Hmm …

… Thoughts on the Unthinkable: The Catholic Church Scandal | Trending.

Whenever one of these scandals erupts, there is talk of reform. But as long as the Catholic Church claims to have the power to forgive sins, it can't be reformed. The Church preaches that you can burn in Hell for any one of a thousand-odd actions that you or I would consider trivial, or for expressing doubt about any one of the Church's thousand-odd official tenets (for example, the doctrine, pronounced by Pope Pius XII in 1950, that the Virgin Mary, on her death, rose bodily into Heaven). Yet if you're a priest who rapes a kid and then owns up to it in the confessional and gets absolution, prepare to say hello to St. Peter.

Not exactly. Pope Pius XII simply declared a belief that went back to the beginning of the Church to  be a dogma. It was no great surprise to Catholics. As for the priest just granting absolution to another priest who confesses to molesting a child, that absolution would be valid only on the condition that the confessing priest turn himself into the police, since the sin he had committed was also a crime. When I was in high school, a little girl was raped and murdered in Mount Airy. The perp turned out to be a student at St. Joe’s Prep. He confessed his sin to a priest at the school, who told him he could only grant him conditional absolution because he had also committed a crime. The kid asked the priest if he would call the police for him. The priest went with the kid to the school office and did precisely that. The Church authorities who covered up these crimes put the institution before the faith it is meant to serve and in so doing themselves committed a grave sin, and probably a crime.