If you stand by the Catholic Church, if you donate time and money to this organization, you are complicit. There is no way around it. This will not be the last report. It will not be the worst report. It’s just the latest in a long line. And we all know this to be true. If you still support the Catholic Church, you are complicit in the rape of children and its coverup. If you think that is too harsh, start thinking about the victims instead.

The cross is an ancient torture and execution device — an odd choice as *the* symbol for a religion. Catholic priests in the Pittsburgh Diocese found a modern and insidious use for the cross, one that harkened back to the bygone era of torture. They would gift the most pliable, reticent victims with a gold cross, marking the children for torment by their fellow pedeophile priests. According to the report, the crosses “were a visible designation that these children were victims of sexual abuse. They were a signal to other predators that the children had been desensitized to sexual abuse and were optimal targets for further victimization.”

The Church knew. It kept “secret archives [that] contained incriminating information regarding numerous priests who had molested children.” Access to these secret archives was highly regulated, protected from legal discovery during litigation, and “seldom turned over” to the secular authorities, even when the church was supposed to be coming clean. The secret archives date back to at least 1948.

The statute of limitations has run out on almost all of these cases, and, “as a consequence of the coverup, almost every instance of abuse [the grand jury] found is too old to be prosecuted,” according to the report. In other words, the coverup worked.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/freethoughtnow/pa-abuse-report/