The Catholic Church has issued a warning to its clergy in Washington state: Any priest who complies with a new law requiring the reporting of child abuse confessions to authorities will be excommunicated.
If some random Catholic confessed to a priest that he was diddling kids, you can bet that as part of the penance, the priest would tell that person to turn themselves in to the authorities. But we know what has happened when the confessor was a priest.
This is the thing that's bugging me. People are taking the Catholic church's history with priests committing child abuse, then making a blind logical leap that Catholics in general are child abusers (or a significant number of them). It's twisting the feelings about Catholic priests and targeting them at a wider group. What's happening here is insidious.
How many Catholics are child molesters, and how many of them are confessing in church, and what penance were they given?