The line is striking in that Maureen Dowd gets it exactly wrong. If Roman Polanski were a priest in the United States, he would have been subject to a zero-tolerance policy. His diocese most likely would have been sued. And he might very well be laicized or put under severe restrictions.

 

Instead, he is most fortunate that he is not a priest, for he has the adulation of cultural elites, including the endorsement of Woody Allen, whose weighty moral assessment of Polanski’s status as a pedophile comes down to: “It happened many years ago. He has suffered. He's an artist, he's a nice person.” Can anyone imagine an abuser priest getting off the hook with such an endorsement?

 

Polanski is was tried and convicted in California in 1978 of drugging and then raping a 13-year-old girl. At least one other actress, who was 16 at the time, said that Polanski sexually abused her in 1982.

 

Writing in Mercatornet, Jeremy Pritchard examines Polanski’s “get out of jail free card”: The pass he has received from celebrity culture is strikingly revealing of society’s unwillingness to engage the epidemic of abuse, as evidenced by the growing phenomenon of child pornography and the child sex trade business.

 

Perhaps the most striking example of how the general media seems only to see child abuse as a Catholic phenomenon is the case of Jeffrey Epstein, a billionaire hedge fund manager. While a well-known Internet blog called The Daily Beast has been reporting on the Epstein case, most of the news media has instead focused on the admittedly egregious behavior of Mel Gibson.  The Epstein case receives almost no attention even though it is far more horrific. Epstein has reportedly bought off his accusers after having a steady supply of girls provided for him, the Daily Beast has reported. The outrage that some news outlets can summon over a case that is 40 or 50 years old when involving a Catholic priest is nowhere to be found when it involves the rich and successful engaged in abusing girls brought in on his private jet from around the world. His punishment: A year of house arrest in his Palm Beach mansion — despite victims' allegations that he molested dozens of girls.

 

The Church has been forced to confront the mistakes it made in years past, and it has instituted a panoply of reforms that have been ignored by its critics. If Roman Polanski was a priest, his career would be over. As it is, he has been released by Switzerland, moved back to France, and continues to release movies. And Epstein still has his billions to fund his predilections.