The American narrative of the Catholic Church's struggles with the clerical sexual abuse of the young has been dominated by several tropes firmly set in journalistic concrete.
A UN committee has roasted the Vatican over sex abuse. And abortion. And the Pill. And homosexuality. And whatever.
The pill has not been the blessing it was cracked up to be.
The Galileo affair is the one stock argument used to show that science and Catholic dogma are antagonistic. While Galileo's eventual condemnation was certainly unjust a close look at the facts puts to rout almost every aspect of the reigning Galileo legend.
Why is it so difficult to speak up, and why do so many prefer to keep quiet?
Catholic bishops were not the only people who covered up evidence of sexual abuse. Public schools, police departments, families, media outlets, non-profit associations not to mention other religious denominations all were guilty of their own cover-ups.
The following facts were presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council on Sept. 22, 2009 by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Holy See's permanent observer to the United Nations in Geneva.
Following Pope John Paul II's 1996 statement that the theory of evolution is more than just a hypothesis, newspapers around the world published articles wrongly asserting that the Church had finally come around and withdrawn its opposition to the theory.
