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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Documents of a horrendous crime, October 22, 2002
It doesn't matter if one is Catholic or not, one thing that must be agreed upon is that the abuse and mistreatment of children must not be tolerated. Therefore, it is disturbing to read such an account as this; that one can see the mechanisms that were systematically used to protect the perpetrators of these crimes, rather than the slew of victims.This book is NOT a book condemning Catholism or Christianity. I am not Catholic myself, but I have enough respect for Christianity and the Catholic Church, that had it been merely thus, I probably wouldn't have wasted my time reading it. With the persistance of the staff of the Boston Globe, though, much of this information, which was previously off-limits, has been opened and researched. This book is a product of that research, and without drowning the reader in tons of details, goes into many aspects of this story - how the story broke, victims' stories, profiles of some of the most heinous perpetrators, the Catholic culture around Boston, and the heirarchical structure of the Catholic Church, and the effects this scandal has had on the Catholic Church in America and in the world. As late as this has come to many people, I am glad that somebody had the nerve to pursue the story. For those who still want to believe that this isn't a major problem, remember that what is written here is just Boston's story, and just a small bit, at that. The priests who committed these crimes are criminals, and should be recognized as such, both inside and outside the Catholic Church.
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