An obvious remark nobody has made yet
The ending of World War Two engulfed all countries, victor and neutral, into a tide of horror. Even the Soviet Union, whose government had little to learn from Nazism at its worst, found it easy to show, indeed to feel, horror at what its troops discovered in the early months of 1945 in dozens of camps from Majdanek to Theresienstadt to Auschwitz.
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I do find it curious that you blame the pervasive sheltering of pedophiles within the Catholic church on secular culture, when it's the religious nature of the organization that protects it from the kind of accountability that, say, the ASPCA or the Red Cross would have if it developed the same reputation for aiding and abetting pedophiles. When the organization punishes priests more harshly for wanting to ordain women than for molesting local children, I think we have a problem with the actual priorities of the organization itself for which we can't just shift accountability away.
Furthermore, I wonder what indigenous populations would think of your assertion that secular culture is to blame for the allegedly quite recent pattern of pedophile sheltering when for the last several decades their communities are the ones that pedophile priests have been relocated to, so that they'll only be victimizing communities nobody really cares about.
Yes, our current affection for sexualizing children in modern media is completely inappropriate and I cannot really make any excuses for it. However, it's not new, either. I find it really hard to believe that nobody was raping children in the days when it was widely considered acceptable to be married to one (or two, or more).
It is one thing to look at the rampant callous and indeed criminal behavior of the Catholic Church where ordained pedophiles are concerned and say, "They are fucking up, but this is a symptom of a broader cultural problem that they are both a result of and perpetuating," and quite another to say, "The Catholic Church has some problems, okay, but overall they're a good organization and if they become an international pedophile cartel, well I think we should consider how that might be everybody else's fault," which is what this really comes off as.
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Here are some of the reasons I feel there is a pattern of sheltering pedophiles in the Catholic church that goes beyond the actions of a few isolated individual bishops whose behavior cannot be said to represent their organization.
WI bishops opposed Wisconsin legislation to repeal the statute of limitations on child abuse cases. Whom does that one help, eh? They don't like sex abuse legislation in Connecticut or New York or the D.C. area or Denver or basically anywhere.
New Report Shows Extent of Priest Abuse in Chicago
The percentage of parishes and institutions ministered by credibly accused priests approached 25% in the mid-1990's. In 2009, one in five institutions in the archdiocese still had a credibly accused priest in residence.
"This study raises deeply troubling questions about the way credibly accused priests were sent to parishes and residences. The concentration of assignments in certain areas, the clustering of multiple pedophiles in the same place, and the total absence of assignments to parishes or institutions in other areas, all suggest that assignments were not made strictly in response to changing pastoral needs. The question of what criteria were applied to the assignment of these priests remains to be answered. It is painfully clear that these assignments were not accidental."
Another article on the RCC's habit of relocating predator priests to unsuspecting communities rather than firing them.
The Kansas City Catholic Diocese chooses not to tell the police that one of their priests--who, it should be noted, had received complaints about the way he behaved around children--had a stash of kiddie porn on his computer, and on his very own personal camera.
The Vatican is arguing the following things as reasons why Benedict shouldn't be deposed: "that the pope has immunity as a head of state; that American bishops who oversaw abusive priests weren’t employees of the Vatican," etc. Not "we didn't do this and you have no evidence," but "the pope has diplomatic immunity so nyah."
Another good defense: Blame the Jews! ...Somehow. There are some other hilarious scapegoats listed here.
These are not isolated incidents being invented by an anti-Catholic conspiracy. This behavior from any other organization would be viewed as seriously suspicious. If the ASPCA did this with employees who molested members' dogs they would have been ripped apart and would go down in history as "those people who screwed Saint Bernards," no matter how many times they helped law enforcement and disaster relief in other instances.
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I'm curious about your assertion regarding "when it was widely considered acceptable to be married to one (or two, or more) [children]." I'm not sure when that was. Polygamy has never been acceptable in the Christian era, given St. Paul's admonition regarding being "the husband of one wife."
I have a copy of a translation of the Burgundian Code - a legal code which dates to the 5th century. I find it interesting that the penalty for the abduction of and "violence to" (slightly euphemistic there) an underage girl was that the guilty party must pay 12 times her wergild (wergild being the price paid to the family of a murdered person in Germanic society). That culture at least took the rape of minors VERY seriously.
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The Burgundian Code: Book of Constitutions or Law of Gundobad and Additional Enactments,
Translation by Katherine Fischer Drew, Published by the University of Philadelphia Press, 1949, Third paperback edition, 1988, ISBN (paperback) 0-8122-1035-2
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