Why I hate the church

It shouldn't be any big secret around this place how much I hate organized religion, christianity in particular. And I just had another reason thrown right in my lap.

A couple of months ago a couple of persons came forward claiming to have been molested as a child while they were staying in a christian/catholic (don't really care what the difference is) Dutch boarding school during the late 40's. Following this, even more people came forward and all of the sudden it wasn't just one school any more but several and the Dutch churches had a major scandal on their hands. Politics got involved and an official inquiry was started into the frequency of child molestation in boarding schools around that time.

Today the result of those inquiries were announced after months of research. The inquiry comity estimates that between 1945 and 1981 at least 10 to 20 thousand children have been molested. The report goes on to say that in at least 50% of cases there was repeated abuse. 90% of cases were groping or other forms of inappropriate touching. Thousands of children were actually raped. Church officials were well aware of what went on in these boarding schools and decided to keep it to themselves.

This is already enough to piss me off, but it gets worse. The period of limitation had run out on almost all of these cases, so not a single offender could even be arrested, let alone brought to justice. 4 persons could file charges, but only 1 person was actually convicted. 1 person out of at least 10.000 cases.

It's no big secret that the catholic church is up to their neck in sexual abuse scandals around the world, but if there's already 10 to 20 thousand cases in the Netherlands alone, who knows how many children have been molested in other countries around the world. It's absolutely sickening to me that an institution that has been steadily raping little boys for dozens of years is allowed to even exist. And don't give me that 'you shouldn't judge the church based on the actions of a few people' crap. This is/was a consistent problem all over the world, not limited to just a few bad apples.