A BLIND EYE | VOL. 2: ALMIGHTY POWER
Written by Adam Riva and edited by Mouthy Buddha, A BLIND EYE VOL. 2: ALMIGHTY POWER attempts to determine the true scale and spread of the child sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. Using the best available data and statistics, this episode demonstrates where the majority of the abuse has been exposed and how the scandal has continued to gain momentum in recent years.
TRANSCRIPT & SOURCES
In a particularly grisly case of revenge, the Washington Post reported on August 25, 2003 that a priest serving a prison sentence for serial child rape, John Geoghan, was murdered in prison by one of his victims.
“Throughout his time as a priest, other higher-ups in the church turned a blind eye to the continuous stream of sexual abuse Geoghan committed as he was sent from Parish to Parish.”
The man who killed Geoghan by suffocation, Joseph L. Druce, expressed no remorse after killing him.
“I wanted to get the thoughts out of my mind of being molested myself, and the arrogant way he answered my questions… I had seen myself as the designated individual who had to put a stop to the pedophilia in the church.”
Just a year and a half earlier, on January 6, 2002, the Boston Globe published its now infamous article Church Allowed Abuse by Priest for Years, [article] which exposed Geoghan as having raped more than 150 underage boys. This article broke wide open the Catholic Church’s conspiracy to suppress the exposure of priests who had been sexually molesting children for decades. Although reports of a massive crisis had been circulating since 1985, this article sparked an international scandal that rocked the Catholic Church as new allegations emerged month after month. The Vatican would later admit that 300-400 new allegations emerged each year thereafter. The story of the Boston Globe lifting the lid on this conspiracy was later theatrically adapted in the 2015 film Spotlight.
Following the Globe’s landmark article, the prevailing narrative that most people accepted was that the abuses were only committed by low-level rogue priests whose behavior did not represent the Catholic Church as a whole.
What is becoming abundantly clear in recent years is that the problem is far worse than what most people are willing believe. More and more top Catholic officials have been accused of child abuse and as we reviewed in volume one of this series, compelling evidence is emerging that even various popes have been complicit in the systematic coverup of the sex abuse epidemic.
The global scope of the crisis is demonstrably much larger than most people have been led to believe, but where specifically has most of the abuse taken place?
Where Has Most of the Sex Abuse Taken Place?
There seems to be a high percentage of allegations stemming back to Australia. The Royal Commission, which is the Australian Government’s highest form of inquiry, conducted a four-year national investigation into all forms of sexual abuse, including but not limited to the Catholic Church. The investigation concluded that 7% of Catholic priests in Australia committed sex abuse against 4,444 child victims at more than 1,000 Catholic institutions as of 2015.
Australia’s sexual abuse crisis was described as ‘distressing,’ ‘shameful,’ ‘shocking,’ and ‘harrowing’ by Catholic News Agency in February of 2017.
“Among religious institutes, 40 percent of the members of the St. John of God Brothers in Australia have been accused of child sexual abuse. More than 20 percent of the Christian Brothers, Salesians, and Marist Brothers have face accusations.”
On February 16, 2017, RT reported that $213 million dollars has been paid in response to child abuse allegations since 1980 – in Australia alone.
Like Australia, Germany has seen high rates of abuse. The Associated Press explains,
“In September, the German Catholic Church released a devastating report that concluded at least 3,677 people were abused by clergy between 1946 and 2014.
While the report was an effort at transparency, the researchers who compiled it complained they didn’t have access to original files, and said there was evidence that some files were manipulated or destroyed.”
Sadly, many cases were dropped due to an expiration on the statute of limitations or because the accused priests have since deceased. Sad news for the victims whose predators will never be brought to justice.
On March 2, 2021, The Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church determined that the number of child victims in France over the past 70 years could be greater than 10,000.
“The big question for us is: How many victims came forward? Is it 25 percent? 10 percent, 5 percent or less?” commission leader Jean-Marc Sauvé told the Washington Post.
Australia, Germany, and France certainly have high rates of abuse, but Guam may not be trailing far behind.
On August 4, 2017, an investigation by USA Today’s Pacific Daily News reported that over 100 lawsuits against pedophile priests have been filed in Guam which is especially high when you consider the population size of the small island.
The report explains,
“Guam’s sexual abuse controversy appears to have seeped more deeply into its smaller community. There are more than 4.7 million people in the greater Boston area, while the population of Guam — an island about 3,800 miles west of Hawaii — is fewer than 163,000 people. Per capita, that’s 12 lawsuits per 100,000 in Boston, compared with 59 lawsuits per 100,000 in Guam.”
Other hotspots include Italy, Ireland, Chile, and Argentina, although not enough solid data has been collected to extrapolate their statistics with any certainly.
