As for the actual question in this thread, I’ll give the simple version I haven’t seen. Before, the news was that this stuff wasn’t being dealt with. That’s what made any of this newsworthy. Now it is being dealt with. So now it’s not newsworthy.
A child molesting priest is now local news, just like any other child molester. That’s the way it should be.
The OP of this thread seems to assume that, if it weren’t for the current pope’s antics, more of the child molesting would be in the news, but I don’t buy it. It’s not like there are special slots for Catholic news that must be filled.
There was a problem. The Church wouldn’t do anything about it. It was made public. The Church started doing something about it and making it public. They changed the rules. They started defrocking past abusers. The problem is being dealt with, so the problem stopped being part of the news.
tomndebb specifically said there should be a two-pronged approach, reporting the crime and helping the abuser. Nothing about helping the abused, and specifically saying these were the two things they should do, not among the chief things they should do. So to speak. The idea that the Church has a responsibility to help the abuser but not the abused is reprehensible.
I’m actually fine with serial child sex offenders being locked up for life, but if they’re not, they do need help - and lots of it. And of course, their lawyers would be obliged to help them as long as they represent them. But if it’s a choice between giving any more help than legally required to the abuser, or to the victims, then the choice should always be the victims. It’s choosing wrongly in that situation that has landed the Church in so much shit recently, and it’s disturbing to see people want to continue it.
ETA I agree completely with your second post, just above this. “Church does what it should” isn’t particularly newsworthy.
The part I can’t understand about the scandal is how it was news. If the Church has been covering up the scandal for decades, they’ve been doing a pretty poor job of it. Even when I was a kid back in the 80s, everyone knew that there were priests abusing altar boys. It was the subject of immature jokes: If an altar boy showed up in a joke, you could be certain that the punchline would involve a priest having sex with him. Not only that, but all my protestant friends knew the jokes, too. And I’m sure that this level of institutional knowledge went back before then, too. So how was it such big news in the past decade?
Actually, you asked a more factual question than that, and there’s a factual answer. The scandal blew open because the John Geoghan case exposed how the church actively protected child rapists, including moving them to fresh pastures as well as intimidating victims into silence. It was no longer possible to dismiss it as a failing of a few scattered individuals who were no doubt dealt with by their supervision; it was rubbed in everyone’s faces that it was an *institutional *problem (and the Wesolowski case shows it to still be one).
The courage of Geoghan’s victims led others all over the world to come forward similarly, and show the rot went all the way to the top levels of the organization. The shock value of it being shown, in a way no one could dismiss, of being an institutional problem, in an institution that purports to provide moral guidance and love at that, an institution to whom so many have given their loyalty and subservience, is what made it news.
It was during the 1980s that it began to be publicly reported. There have always been nasty jokes about the concupiscence of priests (parallel to a fair amount of anti-Catholic propaganda such as claims that nuns were simply kept for the sexual gratification of priests). In the 1980s, the “awe” in which the clergy had been held by many Catholics had been broken following the upheavals that followed Vatican II and more people were willing to come forth with accusations and news outlets were more willing to bring forth such stories. The United States Council of Catholic Bishops were sufficiently concerned by the widespread nature of the reports of a phenomenon that they had presumed was extremely rare that they met in 1989(?) and hammered out new rules that included, among others, reporting events to the civil authorities and placing accused priests in stations where they had no contact with children.
Unfortunately, a number of bishops chose to ignore those rules, continuing to ignore evidence of abuse and moving abusers to unsuspecting parishes.
When the Geoghan/Law/Boston story broke, it sent the bishops back to a second meeting in which the rules were further tightened. My guess would be that the wide publicity of the U.S. stories encouraged people in other nations to come forward with their own reports, making it a “world wide” news story that gets revived as one nation or another begins to recognize that it was not an “American” problem.