Quotes from The Boston Globe

Church paid more than $3 billion to settle abuse complaints between 1950 and 2015. In Boston, the archdiocese paid $154 million to settle with 1,230 victims from 2002 through June 30, 2014, the most recent figures available. Between 2004 and 2015, twelve dioceses nationwide filed for bankruptcy protection.

There's no Martin Luther here," he said, "and whether the Vatican pays attention, who knows?" It wouldn't be easy. "We're dealing with a medieval organization, an organization that represented authority to my grandparents and other immigrants. It was an organization that was respected because it educated them, it gave them a place in the New World, it gave them an identity.

But with assimilation, with the educational and financial success of successive generations, the average Catholic's need of the Church is not social or political, it's moral and spiritual.

That betrayal may not be a chargeable offense in a court of law. But there is no statute of limitations on its impact. And there should be no forgetting.

Sipe called the priesthood a "homosocial culture. All the values within the culture are male, and the reason there has been such a tolerance across the board of sexual activity by priests or bishops is that there is a boys-will-be-boys atmosphere. It's kind of a spiritual fraternity—like a college fraternity, but with a spiritual aura around it.

Irish and Italian kids were taught in Catholic schools that the Jews killed Jesus Christ. Such teachings encouraged anti-Semitism. Gangs of Catholic boys would seek revenge on Jewish kids.

If they were to eliminate all those who were homosexually oriented, the number would be so staggering that it would be like an atomic bomb. It would do the same damage to the Church's operation," Sipe said. "And it's very much against the tradition of the Church. Many saints had a gay orientation. And many popes had gay orientations. Discriminating against orientation is not going to solve the problem.

Of the allegations leveled at hundreds of living priests across the country, only a handful were liable for prosecution because the statute of limitations had expired in so many cases. But the inability of prosecutors to bring charges was hardly a vindication of the Church. Norfolk

the proscription against married Roman Catholic priests is not doctrinal and could be changed if a pope were so inclined. "I have no problems with celibacy withering away," said Archbishop Keith O'Brien, president of the Scottish Bishops' Conference. "There is no theological problem with it ending. The loss of celibacy would give liberty to priests to exercise their God-given gift of love and sex rather than feeling they must be celibate all their lives.

But after Cardinal J. Francis Stafford, president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Laity, told the New York Times that he expected celibacy to be discussed at the gathering of U.S. cardinals in Rome, the Pope quickly shot down that possibility. "The value of celibacy as a complete gift of self to the Lord and his Church must be carefully safeguarded," the Pope told a group of visiting Nigerian bishops.

Many pointed out that celibacy, although valued from the earliest days of Christianity and first mandated in the fourth century, was widely enforced only starting in the twelfth century. Defenders of celibacy have described it as a gift, a charism, a witness to sanctity. But critics have noted that celibacy was legislated to avoid the problem of Church property being passed along from a priest to his children.

I remember reading the first Spotlight reports and just getting furious," recalled Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly, the state's top prosecutor. "I found myself yelling out loud, 'My God, this is about children!

more than fifteen hundred priests sexually abused many thousands of minors who had been entrusted to their care.

For the investigative staff of the Globe, however, Law's 2001 court filing was a turning point: a story about a priest who was accused of molesting children was now a story about a bishop who protected that priest.

a despicable human being." Judge

People expect the guy to be drooling, lurking around in a trench coat. But when I started doing these cases, it became obvious that most abusers are caretakers, respectable people who use that respectability as a cover to carry out their abuse.

You have single men, moving from parish to parish, with no family of their own. It was a formula for disaster." Like

he would single out his prey, the needy children of poor, single mothers—struggling women who were thrilled to have a man in their sons' lives, especially a priest.

today married men can be ordained as Eastern Catholic priests and that there are even a handful of married men serving as Roman Catholic priests—those who were ordained as priests by the Anglican Church but then chose to enter the Catholic Church.

Some Church experts estimate that from 30 percent to fully one half of the forty-five thousand U.S. priests are gay.

unhappy Catholics should just become Protestants.