Examining the Full Scope of the Catholic Child Sex Abuse Scandal
In attempting to determine the scale of the abuse within the Church, it immediately becomes apparent that we cannot solely rely on official reports because the Vatican has a consistent history of interfering with or obfuscating the charges brought against its priests.
The Vatican’s investigations into child abuse allegations, which follow Canon Law first and national laws second, abandon ethics entirely and fail to prosecute pedophiles or protect their victims.
“Critics, however, say canon laws assign excessive importance to the protection of church institutions, encourage secrecy over transparency, and favor rehabilitating wayward priests rather than punishing them. While abusive priests can be defrocked for misconduct, the church cannot send anyone to prison.”
That means that the vast majority of cases never reach latter stages or prosecution, which is evidenced by the nearly $4 billion paid out in settlements by the Vatican as of 2018.
It wasn’t until 2019 that Pope Francis lifted the pontifical secret policy which prohibited priests from reporting sex abuse crimes to the authorities if they learned of the crimes in confessionals. It is impossible to say how many pedophiles went unreported prior to this ruling.
Moreover, an investigation commissioned by the German Bishops’ Conference in 2014 entitled Study on the Sexual Abuse of Minors by Clergy found that 60% of abusive priests went unpunished. Sixty percent. It also found that some 1,670 clerics, mostly priests, were found to have committed sexual abuse between 1946 and 2014 — around 4.4 percent of all serving clerics within that period.
That same year, the Vatican released information collected over a ten year period demonstrating that it had defrocked 848 priests, received a total of roughly 3,400 cases of sexual abuse allegations, and had sanctioned another 2,572 priests for lesser penalties. Catholic News Service reported that there were roughly 410,000 Catholic priests worldwide in 2014. Therefore, the number of offending priests – at least, those who are still alive – represents less than 1% of the total amount of priests worldwide.
However, this number is very misleading. The child sex abuse scandal has been gaining overall momentum in recent years.
For instance, roughly half of the 848 priests that were defrocked as of 2014 were defrocked just between 2011 and 2012. This seems to indicate a near-exponential trend. How many more priests will be outed in the coming years? The scandal doesn’t seem to show any signs of slowing down.
On October 26, 2017, the Associated Press reported that Argentina, Pope Francis’ native country, has experienced a dramatic increase of sexual abuse victims coming forward in the last two years. According to an analysis by the Associated Press, the number of victims of child sexual abuse who have come forward has more than doubled between 2015 and 2017.
There are currently 187 dioceses in America. NY Daily News reported in January of 2019 that nearly 50 dioceses and religious orders had publicly released documents on pedophile priests in their jurisdictions and 55 more had announced plans to do the same.
“Now, within the span of a little more than a year, more than 100 dioceses and religious orders have come forward with thousands of names — but often little other information that can be used to alert the public.”
As of February 2020, 21 dioceses in America declared bankruptcy after reaching settlements in cases of abuse.
If more than half (100+ out of 187) of the dioceses in America have documented incidents of child abuse at the hands of priests and clergymen, does that mean America has the highest concentration of pedophile priests?
On February 21, 2019, Associated Press ran an article entitled A Global Look at the Catholic Church’s Sex Abuse Problem. The article examined some of the most recent global statistics coming from countries including Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, United States, and Vatican City. However, the article admitted that unfortunately data is unavailable in most countries for various reasons. Additionally, in countries like Italy, for instance, there is no legal requirement for clergymen to report sexual abuse within the Church to authorities.
The Associated Press writes,
“Just this week, the online resource BishopAccountability listed Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, Congo and a handful of other heavily Catholic countries as places where the church leadership has failed to respond adequately when priests rape and molest children.”
Bishop Accountability has an active database tracking the total number of accused priests. The count currently stands at 7,163 priests, although this number seems to be climbing by over 500 per year. This number may only represent a fraction of the entire crisis.
To fully comprehend the global scope of the Catholic Church’s sex abuse crisis, we have had to gather data from several sources. The truth is that we don’t actually have a full understanding of the scale of the crisis. However, we can reasonably infer that there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of victims.
There are still many unknown statistics from around the world because most countries simply have inadequate or nonexistent data. However, if we remember the 2014 German study from earlier that concluded 60% of priests go unpunished, we can safely conclude that the percentage of priests implicated in the crisis globally could conceivably be between 10% and 20%, putting the actual number between 40,000 and 80,000 priests worldwide. The Church’s reported figures are woefully underestimated and as time goes by, we will undoubtedly come to learn more of the horrors that this institution has worked so assiduously to cover up.
What is perhaps just as disturbing as the prevalence of the child abuse is the way these pedophile priests conspire together to facilitate access to children and to suppress the exposure of their crimes.
