We hear about sexual abuse scandals so often in the Catholic Church these days, that it’s tough to know where one scandal ends and the next one begins.

One thing is for sure, though – the Pennsylvania sex scandal is as bad as anything else the Church has ever been complicit in. Some numbers to drive home how widespread the abuse, and the ensuing cover-up, really was:

• 301 predatory priests
• Alleged sexual crimes against more than 1 000 children
• Seven decades of silence and cover-up from the Church
• Six dioceses in Pennsylvania involved

You can read more about “how could this happen again” over on CNN, but what’s also left many confounded is how the Catholic Church survives scandal after scandal after scandal.

[After scandal after scandal, ad infinitum, apparently.]

The Daily Beast with why and how the Church soldiers on. I’m going to skip over the history lesson, detailing a falling out between rival factions in the Church early in the fourth century, and get to what the ramifications of said falling out mean for the way the Church operates:

The consequence most relevant to the current Church crisis is to do with authority. As a result of the controversy Catholics began to stress the validity and authority of the sacraments even apart from the piety of the individual bishop. There is a Biblical basis for this view of the sacraments, but prior to the Donatist controversy, Christians (like Romans before them) determined a man’s fitness for leadership from his personal moral conduct.

This is why, among other things, the New Testament says that a bishop should be above reproach (Titus 1:7). After the Donatist controversy, however, the Church’s authority had to be grounded elsewhere, and that was in the liturgy and the performance of the sacraments.

This, in turn, is part of the reason why in situations of moral and theological crisis, the Catholic Church turns to apostolic succession (the idea that the Church’s leaders are the clerical descendants of the original apostles) and the special status of the liturgy as the source of its authority. This dogma has protected the Church through all kinds of clerical scandals, and is one reason why Catholics today talk about reform and change rather than outright abandonment.

In other words, the faults lie with the individual offenders, rather than with the system under which they operate.

NBC News spoke with some churchgoers in Pennsylvania, at a service held in response to the grand jury report detailing decades of extensive and appalling sexual abuse committed by members of the clergy against children.

They would seem to back up this notion:

“Now do I think what the priests did was horrific? Yes, I do,” said Harrisburg resident Antonia Stepanic, 74, as she walked to her car. “Do I think the hierarchy covering it up was wrong? Yes, I do. Did it shake my faith? No, it did not. Not one iota. I still have faith in God. I still have faith in Catholicism.”

Emily Wuerz, 20, agreed and said her faith was not dependent on the individuals who made up the church but the teachings themselves.

“The people of the church are messed up,” she said. “It’s not the church’s teachings.”

OK, then.

300 priests, seven decades, more than 1 000 children – at some point, you have to look at the system. These are not ‘individual offenders’, because they operated with impunity for the best part of 70 years, aided by the Church itself.

Via another Daily Beast article, how about the response by the Church to various crimes:

Rape and molest trusting young boys for half a century, but do not touch the Catholic Church’s money.

Therein lies the lesson offered in Pennsylvania by Father Francis Rogers and Monsignor William Dombrow…

At no point did a church official notify law enforcement about crimes that should have put Rogers behind bars for years. He instead remained at liberty and spent this final days in the comfort of Villa Saint Joseph, a diocesan residence for priests who are sidelined or retired as sexual predators…

Thanks to a life insurance policy and perhaps some modest savings, Rogers left $14,410 to the church. The money should have gone into an Archdiocese and Catholic Human Services account. Unbeknownst to the church, it was instead diverted along with hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations and bequests into an account at the Sharon Savings Bank controlled by the rector at Villa Saint Joseph, Monsignor William Dombrow [above].

When the folks at Sharon Savings noticed a number of payments from what was supposedly a church account to Harrah’s Philadelphia Casino & Racetrack, they alerted the archdiocese.

The same archdiocese that never held Rogers and an unholy host of other monsters to account for “unchecked sexual predations,” was not about to let these bank checks go unchecked.

Dombrow was immediately reported to law enforcement, and during the course of investigations into his actions the Archdiocese “cooperated fully with law enforcement”.

Rather different response to the sexual abuse:

Compare that to what the 2005 grand jury report says the archdiocese did upon receiving complaints about priests sexually assaulting youngsters:

“Not only did Church officials not report the crimes, they went even further, by persuading parents not to involve law enforcement.”

The church files contained allegations that had been lodged against 169 priests. Not all of the hundreds of victims were boys. A priest had arranged for an abortion for an 11-year-old girl he had repeatedly raped. Another girl had been sexually assaulted while in traction in the hospital.

But those were just kids. Money was money.

Dombrow pleaded guilty to multiple counts of wire fraud, and remains behind bars as Inmate 76001-066.

But sure, the problem is these individual priests, time and time again.

[sources:dailybeast&nbc]