Hundreds and hundreds of years.

We found out about it because those people are still alive. The Catholic church has been at this for centuries

Thousand plus years.

I don't know exactly when sneaky catholic scribes changed up the wording to make being gay bad except when they're being gay with children. But it's definitely their doing.

The last decade?!

This is going on forever and people are coming forward from the moment it was possible to do so. Unfortunately it wasn’t possible for a long time.

Watch The Keepers on Netflix.
It starts out as an investigation in a cold case murder of a Catholic nun in 1969 and unearths atrocities in multitude. It shows clearly how they silenced everyone who dared to question or speak out about abuse in the church.

Give people power, and they will seek transgression as proof of that power. What's the point of being supreme earthly authority over people if you have to just sit there and follow the rules? Rules are for little people, are you calling me a little person? Watch me prove my status by committing abominations and not getting punished!

This is especially the case when you load up the stakes with anxieties and resentments and jockeying for power with others and cognitive dissonance and all that jazz. Now they don't just want to prove their made-man status, they need to. And that's not even including malignant narcissism in the mix.

And the thing is, there's a whole category of people who are legitimately impressed by this, who see rule-following as a hallmark of losers, and rule-flouting as a hallmark of winners.

See also: trump voters, cart narcs, anti-maskers, karens etc etc.

The priesthood is an absolute magnet for these kinds of people - and also a magnet for people struggling with shame, hoping to overcome it by being all holy-like, for instance, existing pedophiles.

And on top of that, corrupt power structures like this very often have a culture of mutually-assured destruction: people end up required to do something horribly incriminating themselves so they can't blow the whistle on others - and once they start down that road, the justifications start piling up. See also David Cameron and the pig, and police in general.

Layer on a teaching that the reputation of the organisation must be protected even at the cost of people's own children, and yeah, perfect storm.

No way in hell has this only been happening for the last few decades; it's only in that timeframe that the church's power has diminished enough for word to get out.

Everything in life is about sex. Except sex, that is about power.

Religion isn't about a better afterlife, it is about power and control. Those high ranking priests don't believe in god otherwise they wouldn't sin.

They want to fuck kids and so they build structures around that.

So how long? Since its inception.

The sexual abuse of young boys has been going on for a very, very long time but for most of that time, the church and all its institutions were unassailable and infallible. So most of it went unreported at the time. The attitude that the church and by extension, the priest could do no wrong was especially prevalent here where I grew up. Which is why some truly horrible things were allowed to happen. The church committed some vile acts and they weren't all sexual abuse and enjoyed the protection of the government all the while. Here have some fun reading.

I can only speak for my lifetime and that of my parents, but in my country the church has been revealed to be a child trafficking, child abusing, money laundering, woman enslaving organisation. It has a veneer of pseudo-wholesomeness.

It’s important to recognise that while people rightly expose the church for this, they usually operate with the assistance of the local communities. In Ireland people in the community would report woman who were “impure” in some way, which the church could justify for enslaving them and selling their children if those women gave birth. This is all within the last several decades and I’m sure even before then.

There's a Robert De Niro, Kevin Bacon, Brad Pitt movie from 1996 called Sleepers that is partly about sexual abuse of boys by catholic priests. The fact that such a movie actually had an audience back then tells you that this has been going on for a long time.

The movie is based on a book where the author has claimed that it is a true story from his childhood.

Also, Rational Wiki has an article on th specific topic you're asking about https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Child_sexual_abuse_in_the_Roman_Catholic_Church

Oh boy.

You're gonna want to Google Sinead O'Connor and where her career went.

The best explanation i've seen is this:

Places that put children under the authority of adults (schools, camps, etc) are appealing for child predators; but where most will kick them out when/if found, the Catholic Church makes it easier for them to stay in.

This is because of a religious belief that God judges men for their sins, eventually rehabilitates them, and the job of mere mortals is to forgive and forget.

I really like this explanation because it doesn't flatter my atheist sentiment and provides a very neat and rational cause-and-effect relation, it's a thing that's specific about the Church compared to other institutions.

Priests also take a vow of chastity, in people's minds they're supposed to be above sexual desire; and they have an extra aura of authority compared to the average teacher or summer camp instructor. Both of these things makes it harder for children and parents to question them.

And once they do question them, the Church gets a similar behavior to other institutions where they'll try to protect their reputation by burying the case. I'm not sure which positions are supposed to be held for life, i assume most of them, and so that makes firing someone (or whatever the right word is in this context) a bigger deal.

