Really interesting unusual legitimate perspective

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The sexual abuse of children is so vilified in our society that the mere possession of child pornography by an adult is grounds for an automatic jail sentence.

Yet thousands of priest child abusers all over the world– in the U.S., Ireland, Germany, the Philippines and elsewhere– were allowed by both ecclesiastical and civilian authorities to roam like predators molesting innocent children.

Buried stories continue to be uncovered like mass graves at a holocaust site. Now, like Watergate slowly winding its way into the Oval Office and engulfing Richard Nixon, two new stories implicate Pope Benedict himself.

As a young man, I studied to be a priest before leaving the seminary after college. For nine years, I lived in an all-male seminary environment that produced many extraordinary priests but also failed to cull out the rogue abusers among them.

In fact, some of the priests who later became child abusers were fellow students while I was at the seminary decades ago or attended before or after me. I actually remember some of them as teenagers.

I never witnessed inappropriate sexual behavior by any priest or student during my nine years.

But I was not surprised to learn many years later that particular students I remembered had become serial abusers as priests.

As young men living in a celibate environment without contact with women, there was literally no sex education at all in the curriculum. We were extremely naïve. For me at least, pedophilia was beyond my comprehension.

It was wrong that church leaders did not anticipate that mandating celibacy creates an even greater responsibility for the institution to dismiss questionable prospects for the priesthood.

But the seminary itself had no mechanism to find and remove students with unclear sexual identities

Continue reading here: Clint Reilly Company in San Francisco
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