Whenever there is a whiff of bad news about the Catholic Church, the mainstream media never miss a beat in reporting it. But when there is good news, they go mute. The latest example is the news about the almost complete eradication of clergy sexual abuse. Not one secular media outlet in the United States ran a story on this issue.
Every year, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issues an annual report on clergy sexual abuse. The audit is prepared by StoneBridge Business Partners, which works in cooperation with the National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People, a lay advisory board established by the USCCB.
The 2023 report, which covered allegations made between July 1, 2022 and June 30, 2023, found that there were 1,308 allegations involving 17 current year minors. Four of the allegations were made by males and 11 by females; 2 were listed as unknown. Of the 17, only 3 were substantiated.
During this period, there were 47,987 members of the clergy. This means that 0.006 percent of them had a substantiated case of sexual abuse made against him by a minor. (In the previous year’s report, there were 7 substantiated cases.) Of the accused, 91 percent are either dead or have been kicked out of ministry.
If there had been a sharp uptick in the number of cases, it would be all over the news. Such a story would have been picked up by the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC—and every left-wing internet and social media site. But because this problem has all been wiped out, practically no one knows anything about it.
The fact that more females than males are making these allegations suggests that the crackdown on homosexuals in the priesthood has worked. They are responsible for 8-in-10 cases of the sexual abuse of minors (only a very small percentage of these offenses have ever been committed by pedophiles). For more detail on this see my book, The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and the Causes.
Congratulations to the bishops for implementing the necessary reforms. And shame on journalists and the talking heads for the total media blackout. There is no other organization in the nation where adults regularly interact with minors that has a better record on this issue than the Catholic Church.
