"The relative isolation of that era helped keep things quiet, made it harder for people to connect the dots. “So in a way, the Church was more protected. The bishops and the cardinals said, ‘Well, this is one aberrant priest.’ And they actually said this—‘We’re no different than the Methodists or the Lutherans or the Boy Scouts.’ ”
“That’s what then-Cardinal Ratzinger said,” Rezendes said. “That the percentage of abusers in the Catholic Church was no greater than the percentage of abusers in the general population.”
Robinson said, “So when we got the assignment, as an investigative unit, to look into the case of one priest who had eighty-four lawsuits against him, and a lot of speculation—how could they not have known what he was up to?—we took that on as ‘Find out about the one priest.’ ”
“Face value,” Pfeiffer said.
“And within days, in different ways, one of which is portrayed in the movie, our meeting with Phil Saviano, all of a sudden we realized that it was some much larger number. And the much larger number we thought of was a tiny fraction of what it ended up being.”
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