Everybody's Doing It

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Sexual abuse of children is not just a Catholic Church problem and other institutions should take steps to acknowledge and deal with such "wickedness" within their own ranks, the Vatican said on Tuesday.

The deal settles all 508 cases that remained against the archdiocese, which also paid $60 million in December to settle 45 cases that weren't covered by sexual abuse insurance.

Under the latest deal, the archdiocese will pay $250 million, insurance carriers will pay a combined $227 million and several religious orders will chip in $60 million. The remaining $123 million will come from litigation with religious orders that chose not to participate in the deal, with the archdiocese guaranteeing resolution of those 80 to 100 cases within five years, Hennigan said. The archdiocese is released from liability in those claims, Tamberg said.

Several religious orders in California have also reached multimillion-dollar settlements in recent months, including the Carmelites, the Franciscans and the Jesuits.S. church since 1950 to more than $2 billion, with about a quarter of that coming from the Los Angeles archdiocese. A judge must sign off on the agreement.

The Los Angeles archdiocese, its insurers and various Roman Catholic orders have paid more than $114 million to settle 86 claims so far.

I didn't know there was such a thing as 'sexual abuse insurance'.

I do know that if you build a house on the slope of an active volcano you will have a hard time finding an insurance carrier, and rightly so , because there are 10 million tons of boiling, roiling magma in your backyard and it's headed for your porch...so who the hell would insure Catholic priests against sexual abuse? That's a loser's bet.

It's come up again and again that the Vatican's policy of prohibiting it's priests from being married is somehow at the root of the Church's long history of pedophilia , but I don't think that is the cause of their woes- wouldn't a normal, healthy man just masturbate and/or have unmarried sex with a consenting adult? Yeah, I know the Church doesn't approve of those practices either, but wouldn't it be a lot cheaper than paying the premium on $227 million in sexual abuse insurance? As far as I know, Lloyd's of London doesn't offer 'wanking insurance' , nor are the hymens of nuns insured against breakage.

I would submit that the 'no-marriage' clause does not turn healthy ( read: non-abusive) men into sexual predators, it simply encourages deviants to enter the priesthood while simultaneously discouraging healthy men from joining. A sexual abuser, who cannot publicly disclose or indulge his fetishes anyway, is much less likely to be dissuaded by a vow of chastity than a man who prefers fornication of a consensual, adult kind.

The huge settlement seems to indicate that the no-marriage rule has become counter-productive. It was originally instituted to ensure that Catholic priests didn't produce heirs, as the heirs would inherit property that would otherwise remain in the Church. The chastity rule has nothing at all to do with morality and everything to do with economics, so it follows that if it's costing the Church hundreds of millions of dollars to protect child-molesters, it must still be cheaper than the cost of allowing priests to marry and leave estates to their potentially heretic children. That, I believe, is the main reason the Church remains inflexible on this issue- the entire patriarchal economic power-structure would have to be deconstructed and rebuilt at the expense of those enjoying the benefits of the current system. Hold your breath and wait for that to happen.

I'm contemptuous of the Church's attempt at misdirection:

...other institutions should take steps to acknowledge and deal with such
"wickedness" within their own ranks, the Vatican said ...

but sadly, there's also truth in it. Child-molesters are on quest for power and control, and what better position to find power, control and rationalization of criminal misbehavior than as head of a church?

There's always politics.