yes_justice | Apr. 21st, 2010

Inevitable follow up to my last post about The Catholic Church's chronic problems with child rape.

First, This story:

"Lothstein says there's a "universal feeling" that if a priest has had sexual activity with a child, he should not be around children. But, he says, it didn't always work out that way.

"In my experience, there were some people who were sent right back to working in youth ministries, and they often offended," he says. "There was also a subgroup of people that I saw in my private practice where they were sent back by their religious order to a foreign country, and within that country continued to molest children. And it was just horrible."

Listen for yourself.(mp3)

Second, ignoring such behavior was indeed considered praise worthy in the ranks:

In October 2000, Father René Bissey was sentenced to 18 years in jail for sexually abusing 11 boys between 1989 and 1996. Bissey's bishop, Pierre Pican of the Diocese of Bayeux-Lisieux, had known of the abuse but refused to report Bissey to French authorities and instead sent him for psychiatric treatment. Pican's actions resulted in his own conviction in 2001 for "failure to report a sex crime against a minor younger than 15 years old." The bishop was sentenced to three months in prison. That sentence led Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, then head of the Vatican's Congregation for Clergy -- the department overseeing Catholic clergy policies around the world -- to write Bishop Pican a letter effusively praising his actions in shielding the abusive priest. At the time, Castrillon Hoyos was a colleague of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger -- now Pope Benedict XVI.

"I congratulate you on not having reported a priest to the civil authorities," Castrillon Hoyos wrote to Pican on Sept. 8, 2001. "You have done well, and I rejoice at having an associate in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and of all the others bishops of the world, will have chosen prison rather than speaking out against his priest-son."

Castrillon Hoyos added that he would send a copy of the letter to all the bishops' conferences "to encourage the brothers in the episcopate in this very delicate area."

Could any other organization possibly be allowed to behave in this way? If a teacher at a school was molesting children and the principal covered it up and encourage others to cover it up, how would we react?

The German press is pulling no punches: