Will The Next Scrappleface Announce the Merger of the Holy Roman Catholic Church & NAMBLA?

This would be shameful if it were a secular organization. But from an institution that claims to be the representative of Jesus Christ?

More than 11,000 allegations of sex abuse have been made about Roman Catholic priests in the US since 1950, a new report is expected to show.

One diocese has already confirmed that nearly 4,440 priests - 4% of the total - have been accused of such assaults.

Groups representing victims of abuse say the final figure will be higher.

...

Some Roman Catholics will hope the report will help to close a painful and humiliating chapter in the Church's history.

But groups representing victims claim that people molested in their youth wait on average until they are 44 years old before breaking their silence.

They say there could therefore be thousands of cases still to emerge.

FoxNews.com has more on the results:

Eighty percent of the alleged victims were male, and just over half said they were between the ages of 11 and 14 when they were assaulted, a source who read the reports told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Eighty percent of the victims were male? Somehow, it doesn't sound like a particularly random distribution.

Dioceses nationwide received 10,667 abuse claims since 1950, according to a news release from the Diocese of Yakima, Wash. Of those, claims by approximately 6,700 were substantiated. About 3,300 were not investigated because the accused clergymen were dead.

Another 1,000 or so claims were unsubstantiated, the diocese said.

Let's see, if the claims not investigated because the accused were dead had the same ratio of substantiated to unsubstantiated, that would mean another 2871 uninvestigated claims that would have been substantiated.

Here is where it gets really horrifying:

The panel noted that any evaluation of the crisis had to take into account that much of the abuse involved men preying on boys, the source said. And the report said that church leaders' failure to discipline sexually active priests created an environment which made clerics reluctant to report abuse of children.

If this reluctance to report abuse had taken place in Hollywood, or the Democratic National Committee headquarters, I would be disappointed but not surprised. But in the Catholic Church?