Should the catholic church be closed down in the wake of child abuse?

The child abuse occurred without the knowledge of the leadership of the Church for the most part. Often it was decades later before the Churhc was even aware of the abuse. I do not know what you mean by the leaders brought to justice. However, the perpetrators should have been reported and prosecuted when the crimes occurred. Unfortunately the accusations, for the most part, did not occur for decades after the offense after the statute of limitations had expired and often after the alleged perpetrators are dead.

Unfortunately there is nothing "special" about this. This is a problem of society. This crime is most common among school teachers yet there is no outrage when a teacher is a pedophile. No one is calling for the closing of schools even though the problem is hundreds of times greater. Why are you not arguing that these schools be accountable. God bless!

In Christ

Fr. Joseph

Those priests and nuns who committed those crimes should receive life imprisonment.

Those officials of the Catholic church who were active in trying to cover up those crimes should receive a minimum 20 years inside.

I believe that you've made a good point, however, to disband or close down the Catholic church as an institution, would be impossible. It's just too big and has too many followers. Also, not every catholic official is a paedophile, and/or abusive too children.

no of course not. The catholic church as done much worse things than that and continue to do so but so do a lot of other organisations and child abuse goes on everywhere in fact when we take action against pedophiles we are only tackling about 5% of the problem as 95% of child abusers are either members of the family or close friends,

If all members were guilty, or even a high percentage, then it would be prudent to 'close it down'. The facts remain, that less than 1% of catholics were involved in these terrible abuses. Should orchards be burned because of a few bad apples?

Do you think this is a fair statement considering the sports sex scandals in the news right now and the political scandals .do we need to do away with all sports teams now and politicians . It is a horrible problem but but there should be a way to deal with it without making innocent people pay for the sins of a few. I use the word few because of the hugeness of the catholic church . I know it is a big problem.

I would only consider this question fair if we were also discussing shutting down the following institutions which have been plagued by sexual abuse claims:

1) the Music Industry (for michael jackson and R. Kelly)

2) the public school system

3) Babysitters of any kind

4) Syracuese and Penn State Universities

5) Prisons

Largest religion in the world, over 1 billion followers. According to your logic, the UK should be shutdown because some Brits commit crimes.

its label. Simple as that. Were it a 'music store' or 'accounting office' they would have already closed it down. But christians prefer to remain complacent with a 'church' that rapes little boys in the name of god.

This is why despite all the nasty goings on with this 'church' people are eager to take morality lessons from them.

They've done far worse in their earlier history as have other institutions

And as with anything else in life, you can't blame the majority for the behaviour of a minority

Probably. Its seems to me a lot of answers to this question seem to think its OK for the priests to molest children because other people also do it. Its never right to molest children! And its NEVER right to say others also do it therefore its OK if the catholic church does it.