PRIESTS AND PAEDOPHILIA

I have no intention to open a debate on the Church and sexual abuse.

I would merely like to ask how many New York Times or Guardian readers or reporters have been employed in the care of deaf, destitute or orphaned children: as volunteers, in the name of charity?

When Italy became a state in 1870, one of the first acts of the new national regime was to abolish all church institutions -- whether astronomical observatories, orphanages or homes for Incurables. The result was a huge burden on the state and its tax-payers. What is astonishing is not that some priests failed in their duty of care, but that all religious institutions should be stigmatized for the errors of the few: as though such abuse did not exist in state instututions.

Selfless charity is a gift: that some abuse it is horrid and reprehensible. But it happens. Shall we have, perhaps, a bringing to account of those who operated the Gulag? Would we rather personally man institutes for deaf children? How many bed-pans have the pampered press emptied recently?

I particularly enjoy, however, the 'official' Jewish response to the sermon by Pope's preacher which compared the atacks on the Church to the Holocaust. There seems to be a gold standard for suffering out there: screw Rwandans, abused children in Eire, the citizens of Zimbabwe: only the Jewish extermination counts. It's incommensurable.

I beg to differ. All human suffering is and should be shared by all. It is all wrong. There are no world records in suffering or death.