In 2018, the New York Child Victims Act was passed, placing a one-year ban on the statute of limitations for victims of abuse to be able to sue their abusers, and to be able to do it anonymously.
According to New York Senator Brad Hoylman,
“…the CVA “is a recognition that child sexual abuse has festered in society, in part because the legal system has sheltered these criminals.”
After hundreds of victims stepped forward in New York, many dioceses were forced to declare bankruptcy. By November the following year, a Catholic diocese in Long Island turned heads by astonishingly challenging this litigation twice in two weeks to block any more victims from coming forward. This move by the Church added to the growing outrage from victims and distrust from the public. Ultimately, the Child Victims Act was upheld and in fact the one-year deadline was extended to August 14th, 2021. To date, over 3,000 victims have come forward since the act was passed.
More outrage came in 2017 when a seminarian serving at St. Peter’s Basilica, the Catholic Church’s headquarters in Vatican City, was accused of molestation by about a dozen altar boys, some as young as 13. The church official who conducted the investigation claimed that a top Vatican Cardinal who works directly under Pope Francis, Angelo Comastri, intervened in the case to suppress it. Comastri denied a coverup and insisted that three investigations had in fact been conducted. The seminarian was ordained a priest later that year. Were the altar boys all lying about their abuse or were they telling the truth? Did Pope Francis know anything about a coverup?
That same year, a retired priest was arrested with a “trove” of child pornography. Monsignor Harry Byrne had dozens of photos of girls as young as 8 either posing naked or engaged in sex acts with men, and he openly shared these images with other priests at St. John Vianney Center for Retired Priests, where he was living.
“Byrne was the chancellor of the [New York] archdiocese from 1968-1970, a position that meant he oversaw the central administrative offices and official documents.”
On December 20, 2018, Associated Press reported on the conviction of an Idahoan Catholic priest who wanted to “rape and kill children” in which he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Rev. W. Thomas Faucher used online chat rooms to exchange child pornography, discuss Satanism, and share his fantasies with other pedophiles about violently torturing children.
“During his sentencing hearing in Idaho on Thursday, Judge Jason Scott said Faucher fantasized about raping and killing young children, favored child pornography that depicted extreme violence and claimed in online chats to have mixed his own bodily fluids into the communion wine at his church.”
Epilogue
The hypocrisy of pedophiles preaching morality from the altar of a very corrupt institution is infuriating. We are seeing the collapse of a pedophile empire, built on faith and deceit. We are witnessing the evil of so-called holy men who are closer to the devil than they are to God. They hide in the light while commissioning great darkness. The scale and degree of their sins has created hell on Earth for thousands of victims.
Although Christians trust and love their priests and clergymen, it is imperative that they remain diligent and discerning to protect their children from the hands of demons. As the Bible says in Matthew 25:40,
And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
If we have a shred of a conscience as a society, we must answer the silent screams. We must bring an end to the crimes of indelible consequence.
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Great job. As an Aussie, I can attest, the evil of Satanism runs long and deep within all faculties of our culture, not just under the guise of the Catholic Church.
How can I stream to my tv? Like through Google Chromecast..
Hi Rebecca! We are striving to develop a Roku app by the end of the year. In the meantime, a cheap and simple solution is to plug-in an HDMI cable from a laptop to your television. They also make adapters for ipads and other devices. Hope that helps! Thank you for your support and patience as we grow!
Some how… I’m not at all surprised our leading politicians seem to claim to be “devout” Catholics.
Thank You for this Non-Redacted Expose
Some how… I’m not at all surprised our leading politicians seem to claim to be “devout” Catholics.
Know what strikes me as odd…the AP, NBC, ABC, and other Mainstream media cabals have NO PROBLEM doing big scandalous reports on the Catholic Church and pedo priests, but wont say shit about Hollywood or Politicians. Funny that, eh?
Seems they just KEEP trying to take out Catholics, even allowing pedos into the priesthood and let it go on for YEARS! They allow it bc they want to take down anything that holds moral values. Im not saying the Pedo Priests dont exist, they very much do. But, how do SO MANY get there?? And WHY are they allowed to stay? It seems like its all part of the plan to take it all down or turn it all to shit.
The guy that did a 5 hr video about Hollywood etc and the Freemasons (I forgot his name, but he was one of those talent show music winners or whatever. His video was taken down, but other chnls have uploaded it and you can still find recent uploads of it, until its gone) said when he first started to speak out he got a message from someone he knew that was inside and they told him “You cant stop it, by the time we are done all Churches will be Brothels” and around that time there was some weird satanic “fashion show”…inside a church
Over 1000 kids since 1940s, in Pennsylvania alone in the US, by the clergy.