Abuse in Religion

Here are some "basic" references, for those who haven't picked up a newspaper, or heard a news broadcast for the last 10 years:

Berry, Jason. Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children. Foreword by Andrew M. Greely. Doubleday, New York, 1992.

Father Andrew Greely says that Berry has uncovered "an incredible mass of corruption...the greatest scandal in the history of religion in America and perhaps the most serious crisis Catholicism has faced since the Reformation." Greely also says that his reporting is "accurate and restrained, indeed if anything almost too conservative."

Berry won the 1986 Catholic Press Association Award for his coverage of clerical sex abuse. He documents many things that people have been saying here:

• Over 400 Catholic priests in North America were caught molesting children between 1984 and 1992.
• The typical molester abuses scores to hundreds of children.
• The Church has paid out over $400 million in settlements, and the total is expected to reach $1 billion before they are done.
• The Church tried to cover it all up.
• The press has underreported it. The New York Times refused his stories, saying, "We want to do a child abuse story, but not in the context of the Catholic Church." (any lights coming on?) Subsequent refusals came from The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The Nation, and Mother Jones.

Burkett, Elinor, and Bruni, Frank. A Gospel of Shame: Children, Sexual Abuse, and the Catholic Church. Viking, Penguin Books, NY, NY 1993.

Some quotes from the book:

• "No one knows how many more there may be, since Church officials deny keeping any centralized records. But bishops in dioceses where one or two priest molesters have been sued or prosecuted speak openly about the three, four, or five or six other cases they have handled in private. And they themselves know that they are unaware of the many -- probably the majority -- which are never reported."
• "Reverend Margaret Graham, [is] an Episcopal priest who also serves as the president of the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse. She point out that what has happened among priests and the Catholic Church is not an isolated phenomenon."
• "In province after province, Canadian priests were exposed as molesters in the early 1990's, forcing the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops to create yet another special commission."
• When Dutch Catholic Television dared air a special on the growing scandal of child sexual abuse by priests in the U.S., more than 200 victims from Amsterdam to Rotterdam called in with their own stories of molestation by men in collars."
• James Porter had at least 125 victims "that we know of." The St. John's, Newfoundland case had somewhere around 130 victims; I will look it up. 200 victims called in when Dutch TV showed their special.
• That's 455 victims right there. As you can see, it's not going to be hard for me to reach my "thousands."

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