The Roman Catholic Diocese of Oakland has agreed to pay $56 million to settle lawsuits filed by 56 alleged victims of priest sexual abuse.

I think we are at the point at which the federal government has to crack it’s whip and work out an arrangement so the Roman Catholic church can settle all outstanding claims, and claims yet to be made, in a class-action manner.

I am no fan of the Roman Catholic church. Raised as a Catholic, even going to a private Catholic school, I have since parted ways with their doctrine and teaching. However, at some point this madness has to come to an end.

The feds and the courts must work together to develop a reasonable time-frame for all legitimate claims to be made against the church. There must be a deadline.

I’m sick of hearing about such cases, and I’m sure the church wants to resolve these issues, if not only to sweep them under the pew. When the deadline passes, victims and victims’ families would lose the right to pursue any civil action against the church. However, criminal prosecution would still be allowed for crimes proven in a court of law, unless statues of limitations exists in such cases.

Roadkill

As much as I don’t agree with the church, slowly killing the church is not my idea of justice. Everyone must face justice, one way or another, but this current trend of suits trickling in, here and there, must end. The church should, and must survive or die on it’s own. For this is only fair.

The second component, aside from the legal battles, is the Pope getting tough on pedophile priests. Lip service must not be payed to such an important matter. There is no room for priests who commit crimes, not only against their own god, but against the laws of the land. The Pope must incorporate a zero tolerance approach, and must remove all suspected priests at once, until due process can point to their innocence.

If the Catholic church is to have any continued influence in this country and wishes to be taken seriously, they must take real and certain steps to solve the problem that has been plaguing them, not for the few years since this scandal has become full blown, but for the decades they have chosen to hide the truth.

This article was written by Bryan Los on Saturday, August 6th, 2005 at 3:46 PM and is filed under In The News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.