"Why humanists shouldn’t join in this Catholic-bashing"

"Whatever you think of the Catholic Church, you should be concerned about today’s abuse-obsession. Events of the (sometimes distant) past which nobody can change are being used to justify dangerous trends in the present. A new kind of society is being solidified on the back of exposing abusive priests, one in which scaremongering supersedes facts, where people redefine themselves as permanently damaged victims, where freedom of thought is problematised, and where parents are considered suspect for not adhering to the superior values of the atheistic elite. Seriously, radical humanists should fight back against this."

This is the closing paragraph to an article by atheist commentator  Brendan O'Neill in Spiked, an online magazine. He offers a thought provoking, and sometimes depressing, perspective on the lurid and sometimes screamingly hysterical headlines. He observes how the current crisis facing the church is being used to feed into a cultural mindset that is suspicious of religious belief and the "power" of hierarchical institutions, even including families where parents may   inculcate their children with suspect values. A culture that is turning away from it's past and is instead becoming passively dependant on the intervention of the State.
He opines that it suits the State very much to lay the social ills of our day at the door of the church. The Commision to Inquire Into Child Abuse actively sought victims to come forward and tell their stories.
In a victimhood, litigious culture such as we find ourselves , it would be surprising if the numbers of claims were all authentic. And yet still the number of claims are not, considering the span of years, as huge as the reportage would have us believe.

"In a grotesquely convenient marriage, the state redefined social problems as consequences of Catholic abuse and the individual redefined himself as a sufferer from low self-esteem who did not bear full responsibility for the course of his adult life. In such a climate, not only are incidents of abuse by priests more likely to surface, but they are also more likely to be heavily politicised, turned from undoubtedly distressing and possibly criminal acts into modern-day examples of evil capable of distorting society itself. Thus did the contemporary cult of victimhood ensure that Catholic abuse was blown out of proportion."

It is worth reading in it's entirety here.

( Belated tip of the hat to Fr Ray Blake)