Chapter and verse

Campaigners against sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests are angry with the statement put out by Pope Francis after the extraordinary "summit" of bishops in Rome. The statement goes much further than the Church has ever gone before in condemning such abuse and vowing to root it out, but the Pope stopped short of using the term "zero tolerance".  Those may be just words, but they should not have been difficult for the Pope to say.  After all, sexual abuse of minors is not simply an offence against the precepts of the Church -- it is a crime in every lay jurisdiction around the world in which the Church is active.

As someone educated in both grade school and high school by Catholic religious (first nuns, then Jesuits), there's something else about the Pope's statement that I found very strange.  He seemed to be attempting almost to downplay the severity of the accusations against Catholic priests by pointing out that child abuse is common in all corners of society.  If there's one thing that I learned from those nuns, brothers and priests all those years ago, it's this:  your sins are your own.  They're in no way mitigated by the fact that other people may be doing the same thing.

I can even offer you chapter and verse on this: St Matthew's Gospel, Chapter 7, vv. 3-5.  Here is the King James Bible rendition:

3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

I wouldn't quite go so far as to accuse the Pope of hypocrisy here, but the Biblical message seems unequivocal: fix your own and your Church's problem before you start casting aspersions on others.  I actually heard a priest on TV after the Pope's statement suggesting that the Church was ready to lead a crusade against child abuse.  It's hard to think that there will be many people who are prepared to follow Rome's lead on this for a long time to come.