This is Among the Most Horrifying News Stories That I Can Imagine

8/15/18 CNN:

(CNN)The Vatican has declined to respond to an explosive grand jury report detailing decades of sexual abuse and cover-ups by priests and bishops in Pennsylvania, refusing even to say whether church officials in Rome have read the damaging documents.

"We have no comment at this time," Paloma Ovejero, deputy director of the Vatican's press office, said Wednesday....

In the United States, both liberal and conservative Catholics displayed a rare unity in pressing the Pope to respond to the Pennsylvania grand jury report.

"The silence from the Vatican is disturbing," said Massimo Faggioli [an unfortunate last name], a theology professor at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. "I don't think the Pope necessarily has to say something today. He needs time to understand the situation. But someone from the Vatican should say something."

8/15/18 Washington Post:

Poulson is one of more than 300 Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania named in a grand jury report released Tuesday that accuses church leaders of covering up rampant child sexual abuse over the course of 70 years. In the most sweeping probe by a government agency of clergy abuse in the United States, the grand jury was able to identify more than 1,000 victims while advising that there were likely to be thousands more. 

The report is an index of frightful physical and psychological violence. It recounts how one priest allegedly abused five sisters in a single family; how another confessed to raping 15 boys as young as 7; how a victim was bound and whipped with leather straps; and how a victim died from an overdose of painkillers taken for a back injury suffered during a particularly violent attack. Most of the victims, the court said, will never be able to pursue cases against their alleged attackers, as state law gives victims of child sex abuse until they are 30 to undertake civil suits, 50 to file criminal charges. 

Now I know some of my readers blame the Jews for this because their Church could not do this.  The Church is not responsible for every depraved priest in its employ.  But I am surprised that the Catholic Church hasn't experienced a revolution from within because of this.  There are plenty of priests who did not abuse children, and I am sure the laity are truly horrified by the depravity committed in the Name of Christ.  But is there no mechanism for the good and godly majority to force a house cleaning?  The Council of Constance resolved the three popes controversy by asserting that ecumenical councils are above the pope in authority. 

I really want this mess cleaned up.  Every Catholic kid who is told that sexual abuse is a way of growing closer to Jesus Christ is a child unlikely to grow up a believing Christian.  The Catholic Church's defense of innocent life and Biblical morality is pretty well discredited in battles with the world by these horrifying crimes.