And the Lord said, “Thou shalt not charge priests who rape and molest children because after all, they do some good stuff sometimes too, and besides, those brats should just get over it already because it happened years ago.”This story is just gonna break your heart:Cardinal [Timothy M.] Dolan criticized a legislative proposal that would, for a year, drop the statute of limitations for filing civil claims for sexual offenses, allowing for lawsuits by people who say they were abused long ago. The cardinal said he was concerned that a flood of lawsuits over abuse by priests could drain the church of money it is using for charitable purposes.
“I think we bishops have been very contrite in admitting that the church did not handle this well at all in the past,” he said. “But we bristle sometimes in that the church doesn’t get the credit, now being in the vanguard of reform. It does bother us that the church continues to be a whipping boy.”
Aw. Poor bishops. They are just so sick and tired of being blamed for that whole covering-up-the-widespread-rape-and-molestation-of-children thing. Don’t you secular ingrates understand that they can’t do really important stuff—like . . .

Perhaps if they were to hand the guilty parties over to the secular authorities for appropriate punishment they could regain some credibility. Wasn’t that the principle behind the “auto de fe”? The church would let the state do its dirty work for it.