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Religion

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MineralMan

(149,611 posts)
Fri May 31, 2019, 02:23 PM May 2019

Here's what happens when civil authorities look the other way: [View all]

Depending on where you live, your local police department and city government might be ignoring crimes committed by priests. Buffalo, NY, has historically been a Roman Catholic town, pretty much. Like a lot of such towns, the local government and police force are made up, in the majority, of "good Catholics." Here's what that can lead to, and it's why our country is supposed to keep government and religion separated:

https://buffalonews.com/2019/05/19/why-buffalos-child-molesting-priests-werent-arrested/

Marching orders kept Buffalo cops from arresting child-molesting priests

Hardly any of the more than 100 Buffalo area priests implicated as child molesters spent so much as one day in jail. For years, most of their victims were too scared or embarrassed to make complaints.

But Buffalo Police had marching orders not to arrest Catholic priests, according to former vice squad Detective Martin Harrington and other retired officers. Instead they alerted the bishop’s office to any illegal activities.

“The department’s unwritten policy was that Catholic priests did not get arrested,” said Harrington, who investigated vice crimes for 17 years and retired in 1995. “I never had any experience with priests who molested children. I never heard of any priests molesting children. But we had priests we caught with pornography, or masturbating in the city parks, and our orders were to turn them over to the Buffalo Diocese. The diocese would deal with them … but they would not be arrested.”

The policy “only extended to Catholic priests,” Harrington recalled. “If we caught clergy from other religions, we arrested them.”
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