Why the church should be grateful
It is amazing to me the amount of debate that there has been regarding the Dan Brown book and movie, when the real conspiracy by the Catholic Church goes seemingly unnoticed. The Catholic Church should be grateful for the Da Vinci Code books and movie because the furor surrounding those fictional events serves as a distraction from the true pattern of sexual abuse and concealment.
In 2004, the Catholic Church in the United States received an internal report placing the substantiated allegations against more than 4000 priests and others under vows at over 11,000 in the US alone during the last 50 years. See Link for the source. Quoting from the report prepared for the Church by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice "More than 80 percent of the alleged victims were male, and the most common were males between 11 and 14. The allegations peaked in the 1970s, and the number of priests and others under vows to the church who were accused of abuse totaled 4,392, about 4 percent of all priests. he majority of priests [56 percent] were alleged to have abused one victim. 149 priests [3.5 percent], those who allegedly had 10 or more victims, accounted for 27 percent of all allegations of sexual abuse by priests."
The report offered the following chilling conclusion "Given the lag time typically found in reporting of child abuse, it is likely additional victims will come forward," the study said. More recently, the total number has been revised to over 15,000. That works out to almost one incident per day for fifty years. And these only represent the number of REPORTED incidents that the Church found credible. Since most cases of sexual abuse are not reported, this may only be the tip of the iceberg. According to the report the true number may be 10 times higher.
Only 2% of the accused actually were incarcerated. When the Church heard of allegations, priests were moved from location to location, senior officials acted in a criminal manner by failing to report allegations to the police and in some documented cases payments were made to families to ensure their silence. This isn't supposition or theory; priests have been convicted. Cardinal Law resigned over this issue, for example.
Even Church officials charged with overseeing matters have behaved in a highly questionable manner. For example In May 2001, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and later elected Pope Benedict XVI on the death of his predecessor, sent a letter to all Catholic Bishops declaring that the Church's investigations into claims of child sex abuse claims were subject to the pontifical secret and were not to be reported to law enforcement, on pain of excommunication. In other words "Don't ask, don't tell or your soul will burn in Hell." (My words, but the memo is documented at Link)
These are NOT isolated events, but rather an ongoing pattern. An examination of the data shows that the problem has its roots in the core practices of the Catholic Church. In a report prepared by the Center for the Study of Religious Issues states: "The evidence is so strong that we can predict a continuation of the crime as long as mandatory celibacy exists in the priesthood." Further "A demonstrable link exists between mandatory celibacy and clergy sexual abuse. Sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy is different from sexual abuse by other populations in almost every aspect of the victim/perpetrator profiles and characteristics, differences that can only be seen by segregating respective demographics and other specifics from general population abuse." Source Link
The Da Vinci code, based on a documented hoax, is much more defensible ground for the Church than the real-life conspiracy.