You make it sound like priests are just bad at maximizing their income, so they must be damaged somehow. But putting it in economic terms like that is silly. Priests aren't in it for the money or an easy lifestyle. Similarly I don't think the church is so worried about optimizing their training costs that it could be a plausible root cause. Reducing everything to a dollar amount is some weird sigma shit.
Though I agree... there's probably no coordinated conspiracy of abusers covering for other abusers, just a pervasive culture of secrecy and willingness at all levels to do anything to protect the clergy. And seriously, who thought it would be a good idea to sexually stunt young people with religious indoctrination, get them to swear to a vow of chastity, and then go their whole lives without sex or porn, and think it'll just be fine to trust them absolutely in situations of incredibly significant power imbalance? Like organizational reform aside, this doesn't seem fixable for the church. It's too fundamental to their whole model. They'll keep going because they have so much momentum, but more victims are going to keep getting hurt.
>. Priests aren't in it for the money or an easy lifestyle
Right, which immediately rules out like 95% of Catholic men from even considering the occupation. There aren't a lot of applicants to the job.
>Similarly I don't think the church is so worried about optimizing their training costs that it could be a plausible root cause.
Each priest has received 4-5 years of training that the Church paid for. Basically every other industry would also bend over backwards to save their ~$100,000 investment when they already have the hiring problem I mentioned.
I don't disagree with the rest of your post, Catholicism has a lot of problems. Even without those problems, they act like a lot of other companies that make similar choices of overlooking abuse because it's profitable to do so.
Though I agree... there's probably no coordinated conspiracy of abusers covering for other abusers, just a pervasive culture of secrecy and willingness at all levels to do anything to protect the clergy. And seriously, who thought it would be a good idea to sexually stunt young people with religious indoctrination, get them to swear to a vow of chastity, and then go their whole lives without sex or porn, and think it'll just be fine to trust them absolutely in situations of incredibly significant power imbalance? Like organizational reform aside, this doesn't seem fixable for the church. It's too fundamental to their whole model. They'll keep going because they have so much momentum, but more victims are going to keep getting hurt.