Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing

the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense

Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharis.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed

to add to your favorite pod catcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads

on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.

So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

There have been many things in the news. There was the Pennsylvania clergy sex abuse

bomb that went off this week. A grand jury report detailing the abuse of more than a thousand

children by more than 300 priests over the years, and they're probably vastly more.

A sort of thing is under-reported, as we all know, and also statuously covered up by the church.

In fact, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that the Catholic church is a machine,

one of whose primary functions has been to ensure that children get raped and that the world doesn't

find out about it. This really is not an exaggeration. I remind of me of an article I wrote about

10 years ago when a similar scandal happened in Ireland. I wrote an article titled Bringing the

Vatican to Justice. They actually may have read this on a much earlier podcast, but I'll just

read the first two paragraphs here because it's really all I have to say in the present case.

And it makes a point that I think is all too rarely made. So here's what I wrote, I think in 2009 or so.

I've paid too little attention to the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church.

Frankly, it has always felt unsportsman-like to shoot so large and languars of fish and so tiny

a barrel. And there seemed to be no need to deride faith that is most vulnerable and self-abased.

Even in retrospect, it is easy to understand the impulse to avert one's eyes.

...