Well, it's happened again: a Church Official has been tried and convicted of sexual abuse of children, c.f. The New Civil Rights Movement; BBC. The man, Christopher Jarvis, was actually in charge of a group interviewing adult victims of child abuse by priests and other church officials in the United Kingdom. He plead guilty to owning over 4,000 indecent images of pre-pubescent boys, of which several hundred contained scenes of rape, sadism, and torture, and all of which were stored on a church-owned computer. He was sentenced to 12 months in jail... of course, in the general population, I imagine his sentence will feel a lot longer. Strong language below the jump.
Can I just ask: do diocesian/higher-level officials actually vet the people they use for public roles, or is the Church finally so starved for priests and officers that positions are going on a first-come, first serve basis? How does this happen? How does a person with even paedophilia tendencies end up in a position of power?
People are going to argue that child pornography and paedophilia aren't the same thing, at which point I'll add that straight men should therefore be perfectly happy to masturbate to gay porn, because it's not the same thing as homosexuality. You might argue that the man had no history when he was hired, and I'll argue right back that he didn't acquire all 4,000-odd images in one post. The church owned the computer he was using and had every right to be monitoring his network usage and hard-drive contents. Hell, my college does that, and they don't even OWN my computer.
There has been enough dallying around. The Church must fix this situation, before it really does collapse. Otherwise, allegation after allegation, conviction after conviction, from local courts to The Hague, this crisis will destroy her accountability and integrity.
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