Get ready, Ireland. You're about to be shocked.
The Archbishop of Dublin would like his flock to know that there's a report coming out this summer that details the scope of clerical child abuse over the years. He's talking about a report that examined only the Dublin archdiocese.
People were certainly shocked when the Ferns diocese let it be known that they had a sizable collection of pedophiles in the priestly ranks. So if you were taken aback at that one, just wait.
You've been warned, so don't act surprised when the Catholic Church comes clean and tells the nation that thousands of Irish children were abused by the same priests they were instructed to trust.
A statistician will trot out to explain the numbers, to prove that the percentage of pedophiles in cassocks is the same as that in the general population so it's not as if the priesthood attracts them. That same statistician will say nothing about the Church's habit of moving abusers from parish to parish, rather than turning them in to the authorities as happens in the general population.
The Church took care of its own, at the expense of thousands of children in Ireland. How many in total, then, if a small country like Ireland could count the victims in the thousands?
Against this background of a very horrifying past, Archbishop Martin and his fellow bishops across the planet will ask their congregations to pray for vocations. Pray that more men and women will sacrifice all to sign on, abandon the real world and commit to a life where people on the street look at you with a jaundiced eye. Where you're presumed gay or sexually deviant or otherwise emotionally dysfunctional.
The report is coming, don't be alarmed.
Are the bishops alarmed about the jobs that go unfilled, shocked by the empty rooms in the seminaries or startled to discover lay teachers in every Catholic school classroom?
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