Everybody has been talking about it..but now we have quantified data proving the point. Most Americans and most Catholic Americans think the Pope has done a terrible job dealing with the priest pedophilia scandal. CNN/Opinion Research Corp survey results released Friday also indicate that recent revelations about that matter have hurt the pope's standing with the public:
Fifty-nine percent of American Catholics questioned in the poll have a favorable view of the pope, down 19 points from February. Among all Americans, the slippage is even greater: from 59 percent in February to just 35 percent today. "Only a quarter of U.S. Catholics have an unfavorable view of the pope, but they don't seem satisfied with his track record on the growing and persistent scandal within the church," CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said.Now..does anyone really think the Church or the Pope might re-think how to handle this ongoing tragedy and the public relations disaster it has created for the Church? Of course not!
Some other statistics..
The Catholic figures show that between about 4% of priests and deacons serving in the US between 1950 and 2002 had been accused of sexual abuse of someone under 18. Four out of five of their victims were male. Most were adolescents..two out of five were 14 or over..15% were under 10.
This is sick..but whether it is more sick than the record of any other profession is not obvious. The concentration on boys makes the Catholic pattern of abuse stand out..what makes it so shocking is that parents trusted their children with priests. They stood in for the parents. But this isn't all that different from the pattern in the wider world..either..where the vast majority of abuse comes from within families. The other point that makes the Catholic abuse is that it is nowadays very widely reported. It may be the best reported crime in the world:..that..too tends to skew perceptions.
This is an institution..governed as it always has been..by fallible and often corrupt human beings. If anyone still believes the Pope has any sort of connection to God..I would like that person to explain how he or she can possibly continue to believe that such a connection exists under current circumstances. Please avoid using excuses for what the Church leadership has done. They provide no insight to those of us outside the church as we try hard to understand what keeps people in the church.
..HEAVEN'S EYES WILL NEVER DRY.
Peace out my HALEYUNNS!
What keeps people in church is the want or the need to believe that there is more to life than this...to believe that although bad things happen to good people, to believe that everything happens for a reason. If you don't believe and you don't have hope, what kind of life are you really living. Life is not perfect and neither are we. It is sad that things like this happen especially in the church where you are supposed to be safe and protect, but no one can protect us from the human element involved. Children are supposed to be protected at school to and look how many times things happen there. I go to church not to believe in the church itself but to believe in the bigger picture...to believe in what and whom it stands for...and to have hope for the future.
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