Chapter 6 blog post 7

Three changes made the Catholic Church respond so differently to the 2002 Geoghan case compared to the 1992 port case. One of the changes that were different from the 2002 case in comparison to the 1992 case was the problem of sharing information. In 1992, it was much harder to send information to one another. The main way they communicated was through mail for by phone but to get “hard” evidence to share forward on or even to keep, such as a newspaper clipping, was my mail.  In 2002, you could forward things to whom every you desired to read the information or just have access to this information.  People were on-line having access to one another and everyone else with just the click of a button. Instead of sharing information with one person, people now can share to many with the information sharing “advantage.” The second change was that most of the reports of abuse by priests were in the 1960’s and 1970’s, making it a huge scandal in 2002 because the abuse had become too large of a problem to just simply ignore.  Information of these abusive priests has become known in the court of law today because of the amount of media coverage. In 2002, media could cover more people because of the use of Internet in comparison to 1992 resulting in more people coming forward with their own personal connection to the story. Once the word got out it was like wild fire, more and more people would come forth.  The third change, the expanding growth in technology did not cause the abuse scandal with the priests that began in 2002, but instead it was the actions of the church. As said in the book, it was not technologies fault for this but instead the church from trying to protect their priests from the outside world knowing about the past.  Now with just a click of a button in 2002 anyone could find out the information that the church was hiding about the priests.