This may sounds crass or totally out of school, but it seems odd that such a specific crime seems to have attached to a specific religion. I mean, there are other strict religions and even other ones that don’t allow their authorities to have sexual relations but they don’t seem to have that same specific, on going link the Catholic church has.
Is it an authority abuse of power thing? Is it a sex thing since priests aren’t allowed to have partners? Is it because of the institution of the “alter boy”? Are there more sexual abuses in general I’m not thinking of and we hear more prominently about the church? Has anyone really explored this subject?
It isn’t that the Catholic church attracted more pedophiles than other religions. It’s that the church was complicit in covering it up that made the scandal so much worse.
I think a big part of it was the revelations of just how much of the hierarchy knew or suspected that priests were sexual abusers and hid the evidence, moved the priests around and attempted to resolve things internally. Other denominations have had sex scandals but the CC managed to fumble its way into allowing the abuses to go on much longer than I think other denominations would have been able to do.
I forget where I read it but IIRC the percentage of pedophile Catholic priests is in line with the percentage of pedophiles in the population at large.
As you said the real issue is the church seemed content to let these priests continue even after there was very good evidence that they were molesting kids.
Protestant youth pastors have a long and questionable history of sexually abusing their charges too. And I’m sure other religions have the same issues.
But Catholic priests have the triple whammy of enforced celibacy, unfettered access to young boys, and the appearance of moral authority backed up by the Church leadership in many cases to give them impunity. Were altar girls more common in the days when all this was hushed up, many of them would have been molested too.
Availability (lots of young boys spending 1:1 time) plus the ability for us to count all of the Catholic abusers in one bucket, similar to the Boy Scouts.
There might be high numbers in other groups, but they don’t show up as “another soccer coach” in a list.
Here’s an article that discusses various studies that mostly refute that:
I think the big things would be: the Church’s way of handling the problem “in house” (i.e. just shuffling people around), the vastness of its school/orphanages/church network and the fact that the priesthood is such an attractive “cover story” for a pedophile (moral authority, celibacy).
When I worked for a child advocacy organization I kept a running log of accounts of child sex abuse by clergy. Believe me, it came in all flavors – conservative Christians, liberal Christians, non-Christians, men on boys, men on girls, etc. The only reason there weren’t more women involved was that a lot of denominations had few if any ordained women.
What made it different for Roman Catholics is that they have a much stronger hierarchy and organizational structure. A Southern Baptist minister might get dismissed by his congregation, for any reason from embezzlement, to drub abuse, to child abuse. Maybe the congregation decides to keep it quiet. The minister could even leave the ministry and sell cars for a couple of years, then come back as an associate minister somewhere else. He might even hide his work with the former congregation entirely.
Roman Catholics, having a much more structured hierarchy, also leave a much stronger paper trail. A young Catholic priest might get transferred from a parish to working at a senior citizen home (which also happens to provide therapy for pedophiles), then back to a different parish. The big difference is, the bishop authorized each transfer, and wasn’t sharing the reasons why.
Between the idea that pedophilia was simply a weakness that would go away with a little therapy, an unwillingness to probe too deeply into a priest’s private life, a willingness to transfer a priest away from a problem, and the sheer size of the RC church, the scandal became much broader with Roman Catholics than with other denominations.
There were recent revelations about sexual abuse of children involved in gymnastics programs in the US, often by coaches. And in recent years, we’ve learned about teachers at several prep and/or boarding schools who also sexually abused students. The common thread in these situations, I think, is the offender is trusted to be among underage children.
As many posters have already said, I think it’s partly the hierarchy thing and the coverup. I also think in many cases that occurred years ago, there was a different mindset. Catholic priests were held in such high esteem that a child would never think of reporting sexual misconduct or if he did wouldn’t be believed or possibly even punished. How in the world could such accusations be made about the good Father? I think this may still hold true in parts of the world today that perhaps are not as secular as the US is. In many places, religion, specifically Roman Catholicism is at the heart of the culture.