Tracking Pedophile Priests

RELIGION - Swiss President Doris Leuthard is calling for an international registry to keep track of pedophile priests to prevent them from being shuffled from location to location whenever a scandal catches up to them. By keeping track of these priests she hopes governments can keep them away from contact with children.

For years now whenever a sex scandal involving pedophile priests has become too hot to bear the Catholic Church simply moves the priest to another location and moves a new priest in, possibly even trading one pedophile for another and warning both of them to be more disceet this time around.

This idea comes as revelations that Pope Benedict XVI (formerly known as Cardinal Ratzinger) was directly involved in the cover-up of Reverend Lawrence Murphy following his sexual abuse of over 200 boys at a school for deaf children in the United States. Pope Benedict’s solution to the problem was not to defrock Murphy, but to instead just transfer him to a different location.

What is mindboggling is that there is literally hundreds of Catholic priests that have been switched to different locations all in the United States during the last decade alone, all because of child sex scandals.

Thus this idea of making an intergovernmental registry does make prudent sense. Governments usually track pedophiles independently and then occasionally share their information with INTERPOL. The same system could be made more effective and then applied to priests caught molesting little boys so they aren’t just transferred from one country to another, only to have the sexual abuse repeat itself. By tracking them local authorities could be alerted to a pedophile priest in their neighbourhood and they can then keep tabs on them and routinely conduct interviews to see if more abuse is occurring.

The Vatican denies Pope Benedict was involved in any cover up.