The
global scale of the Catholic clergy’s sexual abuse scandal becomes
harder for the Vatican to deny with each shocking national inquiry. The
latest, from Australian government investigators,
found that from 1980 to 2015 there were 4,444 victims of abuse and at
least 1,880 suspected to be abusers, most of them priests and religious
brothers.
Through
this period, the haunting subtext is the culpability of bishops who did
nothing about the crimes. The abused children were ignored or punished
while priests who raped children were protected by supervisors.