The Vatican Says It's Misunderstood

So, it was just yesterday that I posted about a letter, written by the Vatican to a group of Irish Bishops to warn them against reporting priests accused of raping and molesting children, and instead let the Vatican handle the situation, by moving the suspected priests so they could rape and molest again [see post HERE].
After that post, I got an email from Tom at My New Life with a link to an article detailing the Vatican's response to "The Letter". As you can imagine, my interest was piqued.
The Vatican, circling the pope's red shoes to fend off this new 'threat', has declared the letter to be "deeply misunderstood." The letter specifically says that the Irish bishops policy of mandatory reporting of child abuse cases "gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature."
So, um, yeah, in the words of the Vatican, reporting child abuse, and I'll be fair here, ALLEGED child abuse is cause for concern about the morals of those doing the reporting; not, however, in the morals of the ALLEGED molesters, or in the members of the Vatican, who wished to keep this dirty little secret.
While the Irish bishops understood the letter to mean the Vatican did not want them to report suspected crimes, victims groups are declaring the letter to be the "smoking gun" that shows how the Catholic church enforced a worldwide culture of concealing crimes by pedophile priests of which Rome bears ultimate--and legal--responsibility.
Andrew Madden, a former Dublin altar boy who was raped repeatedly by a priest, Ivan Payne, in the 1980s: "The letter confirms that the cover-up goes as far as the Vatican, that Vatican officials knew exactly what was going on, and that they proactively sought to deter Irish bishops from cooperating with civil authorities in Ireland."
A child was raped, repeatedly, and those who professed to love and protect children, instead chose to protect the rapists, and ordered that protection in a letter.
Still, the Vatican scrambles, and this week they insisted the letter was only intended to emphasize that Irish bishops follow church law meticulously; Vatican spokesman, Reverend Federico Lombardi, said the Holy See wanted to ensure that pedophile priests wouldn't have any technical grounds to escape church punishment on appeal.
Now, why would they need technical grounds to escape church punishment? I mean, in the case of pedophile priest Tony Walsh, the Vatican's method of punishment was to take him out of his parish where he was accused of raping boys and put him in a monastery where he raped another child. Is that the Vatican's idea of punishment? And, since when does the church, any church, get to decide how to punish someone who breaks the law?
And, because of 'The Letter', the Irish bishops, who had proactively begun cooperating with law enforcement in cases of abusive priests, suddenly changed their tune, and never implemented their commitment to report all suspected abuse cases to police.
I understand faith. I understand having faith in the Catholic religion, but could someone, anyone, tell me how Catholics continue to follow their leaders when it becomes clearer and clearer that they have spent decades allowing priests to rape and molest children, and then refusing to punish those priests, and instead simply transferring them somewhere else and hoping they wouldn't molest another child.
How do they do that?

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