The Pope is Sorry About Priests Who Fuck Children

In a private mass last week, July 7th, Pope Francis apologized to victims of clergy sex abuse. That’s cute. Unfortunately, it doesn’t change anything. But let’s not forget the facts.

The Catholic Church is still an organization with members that have raped so many children that it has its own child-rape wikipedia page: Catholic Sex Abuse Cases. That page is linked to 277 other online sources, many of which refer to priests having sex with children.

Priests have inserted their penises into the underdeveloped anus or vagina of children as young as 3 years old, and the Catholic Church has turned a blind eye to these incidents for so long that even the United Nations human rights panel has accused their leadership, the Vatican, of systematically protecting its reputation instead of looking out for the safety of children. According to the United Nation committee, “the Holy See maintained a ‘code of silence’ that enabled priests to sexually abuse tens of thousands of children worldwide over decades with impunity.”

In other words, the Vatican allowed pedophiles to rape and molest children.

The Catholic Church is still an organization that continues to pay billions and billions because many of their members can’t keep themselves from raping children. It’s a multi-billion dollar organization that has dioceses going bankrupt because many members have a very expensive sexual preference: children.

In Holland, there’s a set cost offered for different types of clergy abuse. It looks a lot like a restaurant menu:

5,000 € – Sexual gestures against physical or mental integrity.
7,500 € – For touching one’s genitals.25,000 € – In case of rape.
100,000 € – For atrocious,continuous and prolonged abuse resulting in permanent trauma.

As we can observe, the problem of pedophilia in the Catholic Church is so insidious that they had to come up with an abuse scale as a guide for how much they’d have to spend for each form of abuse. According to an article in the Economist, “The molestation and rape of children by priests in America has resulted in more than $3.3 billion of settlements over the past 15 years.” And that’s just in the United States.

Here’s a more comprehensive list of how much this organization has been spending in an attempt to keep rapists out of jail. Here’s a third of the first page. The document, by the way, is 5 pages long:

Here’s a quick look at some crimes that priests have committed from the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP):

According to the pope himself approximately 2% of clergymen are pedophiles. In other words, around 8,000 of the 400,000+ active members of the clergy are pedophiles.

Unfortunately, according to statistics, “pedophiles have a strong, almost irresistible, desire to have sex with children. The average pedophile molests 260 victims during their lifetime. Over 90% of convicted pedophiles are arrested again for the same offense after their release from prison.”

The only way to stop a pedophile from having sex with children is to keep him in prison. Unfortunately, the Catholic Church has ways to make sure that pedophiles stay free. In the report, “Fighting for the Future: Adult Survivors Work to Protect Children & End the Culture of Clergy Sexual Abuse” by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), it was mentioned that there were five ways the church resisted accountability and taking responsibility:

The section on victim blaming reminds me of that ridiculous notion implied by a priest that, “child sex abusers are often seduced by teenage boys.”

As happy as I am for Pope Francis’ apology, I still don’t think he should be revered for admitting the crimes committed by the Vatican. That’s what he’s supposed to do to begin with. I just find it a little ironic how it’s a big deal when a pope does something an average ethical human being would have done – apologize for being the head of an organization that committed many crimes.

I’m happy that Pope Francis finally admitted that some clergymen have been responsible for sex crimes. I’m happy that he admitted that some of his colleagues systematically hid records of the abuse, hid the abuser, and silenced the victims.

But I’m not happy that the Catholic Church is still an institution that protects child molesters. I’m not happy that the Catholic Church still follows “hush-hush” regulations that perpetuate child molesting. I’m not happy that the Catholic Church is still a financial behemoth that spends billions upon billions to make sure rape victims keep quiet, and child molesters are not punished.