Catholic and Enjoying It!
The best book I have read on this is by a lawyer named Joseph Klest called The Whole Truth. He’s an agnostic out in Chicago who has prosecuted around 500 sex abuse cases against the Church and has really good understanding of the institutional forces that create an environment for predators to seek prey (the same everywhere in the world, which is why this happens everywhere in the Church).
He doesn’t cut the Church one damn bit of slack, but he also doesn’t cut other institutions any slack either. And he argues, counter-intuitively but very persuasively, that if we really care about sexual abuse of minors, then the smartest thing we can do is take a good hard look at the astonishing work the US Church has done to tackle this issue: work that other institutions in dire need of reform (*cough* our entire public school system *cough*) have not done jack about.
Australian Church: there’s a way out of this nightmare. The first thing you need to do is face the fact that you really have a problem. Happily, we belong to a tradition that has a big place for acts of contrition. Start there.
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