cover-up in a number of large dioceses across the USA, what had originally appeared to be a few isolated cases of abuse exploded into a nationwide scandal. The resulting scandal created a crisis for the Catholic Church in the United States, encouraged victims in other nations to come forward with their allegations of abuse thus creating a global crisis for the Church.
Ultimately, it became clear that, over several decades in the 20th and 21st centuries, priests and lay members of religious orders in the
Catholic Church had sexually abused minors on a scale such that the accusations reached into the thousands. Although the majority of cases were reported to have occurred in the United States,
victims have come forward in other nations such as Ireland, Canada and Australia. A major aggravating factor was the actions of Catholic bishops to keep these crimes secret and to reassign the accused to other parishes in positions where they had continued unsupervised contact with youth, thus allowing the abusers to continue their crime.
The
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops commissioned a comprehensive study that determined that, during the period from 1950-2002,
a total of 10,667 individuals had made allegations of child sexual abuse by 4,392 priests. This number represents 4% of the 109,694 priests that served from 1950-2002. Of the 4392 priests who were accused, police were contacted regarding 1021 individuals and of these, 384 were charged resulting in 252 convictions and 100 prison sentences. Thus, 6% of all priests against whom allegations were made were convicted and about 2% received prison sentences to date.
[13][14]
Many of the accused priests were forced to resign or were defrocked. In addition, several bishops who had participated in the cover-up were also forced to resign or retire.
[15] The dioceses in which the crimes were committed found it necessary to make financial settlements with the victims totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
[12]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_C...**_abuse_cases 