''Research suggests ... that the sexual abuse of children is a problem for the church everywhere,'' Guido wrote in the current issue of America magazine, a Jesuit weekly.However, he wrote, outside North America the religious order superiors were more likely to be aware of sexual misconduct by priests with adults, rather than children. ''Questions about what the Church can or will do typically seem to assume that American Catholics represent the whole body of the faithful, which for no obvious reason finds itself under the supervision of a quirky, irascible band of elderly Europeans,'' Jenkins wrote. With his parents already dead, Jim Graham pleaded with his Aunt Kathryn and Uncle Otto to tell him the truth about his family. In South Africa, the church last year began investigating allegations of abuse of children by priests and other church workers, but at the same time asserted that the issue was not as significant there as in the United States.The church's population has increasingly been shifting to the Southern Hemisphere and the developing world, as the percentage of the world's Catholics who live in North America and Europe falls. And that thinking is tied to the larger perception about American culture, which is that there is a hysteria when it comes to anything sexual, and an incomprehension of the Catholic Church,'' said John F. Allen Jr., Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. A look at The Boston Globe, the newspaper that first uncovered extensive sexual abuse cover-ups in the city's Catholic Church. ''Although there have been allegations of clergy sexual abuse worldwide, there is no data examining whether the problem is more acute in certain parts of the world. And a priest who was accused of sexually molesting a 5-year-old last year was allowed to avoid criminal prosecution in exchange for returning to his native Peru and agreeing not to enter Chile for at least three years.The reaction by the Vatican to the current uproar suggests the hierarchy sees a particularly American hue to this scandal. ''The Vatican is a very protective world, and there's a whole way of proceeding with secrecy and denial,'' said the Rev. Jenkins then went on to argue in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal that the clergy sexual abuse crisis is really an outgrowth of an ideological clash within the American Catholic Church. Directed by Tom McCarthy. ''In India you'd have gossip and rumors, but it never reaches the level of formal charges or controversies,'' Schmalz said.Thomas Jayawardene, a professor of sociology at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif., who has studied the Catholic Church in Asia and Europe, agreed, citing a long tradition of Buddhist celibates. According to him: “The Boston Globe has exposed the largest and most vile scandal in the history of any institution known to man.” (Quite a statement, considering man has known such institutions as the Gestapo, the KGB, the Inquisition, Planned Parenthood and the Ku Klux Klan.) The newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage.We reached out to Vatican officials for a statement regarding the new reporting on children of priests, but they declined to comment.Watch CBS News anytime, anywhere with the our 24/7 digital news network. ''What that means is that Vatican officials are slower to make the kinds of public statements that most American Catholics want, and when they do make them they are tentative and halfhearted. There was a scandal last summer after the National Catholic Reporter reported that priests had been raping nuns in parts of Africa.The newspaper reported that the Vatican had known for seven years that priests were having sex with nuns, and in some cases raping them - apparently in part because in a continent where many people have AIDS, the nuns were viewed as safe sexual partners.
Spotlight Team Investigation: Abuse in the Catholic Church. It's not that they don't feel bad for the victims, but they think the clamor for them to apologize is fed by other factors that they don't want to capitulate to. That may be changing: On a handful of occasions recently, Rome has appeared to have forced the resignation of a bishop over this issue, and late last year the Vatican issued new standards requiring that cases be reported to Rome.But the pope's recent comments on the issue have been quite general - for example, in his Holy Thursday letter to priests this month he wrote, ''As priests we are personally and profoundly afflicted by the sins of some of our brothers who have betrayed the grace of ordination. Today, 40 percent of all Catholics live in Central and South America, 12 percent in Africa, and 10 percent in Asia. Boston Globe © 2017 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
View the active life of Catholics in the Archdiocese of Boston. ''It is salutary to recall that the United States accounts for a paltry 6 percent of the world's Catholics, and that the fastest-growing Catholic centers are all in Africa, Asia, and Latin America - areas that do not share the American fascination with clerical scandal.