Irish bishops covered up sex abuses
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There's a pattern at work here. In hundreds of instances, the pattern has held true -- that religious leaders have nearly universal opportunities to abuse their "flocks." And when some leaders get to facing that temptation, and succumb to it -- the religious organization's first move is to protect its reputation, and not the followers (or their children) who were abused. It may not be happening most of the time. Maybe it's a relatively small percentage of leaders who abuse a small percentage of followers. But when you're talking about billions of members, even a tiny fraction means thousands or hundreds of thousands of people suffering.
I've seen stories of this pattern happening many times... in Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities. And always, the people who perform the crimes get some sort of consequences -- but nothing is done to solve the problem. You'd think that with the human capacity for seeking patterns in the world around them, someone would notice this pattern and demand some real response, other than sending rapists and their protectors to jail. A real response would be to seek out the source of the problem (the elevation of religious leaders to "holy" status) and correct it.
