Swing and a Miss

This Blog Post by Andrew Brown entitled “Catholic Child Abuse in Proportion” is a marvel in missing the point. At least, I’m going to give Mr. Brown the benefit of the doubt and say that he missed the point. A more cynical person might find a deliberate attempt to muddy the water.

To save you some reading, Mr. Brown goes through some elaborate statistics in order to prove his central point: that the rates of abuse among the Catholic Clergy are no worse than other organizations. He describes the rates of abuse as “not remarkable.”

I don’t even care to look at Mr. Brown’s numbers. I don’t care because they do not matter one bit. Child abuse will happen anywhere children are. What Mr. Brown seems to want to bury here is what the real scandal is:

THE COVER UP!

It’s the Catholic Church’s years of covering up abuse by Priests that is the issue here, Mr. Brown. Shipping Priests around to different locations and passing the problems on to others. I consider the people who covered up the abuse only slightly less guilty than the abusers themselves. So no Mr. Brown, I don’t care about all your statistics about rates of abuse. They do not matter.

The blog post also ends with quite a statement: “Certainly the safeguards against paedophilia in the priesthood are now among the tightest in the world.” Really? They are? He cites no proof for this statement, so I really don’t feel the need to find my own facts to refute it.

The question remains: can one miss the point this widely by accident?