Below I have highlighted in red the part about the Jehovah's Witnesses' Pedophile Scandal:
The Selma Enterprise Newspaper (California):
Faithful flock Scandal without end
By Enterprise Staff
January 22, 2003 Newspaper Publication
The Rev. Msgr. Daniel Lopez has grown weary of the story. He is tired of reading about priests and children and sex.
He wants his newspaper to tell him about other things, cleaner things, familiar things.
But the story keeps getting resurrected and it keeps coming back in his face. It seems to have the persistence of Satan.
And now, in the offices of St. Joseph's Catholic Church on a recent Thursday afternoon, there is a reporter sitting in front of him, meaning the story is going to be rehashed once again.
This story, the one that is going to take him to thoughts he doesn't want to have, is about priests and sex with little boys, and he no more wants to answer questions for it than he wants to roll around in a mud puddle.
Lopez is 65 and he wants to retire, but the pope won't let him because the church has a shortage of priests that grows more ominous every day.
He is tired and the last thing he wants to do now is answer questions from a stranger about the vileness that is seeping to the surface and staining the profession he has given his life to for 40 years.
At one point, early in the discussion, he said that at first he felt moved to blame the whole thing on the media.
"It's to sell newspapers," he said of the coverage of the sex abuse story in the Roman Catholic Church. "Some reporter wants to make a splash or something."
But then, when the scandal first broke and members of his congregation said it was a media thing, he said no, the accusations are true, and it's a good thing that it's out in the open.
He said his congregation has been depressed about the relevations, but the scandal hasn't hurt church attendance or donations.
There are five Masses a weekend at St. Joseph's and he says the church is still attracting between 2,400 and 3,000 for the services, two of which are in Spanish.
In fact, he says, he thinks donations have increased since the story broke, but he's content to have other people in the parish keep track of such things.
He smiles wanly at his claim. He doesn't want to hurt his predecessor's feelings by letting the world know that, even a during the time of a great scandal, St. Joseph's is harvesting more souls and money with him at the helm.
While he is not a bean counter, and he doesn't have the energy to count noses at Mass, he does know that St. Joseph's hasn't been asked to chip in to help pay for the lawsuit settlements the church has reached in other parts of the country.
If he strains his memory, he can recall meeting with other Catholic priests in Visalia about a year ago to discuss the scandal and prevent more lawsuits, but he can't offer anything specific in terms of the outcome.
Lopez mentions guidelines that the bishops drew up to direct the church's response to allegations about sexual abuse by its priests. He makes a pass at finding the guidelines on the bookshelf behind him, but soon gives up.
He suggests, vaguely, that the church could institute a screening process at the seminaries to weed out potential abusers.
He thinks he may have met some of the priests mentioned in the scandal when he was attending St. John's seminary in Chowchilla, but he graduated from there in 1963, a long time ago.
Things were different back then. People entrusted their children to priests without giving the situation a second thought. Nobody was screaming for the resignation of cardinals, and the church -- the one true Church, as Catholic literature refers to it -- wasn't being forced to admit its mistakes.
Today it seems like there are critics of the church emerging from under every pew, and they never seem to run out of the accusations they hurl at the altar.
"Some of it was that they didn't get rid of these guys as soon as they should have," Lopez says. "Years ago they were sent to a psychiatrist and allowed to come back. That was a mistake. They were supposed to be cured and they weren't."
These days it seems like the church's mistakes outnumber its saints.
Some of the church's highest ranking officials, such as Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, were "really, really stupid" in their approach to the scandal, especially regarding the way they tried to cover up the problem," Lopez says. "It was a lot more than we thought was going on. We also didn't see the victim's side as much as we should have.''
But he doesn't want the reporter leaving with the impression that the sex scandal is strictly a Catholic problem. "A lot of ministers get caught with the same thing but it doesn't get as much publicity,'' he says, without much passion. He says there were accusations made even against a couple of local ministers five or six months ago and some members of Jehovah's Witnesses "are being investigated for certain things" on the East Coast.
He also thinks that some of the accusations against his church are bogus and are being made because people think the church has deep pockets and they want some of the money.
It is not a fiery defense of his church. Either because of age or scandal, the fire is mostly gone from the Rev. Daniel Lopez these days. There is, instead, resignation.
The critics say the church long ago should have allowed its priests to marry, and should have ordained women as priests. Lopez would support both changes but he is not optimistic that the Catholic Church will admit that its policies have been mistaken for 2,000 years. "I really don't see anything wrong with it but the pope says no," he says.
"Personally, I feel getting married would make it hard to get on with my work. I never had that thought of marriage. Back when I was young, I was afraid of the thought of mariage, and now I'm even more afraid."
He is much older now and he would like to shuffle off into his retirement years, but the scandal keeps spreading and priests like him are left to face the reporters.