"Child abuse has been going on since Adam and Eve came out of the garden,,,,, If a case comes to us, we look at it, in the first instance, and say, does there seem to be any substance in this case, and straightaway hand it to the police. That's been our practice since '94."
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/03/world/la-fg-bishop-qa4-2010apr04/2
Catholic Church will survive abuse scandals, says English bishop
Bishop Kieran Conry, one of the few clerics to openly talk about the issue weighs in on whether the media are unfairly targeting the pope and the long-term effects of the scandal.
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The '70s was a quite different era. I was in Birmingham, in England, in the '80s, and there was a case involving a priest in the parish next door to me. The common gossip was that this man was too close to children. We thought, yeah, that's not good, get him away from them, so they moved him on. But then a few months later, the whole thing comes out; he was abusing children.
We didn't have the language [to describe it]; we didn't have the concept.
But child molestation was a crime already in the 1970s. There was already a legal language to talk about it.
The legal language might've been there, but the common language wasn't around. For instance, it wasn't till a few years ago that the word "pedophilia" appeared in an Italian newspaper. In many cultures it's just not talked about; it doesn't happen.
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. You've spoken of "generations of damage" to the church. Can the church recover, and if so, how?
It will recover; it's always recovered from damage, the damage done by the Reformation, for instance, and various times in the past.
The problem with this is it's not a [single] incident that's damaged the church. I was talking about cases now emerging in Germany, beginning in Italy. . . . My fear is that it'll get worse before it gets better. That might be generations, the constant drip-drip of more sexual abuse cases.
Is the church therefore fated to go from crisis to crisis?
It depends on how you understand "church." The church is an enormous institution, and perception of it in most people's minds is actually fairly local. The church locally, I'd say, is still doing quite well. . . .
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