Thems my attempted explanations

BTW, it is not just the catholic church having those issues. This happens everywhere when people have a position of power over children.

Here in Germany it has been revealed that the church set up a whole network shuffling around offenders (or sending them away to south america) and muddling traces. It's even been shown that the former pope knew about such cases. It's systemic.

Basically it's a combination of supposed moral authority, intransparency, and mutual cover ups. People are willing to look the other way a lot when they perceive of someone as having a higher mission or great social standing. That includes law enforcement. Think of Donald Trump who's a fraudster-racist-rapist-insurrectionist and yet the MAGA crowd loves him. Maybe celibacy plays into it as well, sexual urges don't stop just because you don a robe.

Younger people are less and less religious with each generation. So at least from that angle the problem might eventually go away.

Historically, it's been alleged that some 'celibate' Catholic bishops fucked women. When the resulting bastard children grew up, they were rewarded with coveted Church appointments. If anyone noticed the apparent favoritism, they blamed the adultery on their brother, saying the appointee was a nephew (it: nipote) rather than the priest's own illegitimate son. Thus the origin of the term nepotism.

Probably some of them had different tastes and realized that fucking boys leaves less evidence.

Catholic church is responsible for the worst atrocities in history.

Honestly not sure how anyone could support them anymore with how readily available historical information is.

In Germany there has been a court ruling that it is allowed to call the catholic church a “Kinderfickersekte” which translates to “child raping cult”.

It was only a lower court and the church choose to not object against it probably because they were smart enough to fear the additional publicity this would get if a higher court would confirm it. https://taz.de/Gotteslaesterung-ist-kein-Problem/!5067953/?t

I think people haven't changed that much in their nature, what changed is the culture and since a few decades people have been more open and daring to talk about it in spite of any stigmas.

I could swear I've read Marquis de Sade saying priests very often hide all sorts of dirty secrets about boys. That was a couple centuries ago...

Erasmus put this in his 1514 dialogue "Julius Excluded From Heaven" (Julius II is being examined by St Peter at the gates):

PETER: [...] hope it won't be too tiresome for you to answer a few clumsy questions about the details. Who, for example, are these little curly-headed striplings?

JULIUS: I brought them up for my diversion.

https://www.tamaqua.k12.pa.us/cms/lib/PA01000119/Centricity/Domain/119/Julius%20Excluded%20From%20Heaven%20bY%20Erasmus.pdf

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Excluded_from_Heaven

Kind of given considering the nature of the job. I heard a radio show where they talked about this with someone in the church who explained that the church offers forgiveness for sins to people who are willing to commit to God. I don't think to many pedophiles want to be attracted to kids and see themselves as evil. It's around the same age that the priesthood is calling that young guys start to realize these attractions. The church is a place for these people to go celabete and purge themselves of their evil but reality is the church can't do that. Instead their ranks fill with these pedophiles same as it gets filled with our types of people who see themselves as sinners; ex drug users and wall street bankers. The whole radio show made me feel like the church could be a victim in all this as well. But then they fuck up by hiding these people and shuffling them around instead of bringing them to justice.

I don't understand how the organization doesn't collapse. It shows how, like so many things in society, people are inhuman scum, that they keep oppressive systems and organizations alive despite mountains of evidence of its harmfulness.

Some might argue that's the point of the church.

Well, priests aren't supposed to get married or have kids. I guess they found a loophole to "still get into heaven", or something. Who knows. It's all fucked up.

There was a gigantic scandal where I grew up in Boston in the 90s/00s... it brought a lot of claims out of the woodwork and it turns out that priests diddle a lot of young kids and it's fucking awful.

Just the latest offenders, but please look at the size of this database: https://www.bishop-accountability.org/accused/

A common way of manipulating people is to deny them parts of being human. Be wary of any organization that tries to control your food or sex. Fasting and abstinence are massive red flags that the organization is toxic.

Been happening for a long time. It's also not just Catholic church. All religions are guilty of some sick shit. ALL OF THEM!

I mean you give people authority over kids and then teach them to hate the sexual part of their personality, and something's gonna go wrong, probably way more often than it goes right.

I haven't done any real reading on it yet, this is just a really common sense starting hypothesis. So don't take it for more than that. But that's my guess.

For the hows, I find the life of Marcial Maciel a raw example. For how long, I wouldn't put it in the beginning of the roman-catholic church, but centuries have passed for sure.

Been going on for thousands of years. The more information access we have the more we hear about these kinds of things.