`I'm afraid the post you link to above reflects exactly the sort of outright misleading information that certain people are circulating on this subject. His BBC link talks of 20 catholics convicted of abuse in the past ten years, many being very old cases. He then adds the preposterous (unsourced) claim that there have been 3,000 cases of abuse in Ireland! The Australian link was to one incident. The Polish report refers to one person. The Austrian report refers to ONE STUDENT! This does not a ``worldwide`` scandal make. The list is the result of a BBC search round the world for incidents in 2002! at the height of the US  scandal. The BBc in particular has been anxious to find sex abuse cases and to spread the scandal to the UK. Despite relentless digging they have come up with nothing. They even sent a team to Brazil, convinced, as was ``Mike`` above, seems to be, that somehow Child abuse and Catholicism were intrinsically linked. The team found nothing. Of course in a church with over a thousand million members and millions of priests and religious, you are going to find incidents of all crimes if you go hunting for them. I could link up to lots and lots of abuse cases in protestant, muslim and secular spheres. So no. The abuse crisis is not worldwide.     `