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Those Rotten Apples
Sunday, March 31, 2002
By Andy Rooney
CBS News Correspondent

I hope I can say this without getting Catholics mad at me. You don't have to be Catholic to feel bad about what's happening in the Catholic Church. I don't think Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians -- or even atheists -- are taking any pleasure from it. No one's gloating.

At first the story seemed to be about just one bad apple in Boston who had sexually abused a lot of young boys. Then, it slowly became clear, one story after another, that the problem was bigger than that, that it exists almost everywhere there are Catholic Churches. Church choirs were a hunting ground for pedophile priests.

Catholics are going to continue to be loyal Catholics but surveys show that what they can't forgive is that their Church officials knew and covered it up -- sometimes with payments of millions of dollars. Those were dollars given the church one at a time on Sunday collection plates.

The pledge of celibacy demanded of priests assumes that sexual desire can be suppressed by resolve. The fact is, sex isn't something a person can decide not to have or promise not to have and then never have it. They might as well have ordered church bells not to ring when struck.

Religions have always been concerned with sex in strange ways. Circumcision is an arcane rite in some religions that I never understood.

We're all sinners according to the Catholic Church. Jesus and the woman known as "the Virgin Mary" are the only two people considered to be free of Original Sin. I don't know whether original sin had anything to do with sex or not.
(More: CBSNews.com News Source)
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Dan