How is a Catholic parent to respond to the sexual abuse crisis?

This is something I've been thinking about, and so I read the article published yesterday in The Atlantic online with deep interest. Obviously the answers of those interviewed varied widely. There are the parents who've elected to move on, and this comment particularly stood out to me:

“I don’t necessarily think anything would happen to him,” she says. “I mean, it could. But I’m just thinking, What would he think of us if we brought him to that church even after all of this had unfolded? … Let’s say he was raised Catholic, and then he learned about all of that—about the sex abuse worldwide that had been going on for decades and covered up—and then came to us and said, ‘How could you have raised me in that religion?’ I wouldn’t have an answer for him.”

The more I think about it the more occurs to me that this is exactly how a parent ought to respond-- at least, it's how a parent ought to respond if the organization were anything other than the Catholic Church. Think about it, if your child were signed up for a civic or sports activity and sexual abuse was exposed, it would be entirely proper to pull your child out. Otherwise, you'd be liable to his questions when he grows up-- "What were you thinking? Why would we want to be associated with that group?"

Yet the Catholic Church is different, and the parent who made the comment cited above has at least a tenuous grasp on this fact. She still understands the importance of raising her son in a faith tradition, as evidenced by their attendance at a Lutheran church. She acknowledges that she misses the rosary and other familiar practices, and she finds that she has to fight the instinctive urge to make the sign of the cross. Yet the fact of the matter is, she is depriving her son of so much more than the rosary and the comfortable traditions she grew up with. Far more importantly, she is depriving him of the grace of the sacraments, particularly a valid Eucharist. But again, if a parent's connection to the Catholic Church is simply that it's the faith tradition that she is most comfortable with because she grew up in it, then the move to a faith tradition with many of the familiar "smells and bells" but without the sex abuse scandal, makes perfect sense. So again, I understand where this parent was coming from. Yet I lament her choice, because it's emphatically the wrong choice.

Obviously I'm not going to be leaving the Catholic Church anytime soon. I was edified by the comment of another parent cited in the article, a blogging mother:

“If you believe that the Catholic Church is the one founded by Jesus Christ, there is nowhere else to go. Jesus asked Peter, ‘Are you going to leave me also?’ and Peter says, ‘To whom shall we go?’ This is how I feel.”

Really, there is no-place else to turn. The Catholic Church is the Bride of Christ. She has the seven sacraments and the apostolic authority granted to Peter and his successors. For years I've taught students the apocryphal line from Hilaire Belloc about the proof of the Church's divine origins being that "no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have survived a fortnight." Recently Pope Francis said that the Church has been "surprised in flagrant adultery." I know that many traditionally-minded folks are up in arms, claiming that the Holy Father is denying the indefectibility of the Church. And while Pope Francis is speaking imprecisely, as is, frustratingly, his wont, I think he simply means to acknowledge that the leadership of the Church has failed dramatically, something akin to Belloc's "knavish imbecility."

I guess this is my chance to live really what I've always taught students theoretically-- the heresies of Pope Honorius, orgies of Pope Benedict IX, the nefarious dealings and nepotism of the papacies of the Borgias. These historical scandals each led to great fallings-away among the faithful in turn, and so it is all over again in our own day. But to whom else shall we go? If the parent who left the Catholic Church for the Lutherans really thinks that she is leaving the sex abuse scandals behind, she is setting herself up to be scandalized all over again. Without excusing the Catholic Church in any way, it's worth noting the sex abuse scandals looming on the horizon for these Protestant churches, and for practically every civil youth organization of size-- the Boy Scouts, for example. 

Many other organizations that become corrupted ought to be abandoned. But the Church is surely different. Again, to whom else shall we go?