Apparently the Roman Catholic Church feels picked on, singled out for abuse from the rest of us. You see, when their priests rape children, they don't have columnists and famous entertainers defending them and suggesting that really, we should just let bygones be bygones.
This type of reasoning really confuses me. Before it became clear that the Bush administration was authorizing exactly the same kind of abuses that Saddam inflicted upon the Iraqi people, it was argued that what happened at Abu Ghraib and other crimes committed by Americans in Iraq should be ignored because Saddam was a bad guy. Now we have the Vatican itself arguing that people should lay off their priests because Roman Polanski raped a young girl.
Mark Silk is of course right that it "is right and proper to hold clergy to a higher standard--they're in the ethics and morality business." But even beyond that, I'm completely unable to understand why people insist upon justifying their own wrongdoing by comparing their behavior to that of known tyrants, sexual predators or other human monsters.
And of course the simplest way for the Roman Catholic Church to get people to stop prosecuting and discussing its priests for being sexual predators is to get them to stop being sexual predators. The Catholics' problem isn't the fault of the media, the UN or Roman Polanski, it's the fault of the child rapists they have ordained into the priesthood and then repeatedly shuffled around the nation from post to post, giving them new victims to attack.
