This was not a "pedophile" scandal, but a homosexual scandal.
You seem to think that that somehow vindicates the RCC. Also, you left out the main scandal - the cover up.
The Church has taken action to block actively gay men from becoming priests and instituted other safety measures which have virtually ended instances of abuse.
And we're to take their word for that? Or yours? It's a given that they would say that. What's not a given is that they have done anything effective, or that they even care about the matter apart from the way it hurts their reputation and bottom line.
The bigotry against the Catholic Church is rampant on these boards.
You probably also think that the Jan 6 committee is bigoted against Trump. But some people are actually opposed to crime, and being such doesn't make them bigoted against the criminals.
The Church made its bed and will now have to sleep in it for as long as people can remember the sex scandal and its criminal cover-up. We learned that it was not to be trusted in these matters twenty years ago, and that hasn't changed. Your task here is hopeless, assuming that you're trying to sanitize the Church's reputation. You've seen the reaction. Even the Catholics posting here are rejecting your argument. And there has not been a single word of bigotry from any of them.
Deal with the facts. You can dispute the conclusion(not rationally) but the facts are no disputed.
When dealing with a source that has the agenda and values of religious apologists, one needn't even look at what it says. Why? Because at a minimum, the source needs to be trusted. Find a disinterested news source that reports the same thing, and I'll look at that.
In case you want to call that the genetic fallacy, I would disagree. For starters, that occurs when one says the argument is wrong because of its source. That is not what I am saying. I am saying that I don't trust it and am unwilling to do the necessary fact checking to make an assessment of whether I buy the argument or not.
That came home to me when reading some creationist apologetics arguing that human evolution from the ancestors of other extant great apes was impossible, since the other apes all have 24 pairs of chromosomes and man only 23. The argument was that if these other apes had a common ancestor, it could not have been an ancestor of man, since no chromosome dropout mutation is survivable, much less selected for. I happen to have been aware of human chromosome 2, and could rapidly reject the argument, but what if I hadn't been? The argument presented was sound. The facts provided could be confirmed, and the subsequent reasoning flawless. Yet the conclusion was false anyway.
The problem was that I was dealing with a dishonest source, and it was not enough to check the factual claims and reasoning. I would have had to take the argument to somebody more knowledgeable than I in biology or do a survey of biology to discover the omitted fact. It is on this basis that I say that I reject anything from indoctrination sources, and insist that a mutually agreeable source be cited before being willing to consider the argument. And that's quite reasonable. Even indoctrination media can present truth if it thinks it supports their position, but if they have, they learned it from a reliable source. That's the one I'll read. If no other such source exists, then the apologetic are almost certainly dishonest.
It's the same argument for not going to a known or suspected dishonest investment counselor. He makes his presentation, and it seems like a good investment. The facts provided can be corroborated. If he were a trusted source of investment advice, you might take it based on that sound presentation. But this guy? Don't even listen to him. And that's not the genetic fallacy, either, since I'm not concluding that he is lying, just that I don't care to find out if he is or put him to the test.
Similarly, I'm certainly not interested in looking at anything from the Catholic church or any church advocate on the matter. Lets let Luther explain the ethics of apologetics: "
What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church … a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them."
Do you think the apologists for your source agree? I think it very likely.
