Educated and erudite, and almost impossible to argue with the analysis or any of the self evident conclusions/recommendations!
Rhrosty.

“Complaints to our parents were pointless. Most of us escaped just with sore hands. But why was this power to hurt and wound by capricious and unstable people almost never questioned? It's horrible when our stories aren't even listened to by parents and guardians.”

So if you get abused and tell your parents what is happening to you and they refuse to take you away from the abuser then what the hell does that say about your parents? Why would they not do that? What could possibly be more important than the safety of their own children? Why are these parents not also being investigated?

You want to make the church pay the price for covering up clergy abuse. Who makes the parents pay the price for covering up the abuse which is exactly what they are doing? It is a very selective type of moral high ground. Everyone who conspired to keep the abuse going is guilty.

Perhaps there is so much heat on the church in order to keep it away from the parents and a lot of those with a blow torch in their hands are the very parents who knew about the abuse , even of their own children and did nothing about it? Where is the Royal Commission into their cover-ups?

That is what is so hypocritical about this whole witch hunt. Anyone who abuses a child should be punished but so too should those who know about it and do nothing and that includes parents.

“Clergy should be married for the safety of children. That's my reason. Is there a better one?”

If you are writing about fathers and sons then we are deep trouble. Pedophilia has nothing to do with sex anymore than rape does. It is complete ignorance of pedophilia to say such a stupid thing. How do you explain the fact that by a long way the group that most indulge in child sex abuse are fathers in married relationships?

The author reasons soundly; one of "organised religion's" problems is that it is organised, not a harmonious practice of individual ethical tenets.
As is pointed out, organisation harbours hierarchy.
In the case of most religions, that hierarchy starts with some kind of imagined god, then flows down through assumed mantles of management, down, down, down to the gullible follower.

One counter to religion is individual though and reason under the mantle of respected teachers, not deferred to as superiors, but sharers of knowledge.

That's very important topic. I've seen great movie about it, called "Spotlight". I don't know what I can personally do to help :(

What about the altar boys who company the priest at Mass?
Is it time this practice was stopped? We don't want boys too close to protests who may or may not be suspect.

I'm still enough of a Marxist to take note of Marx's Ele3venth Thesis and to adapt it for this subject:

"Social commentators have hitherto been content to whinge and bitch, our role should be to do something about it."

So:

1. In the Catholic Church: Change Canon law, to make it obligatory for complaints to be investigated by police, and to shield nobody from such charges, no matter how high up the hierarchy they may be;

2. In government welfare organisations and institutions, that carers are monitored and never put in potentially compromising situations, and that signs of distress and complaints by children be investigated by counsellors, and referred to police if found to have any substance.

Phanto, I don't know about fathers, but step-fathers - especially of pubescent girls - may be especially prone to abuse their step-children. Single mothers should be routinely advised of this reality by welfare agencies. At one Aboriginal mission here in SA, it was fairly common for a woman with daughters, who re-married after the death of her first husband, to put the girls in the Fullarton Girls' Home.

Joe