Meeting with the arch-perv

Douglas Dalby has an article in The New York Times about the Catholic Church:

A senior Roman Catholic prelate in Ireland said that the church would arrange for victims of clergy sexual abuse in one diocese to meet with the bishop who was in charge of it when hundreds of abuse complaints were kept secret. The meetings, the first of their kind in the Irish abuse scandals, are similar to those now taking place in the United States.
The prelate, Archbishop Dermot Clifford, who now leads the Diocese of Cloyne, discussed the planned meetings in an interview on RTE, the Irish state television network. He repeated an apology to victims, saying the church’s failure to report accusations of abuse to the police was misguided. “I suppose they didn’t see the thing as a crime,” Archbishop Clifford said of priests in the diocese. “They saw the thing more as a sin than a crime, and probably weren’t advised strictly enough as to where their duties lay when an allegation came to them.”
The victims are to meet with the Reverend John Magee, who resigned as bishop of Cloyne in 2009, and with Monsignor Denis O’Callaghan, now retired, who was responsible for child protection in the diocese, Archbishop Clifford said.
The announcement followed the publication of a previously withheld chapter of a major report on clergy sexual abuse in the Cloyne Diocese, a mainly rural area in southern Ireland. The report, most of which was published in July, held Father Magee and Monsignor O’Callaghan largely responsible for the failure to deal appropriately with complaints against nineteen priests, some of them lodged as recently as 2008.
Only one of the nineteen priests has since been convicted. The report said Monsignor O’Callaghan “stymied” the child protection policies the church promised to put in place.
The findings caused a furor in Ireland, culminating in a speech in Parliament by Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who accused the Vatican of enabling the cover-up of clergy sexual abuse, a charge denied by the Holy See.
The newly published Chapter Nine of the Cloyne report deals with accusations by thirteen people against a priest referred to by the pseudonym Father Ronat. It says that a complaint against him that was filed with the police in 2003 “seems to have been put in a drawer and forgotten about until raised by this investigation”, and that the church ignored repeated complaints that the priest was hypnotizing young people who went to him for guidance.
The minister of the Department of Children and Youth Affairs, Frances Fitzgerald, said she was “deeply disturbed” by the newly published material. “My thoughts are with the complainants in this chapter and their families, all of whom must be commended for their courage and perseverance,” Fitzgerald said. “It is clear that the priority of the church authorities in Cloyne was the protection of the institution of the church and not the protection of children.”
Maeve Lewis of One in Four, an Irish victims’ advocacy group, said that the justice system in Ireland “consistently fails victims” of sexual crimes, citing “low reporting rates, high attrition rates, and the re-traumatization of the very small numbers of victims whose cases go to trial.”

Rico says that the Holy See is neither holy nor does it see the problem...