A few months ago, I was innocently finding ways to kill time at work when I get a message from some lady who works for the PA State Attorney General. Seems she wants to see if our business website would be willing to have a "hotlink" to the Atty General's PA health care site. What do I care?, I think. It will take me about 2 minutes to code in a link. So I call her back and get told that they are still in discussions on the matter and she'll get back to me. Weeks pass, but she does indeed call again, this time prepared with some crazy URL and a few graphics. So up goes the link. To her, this was a huge deal. Probably meant she completed X tasks from her Inbox and achieved some kind of bureaucratic coup that rubber-stamped "OK" on a dozen official state documents. To me, it was another boring piece of monkey work that burned me 2 more minutes towards going the fuck home. It's all a matter of scale.
Kinda like how the Catholic church is glossing over priests who enjoy diddling choir members. Boy, I'm super proud that the Pope came right out and said pedophilia is wrong. What an amazingly honest and refreshing stance! How brave! I've read all the news reports, and - despite the Pope's assertions - there is still no policy on what to do with sexual predators in positions of authority.
To the Catholic church, protecting the Old Boys Club is more important than protecting the little boys. Once you get past all the crap about eternal salvation, the church is a business like any other. A fraternal business, at that. And they want to protect their own. That's why our good ol' American priests traveled to the Vatican with the hope that the Pope would come up with a creative, multilingual way to squirrel sickos back into their jobs. That's why we've spent decades shifting offenders from one region to another, hiding them in plain sight instead of locking them up in freak prison.
What's this shit about being lenient on the priests who "only did it once"? How does that make a difference? First of all, unless you get notarized statements from every single child he ever had contact with, how do you know it was only once? What, you're going to trust his word? The word of a goddamn child molester?
But more importantly, once is more than enough.
