Not saying this guy did or didn't do whats said and been said, just thats hes been dead 30 years, claims started 50 years ago,trigger happy lawyers are invovlved and I couldn't take (before dinner)reading the whole story.......

This is as much about how they're behaving now as it is about how they were behaving back then.

Ditto, Jack.

I was an altar boy when the alleged acts started here, back in Cicero IL. All the priests are gone, I believe. What's to stop me from telling "stories"? Rumors were rampant at the priests had a thing for nuns etc, as boys about the age of 11 were wont to believe!

Makes me sick. Those priests I served with were actually wonderful men, imo. The altar boys...? Well we took to the sacramental wine, we sure did!

"Trigger happy lawyers are involved" -- yes, that's how this whole thing got brought out from under the very deep plush rug it had been carefully hidden under.

Kind of like the "trigger happy lawyers" who stuck with their clients instead of buying into Toyota's "we make the finest cars in the world" line all those years.

Remember, when you are screwed by a powerful institution, don't call a trigger happy lawyer. Just call the priest or the CEO and ask them to make it right. You wouldn't want to get involved with a trigger happy lawyer. And good luck to you.

Thank you George, well written / said.

Again, not saying guilt or innocence just that in the (vast?) majority of these cases the priests have been dead 20, 30, even 40 or more years before plaintiffs thought about filing suit.Thats when the lawyers fly in just as they are in defending the church(which the defense lawyers are doing by trying to protect the churches assets).There are dozens and dozens of lawyers working these cases(full time) just in OR. BTW I'm not anti-lawyer or lawsuits either by any means....

Thats when the lawyers fly in

Thanks be to God Our Father and to Jesus Christ His Son that we live in a society in which people and organizations who prey on children are brought to justice, however long it takes.

Amen.

I think claims that the whole thing is overblown or fraudulent are pretty much put to rest by the evidence that's come out in these cases that Church authorities knew of claims of sexual abuse and moved priests from parish to parish in order to hide that fact. And it was hardly limited to one geographic region or country.

Vatican: Irish sex abuse scandal 'humiliating' for Catholic Church

Priests involved in the abuses had committed "particularly execrable acts", the Vatican said on Monday, as Irish bishops began an unprecedented summit with the Pope.

The Vatican's Secretary of State, Tarcisio Bertone, told the bishops that revelations of systemic and long-standing paedophilia presented a "hard and humiliating challenge" for the Irish Catholic Church.

The crisis erupted in November with the publication of an explosive Irish government investigation detailing the crimes and revealing that church leaders in Dublin had spent decades protecting child-abusing priests from the law. The Murphy Report found the Church had "obsessively" hidden child abuse from 1975 to 2004.

Pretending that all of these stories are made up by drunken altar boys and greedy lawyers to extract money from the Church is just more of the kind of behavior that enabled the cover-up for so long. Even the Pope's condemning that kind of behavior these days. Time to face the facts.

Iunderstand the anger about the priests and there should be some sort of criminal action and surrneder of a priests resort.

However, Jesuit is a good school turning out decent students better than the average public school. WHat do we gain by putting it out of the educations business?

"We" aren't putting Jesuit out of business. The capos in the organized crime syndicate known as the Catholic Church have decided which assets to protect and which to cut loose. If they valued the school as much as their ornate gold decorations, it wouldn't be threatened.

"...out of the educations business?"

Fewer typos?

If the church doesn't own Jesuit High School, what would its reaction be if, as part of a settlement, the plaintiffs required Jesuit High School to propagate evangelical Protestantism?

More interestingly, since Jesuit High School is a religious non-profit corporation with members, the plaintiffs could say that as a condition of settlement, they would all be admitted to membership in the corporation, with full voting rights, and could elect new management with, perhaps, a different theological viewpoint.