Yes, every Catholic who sits in the pews and does NOT boycott the church and force them to deal with this is completely complicit. The Catholic Church needs to have their tax-exempt status revoked and their property and holdings taxed due to their failure to deal with this issue.

I have Catholic neighbors who claim to be in great hand-wringing angst about this, and yet, they do not speak openly against it or leave their faith, so I think it more likely they are experiencing unpleasant cognitive dissonance and are just paralyzed from acting. In that sense, yes, they're complicit, technically. But ... they are good people, who do tremendous community / charitable work, too.

In the real world, these moral questions are not easy to pin down such that Catholic = complicit.

Yes..frankly I agree...if you are a true believer in Catholicism then your belief system is rooted in the Gospel..guided by the holy Roman church.

If you were a footballer but one of your coaches was found to be an abuser..
You would not suddenly consider football a bad sport..and quit..or a spectator will still attend games...

However I think if spectators and players stopped turning up for games..the organisers would soon root out the abusers..and prevent others from infiltrating the game where possible.

They would not hide them ..protect them ..reassign them..or deny they exist or the abuse happened.

That is what the Catholic church did..and continues to do.

A church boycott might focus the mind of the holy Roman sea.

This is where "willful ignorance" comes into play with religion. Whenever thigns liek thi8s happen, church members view it as beign separate from the church itself.

My opinion is that celibacy is unnatural for 99% of the population. Studies have shown that suppressing sexual drives and having no sexual outlets makes a person psychologically unstable. Sex is a natural animal instinct, and if we try to supress it it will express itself in one way or another.

Add in the extra adrenaline rush from "being bad" and "celibate" priest will misbehave and literally become addicted to the addictive adrenaline rush they get when beign "bad" It is ht adrenaline rush from beign "bad" or "naughty" that makes for pedophiles never beign cured. An addiction, once acquired, is not curable.

Those who have been molested oftne become molesters for the same reason. They get hooked on the addictive rush of their own bodies chemical reactions from beign a part of being "bad" or "naughty" even if it is not by their own choice.

I know several people who left the Catholic religion in the wake of the scandal because they felt they would become complicit if they didn't.

Probably. An ex of mine was a victim of Cardinal Law's reign over New Hampshire and Mass.
Needless to say totally fucked up his life.

It is funny, sort of, but members of the HRCC remind me of the folks who consistently vote to reelect THEIR CongressCritter while at the same time giving Congress overall incredibly low marks.

I have family members who routinely attend Mass and send their children to catechism classes, praising their local cleric and bishop while lamenting the church's response to abuse overall.

The real question I guess is do they suffer from Stockholm Syndrome or cognitive dissonance? Or both?

Yes. Yes, they are.
Completely. Totally. Absolutely.
Complicit.