Let’s draw a line between the bishops and the powerless laity
Since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s the Catholic Church is properly understood as its entire membership, the 'people of God' almost all of them laity. Furthermore, although the council clearly envisaged permanent structures for upward communication from laity to hierarchy, this commitment has been reneged upon by the Irish hierarchy ever since to the severe detriment of Irish Catholic families who could find no mechanism within the church to represent and protect them when injured by their clergy.
In the light of the shameful failure of the hierarchy to protect its laity from clerical child abuse, and to minister adequately to those lay Catholics who have been abused, should the Catholic Church i.e., mostly its laity be further abused by inaccurate media references to 'Catholic Church scandals' when, in fact, these scandals are exclusively clerical and hierarchical? And when laity the vast majority of the Church - are in almost all cases the victims?
