Why should a priest not be held responsible as any other pedophile. They should not be granted any special treatment. Any man that does such a thing is NOT a man of God. He is pretending to be in order to be put in a position of trust so he can take advantage of these children. A priest should face the same rule of law as any other pedophile.
I do not understand how a church can condone such actions by the leaders of its church. If the church was following the Word of God these men would be stripped of their priesthood. Yes the Church does condone this action by paying millions of dollars and transferring these so called priest to another parish to an entire new group of kids to molest. The actions of the church has been a disgrace.
First, I agree that the disciplinary actions taken by the Church were neither effective nor enough.
However, I think the Church has a legitimate argument for not turning Priests over to the State. The Church (an fact, any church/religion) sees itself as higher than the State; the Church sees itself as not answering to the authority of the State but to the authority of God; and, the Church (especially an international Church) cannot maintain that the authority of the State comes from God, unless it is the Church that is bestowing said authority (Christendom and the divine right of kings).
Thus, the Church seeing its authority as higher naturally holds that it has jurisdiction, not only over its Priests but over all of its members. Insofar as any member of the Church wants to present complaints to the Church, the Church will oversee and mediate said complaints. The Church does not turn to the State in the vast majority of situations.
Thus, there is nothing inconsistent in the Church handling these investigations and these problems 'in-house'. The problem is not that the Church is not handing these individuals over to the State, the problem is that the Church is not dealing effectively with the individuals. The Church ought to remove these Priests from parishes and cloister them away in isolation (which, by the way, is not vastly different than the idea of imprisonment).
However, there also appear to be some theological reasons and beliefs for the lack of effective measures taken, which I will address with your following point:
Priest are human but they are held to a higher standard than the average member of the church. The qualifications are found in the books of Timothy and Titus of the Holy Bible. The actions these man have taken excludes them from being a priest.
You are absolutely correct. The Church holds Priests to a higher standard, and it should hold Priests to a higher standard. However, the bedrock dogma of the Catholic Church is the dogma of reconciliation. If anyone in the Church, to include Priests, confesses their sins, shows contrition, and serves their penance, then the Church views said person's past as irrelevant to their future. This is embodied in what is meant by forgiveness; one has not actually forgiven another if one still does not trust the other.
So, the Church is faced with a dilemma: do they refuse to take seriously the confession and repentance of Priests (and, what must logically follow, all penitents), and therefore protect children; or, do they take seriously the confessions and repentance of Priests, and therefore continue to place children in harm's way?
While, I think this dilemma is a very troubling dilemma for the Church, I do believe there exists at least one way around it: make the penance the removal of the priest from society (i.e., cloister the priest away in isolation). However, such a penance would have to hold not just for Priests but for all members of the Church, and it is hard to see how the Church could make life-imprisonment a penance for this act, but not for things like homicide (to include fighting unjust wars), rape, etc.
It is not as clear cut as many on the outside make it out to be. There are plenty of dogmatic complexities at issue in this problem. Personally, I think the Church ought to embrace Cardinal Shonnbrun's idea and look into the possibility of allowing, for the first time since the eleventh century, Priests to marry.
