But you can read about it here:
In a stunning ten-page declaration recently submitted to the Los Angeles County Superior Court, veteran attorney Donald H. Steier stated that his investigations into claims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests have uncovered vast fraud and that his probes have revealed that many accusations are completely false.
Counselor Steier has played a role in over one hundred investigations involving Catholic clergy in Los Angeles.In his missive Mr. Steier relayed, “One retired F.B.I. agent who worked with me to investigate many claims in the Clergy Cases told me, in his opinion, about ONE-HALF of the claims made in the Clergy Cases were either entirely false or so greatly exaggerated that the truth would not have supported a prosecutable claim for childhood sexual abuse” (capital letters are his).
Mr. Steier also added, “In several cases my investigation has provided objective information that could not be reconciled with the truthfulness of the subjective allegations. In other words, in many cases objective facts showed that accusations were false.”
I would have thought something like this might have gotten a headline for two but nope the first time I hear about it is when I’m checking out this story at Lisa Graas on a different subject (Andrew Sullivan and excommunication a good read btw), where I found this tidbit from October that I missed as well:
…in a report titled “Sexual Victimization in Juvenile Facilities Reported by Youth” released earlier this year, a federal Bureau of Justice Statistics survey found an astonishing 10.3 percent of more than 26,000 youth held in state-operated and other large juvenile facilities complained of a “sexual incident” involving facility staff in the previous 12 months.
A few years ago, The Associated Press examined sexual abuse of students by public school teachers. Although reporters couldn’t quantify total complaints, they did discover “more than 2,500 cases over five years in which educators were punished for actions from bizarre to sadistic.” Perhaps more disturbing, “The AP investigation found efforts to stop individual offenders but, overall, a deeply entrenched resistance toward recognizing and fighting abuse . . . . In case after case the AP examined, accusations of inappropriate behavior were dismissed,” while “deals and lack of information-sharing allow abusive teachers to jump state lines, even when one school does put a stop to the abuse.”
In other words, school districts were engaging in the same sort of institutional treatment of offenders that characterized a number of Catholic dioceses in the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s, and which did so much to damage the church’s reputation.
Well that must be nothing compared to what’s going on in the church today right?
In 2009, by contrast, a total of only six “credible” allegations were lodged against U.S. Catholic priests or deacons for sexual abuse of a minor occurring that year, according to statistics gathered by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. That’s in a church with more than 41,000 priests and 17,000 deacons. Assuming the clergy will never be staffed entirely by saints — what profession is? — this figure may be about as low as it is likely to go for such a large organization.
that works out to about .58 per 1,000 clergy.
And Lisa has even more interesting numbers in a post from last month.
The newspaper that most attacks the Catholic Church on this issue is the New York Times. According to Laurie Goodstein, “Decades of Damage; Trail of Pain in Church Crisis Leads to Nearly Every Diocese,” New York Times, January 12, 2003, Section 1, p. 1., based on their survey, 1.8 percent of all priests ordained from 1950 to 2001 have been accused of child sexual abuse. The Associated Press found that approximately two-thirds of 1 percent of priests have charges pending against them.
Let’s compare this to Protestant ministers.
According to Philip Jenkins, Pedophiles and Priests (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 50 and 81, between .2 and 1.7 percent of priests are pedophiles. Among the Protestant clergy, the number is between 2 and 3 percent.
How about Jewish Rabbis?
According to the Awareness Center, the Jewish community is by no means exempt.
How about Public School Teachers?
According to Daniel Wishnietsky, “Reported and Unreported Teacher-Student Sexual Harassment,” Journal of Ed Research, Vol. 3, 1991, pp. 164-69, in New York City alone, at least one child is sexually abused by a school employee every day.
This will never make the national news because as the leading opponent of both Gay Marriage and Abortion in the nation (along with opposing the hook-up culture etc etc etc) the Church is and remains the leading opponent of liberalism embraced by the MSM.
