Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam slogan, quoted by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during his 1967 address at The Riverside Church in New York

I won't pull any punches or give you a cutesy anecdote to start off this piece. The topic's too serious.

Keeping silent about the sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church - keeping silent about the cover-up and reassignment of priests - keeping silent about the current pope's apparent involvement in some of the priest-shuffling - is not loyalty to the church nor to Christianity nor to God. It is a betrayal of the victims past, present and future.

"Black-collar crime" - a term the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation uses to describe clergy scandals, though they grabbed it from a folk song, says co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor - isn't limited to sex crimes, nor is it limited to Catholics. West Tennessee has seen clergy and youth leaders from Protestant and evangelical churches face similar charges.

But the Catholic Church is uniquely hierarchical, insular and opaque. Where Baptist churches make their own decisions about who to call as a preacher, the Catholic Church is a top-down organization. And when the wrong people get in place at the top, almost nothing short of death (from old age, well cared for) dislodges them.

Organizations such as SNAP - the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests, online at snapnetwork.org - have been working for years to see that justice is done for the victims. And I had hopes that Pope Benedict XVI might do the right thing; he'd been in charge of what they used to call the Inquisition, he had a reputation as a hard case, and he met with victims early in his papacy.

But his recent stubborn silence on new revelations in his native Germany and his dismissal of the controversy as "petty gossip" tell a different story, sadly.

There comes a time when silence is betrayal.

Arthur Budzinski, abused as a child while attending a school for the deaf in Wisconsin, took that personally. The Associated Press picked up a photo of him carrying a sign that read "I am not petty gossip."

The FFRF started tracking clergy crimes in 1986 or 1987, Gaylor told me in an e-mail. She said she couldn't begin to guess how many sexual abuse cases she's seen, but by the time she wrote a 1988 book on pedophilia in the church (the first major report of same), "I reported that 3-4 new cases cross my desk a week (which I found extraordinary)."

She added that Freethought Today's new editor Bill Dunn "agrees it's closer to 3-4 new cases a day and that's probably low. We track reported public cases through the criminal justice system life span, so that makes it a bit harder to estimate in terms of 'new' cases - but we are flooded."

Enough crimes to fill a two-page blotter in their newspaper in pretty small type, Gaylor notes.

Gaylor is an atheist, and the FFRF advocates for nonbelievers. The protectors of the Catholic church will denounce them, and her tally of "way past thousands" of abuse cases she's seen in the news, as biased. They'll also point to prominent atheists Christopher Hitchens' and Richard Dawkins' calls for the pope to be arrested for crimes against humanity next time he leaves the Holy See as persecution of the church.

So here's a source the church and its defenders claim to trust: Jesus stated, we are told, that whatever we do to "the least of these my children," we also do to him. You cannot get more "least of these" than a child in a school for the deaf.

I'd argue that the Vatican is doing plenty to further the cause of atheism on its own. In Connecticut, the church is lobbying against a law that would remove the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse, so that rapists could be prosecuted decades after the fact.

Maybe the leadership SHOULD be treated as an international criminal conspiracy. "A time comes when silence is betrayal." - Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam slogan, quoted by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during his 1967 address at The Riverside Church in New York

I won't pull any punches or give you a cutesy anecdote to start off this piece. The topic's too serious.

Keeping silent about the sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church - keeping silent about the cover-up and reassignment of priests - keeping silent about the current pope's apparent involvement in some of the priest-shuffling - is not loyalty to the church nor to Christianity nor to God. It is a betrayal of the victims past, present and future.

"Black-collar crime" - a term the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation uses to describe clergy scandals, though they grabbed it from a folk song, says co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor - isn't limited to sex crimes, nor is it limited to Catholics. West Tennessee has seen clergy and youth leaders from Protestant and evangelical churches face similar charges.

But the Catholic Church is uniquely hierarchical, insular and opaque. Where Baptist churches make their own decisions about who to call as a preacher, the Catholic Church is a top-down organization. And when the wrong people get in place at the top, almost nothing short of death (from old age, well cared for) dislodges them.

Organizations such as SNAP - the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests, online at snapnetwork.org - have been working for years to see that justice is done for the victims. And I had hopes that Pope Benedict XVI might do the right thing; he'd been in charge of what they used to call the Inquisition, he had a reputation as a hard case, and he met with victims early in his papacy.

But his recent stubborn silence on new revelations in his native Germany and his dismissal of the controversy as "petty gossip" tell a different story, sadly.

There comes a time when silence is betrayal.

Arthur Budzinski, abused as a child while attending a school for the deaf in Wisconsin, took that personally. The Associated Press picked up a photo of him carrying a sign that read "I am not petty gossip."

The FFRF started tracking clergy crimes in 1986 or 1987, Gaylor told me in an e-mail. She said she couldn't begin to guess how many sexual abuse cases she's seen, but by the time she wrote a 1988 book on pedophilia in the church (the first major report of same), "I reported that 3-4 new cases cross my desk a week (which I found extraordinary)."

She added that Freethought Today's new editor Bill Dunn "agrees it's closer to 3-4 new cases a day and that's probably low. We track reported public cases through the criminal justice system life span, so that makes it a bit harder to estimate in terms of 'new' cases - but we are flooded."

Enough crimes to fill a two-page blotter in their newspaper in pretty small type, Gaylor notes.

Gaylor is an atheist, and the FFRF advocates for nonbelievers. The protectors of the Catholic church will denounce them, and her tally of "way past thousands" of abuse cases she's seen in the news, as biased. They'll also point to prominent atheists Christopher Hitchens' and Richard Dawkins' calls for the pope to be arrested for crimes against humanity next time he leaves the Holy See as persecution of the church.

So here's a source the church and its defenders claim to trust: Jesus stated, we are told, that whatever we do to "the least of these my children," we also do to him. You cannot get more "least of these" than a child in a school for the deaf.

I'd argue that the Vatican is doing plenty to further the cause of atheism on its own. In Connecticut, the church is lobbying against a law that would remove the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse, so that rapists could be prosecuted decades after the fact.

Maybe the leadership SHOULD be treated as an international criminal conspiracy.