Little Faith in Catholic Hierarchy

[SinnersAnonymus]

I believe Arizona Mike answered a few of the points brought up. However, let us try to be civil and not jump to conclusions about our brethren suffering from homosexual tendencies.

Married or not, straight or gay, the issue of messing with children is deplorable. The Church got a black eye but it is learning. Not every Bishop is guilty of hiding it and not every priest committed such an act.

I have a close family member who was molested and raped by a member of the clergy decades ago. We often wondered why that particular family member acted a bit odd. It was not until recently we found out the full story of what transpired in their teenage years. The remarkable thing to me was how the person decided to handle their traumatic experience. Instead of turning to anger and revenge they turned to therapy and spiritual direction. In the end my family member forgave and befriended their attacker when the molesters past sins caught up with. My family member did not excuse the molesters actions and the molester reaped what he sowed. However, my family member felt that if Christ could be innocently crucified next to criminals and forgive everyone one that killed him why couldn’t they forgive this man. I can never forget how shocked I was to find this out but I saw the healing power of forgiveness in my family member. These are horrible experiences that violate trust at the most sacred level. However, the healthiest response I have seen is to respond as Christ taught. Obey the laws of man and forgive from your heart.

God Bless

 

[CarolNoel]

Arizona Mike Thank you. That was a very informative and well thought post.

 

[JEANNIEMAC]

n the early 1950s, Mrs. Bella Dodd provided detailed explanations of the Communist subversion of the Church. Speaking as a former high ranking official of the American Communist Party, Mrs. Dodd said: “In the 1930s we put eleven hundred men into the priesthood in order to destroy the Church from within.” The idea was for these men to be ordained and progress to positions of influence and authority as Monsignors and Bishops. She stated that: “Right now they are in the highest places in the Church” — where they were working to bring about change in order to weaken the Church’s effectiveness against Communism. She also said that these changes would be so drastic that “you will not recognise the Catholic Church.” Dodd gave testimony on communist infiltration of Church and state before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in the 1950s.

On Tuesday, August 5, 1952 she publicly announced that on April 7th of the same year, she was received back into the Roman Catholic Church. Not being able to secure her baptismal certificate from Italy after inquiry, she was therefore conditionally baptized by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Dodd

Bella Dodd’s Book, “School of Darkness”

 

[RCCB]

I might be wrong, but part of me feels, that is some of those bishops/ priests had kids, or had an open “normal” sex life, they would have had more of the sense to not go along with the “cover up” and have known how wrong and harmful such actions really are…

If there is anything that holds the potential for dismantling both the religious concept of being ‘created in the image and likeness of God’ and ‘natural law’ as the basis of a moral order and force questions on the origins of the church itself, it is the ongoing sexual abuse crisis facing the church as well as other traditions and secular society itself.

Human nature is self evidently heir to both a corruption and limitation of moral and spiritual perception and this corruption is tied directly to male sexual response as evidenced not only by the ongoing sexual abuse scandals mentioned above but by a weighty list of problems whose origin is within human sexuality.

Who can doubt that God would not have an interest in defining for humanity the true nature of Love. but I see no such insight in anything the church or philosophy offers that would ‘make strait’ the way of Love.

The religious quest remains an unfinished project and at some point it will be necessary to question human nature itself; to see it as an unfinished potential that God has yet to complete! (or create] and so long as human nature is heir to such potential for corruption, it beggars my belief that God should have any interest in our species at all!

 

[ElisabethM]

I can only hope that this mess is cleaned up… It has to a large extant… but every so often, it seems a spot has been missed… as what happened a few weeks ago in MN…

I wish I could be that optimistic, but I can’t. I am very much “on guard” now regarding our young priest who welcomes homosexuals to our parish through the weekly bulletin. I have three teenagers (2 boys) and I have told them to curtail their weekly Confession. I wrote letters to both my bishop and priest with my concerns. The bishop completely blew me off and said he wouldn’t do anything because I asked him not to mention my name to the priest if he chose to address it. My priest wrote me an angry letter, never addressing any of my concerns, and told me I should go the the GAL support group to develop some compassion for these people.

em

 

[michaelhager]

Please excuse me for not having the facts at hand…but I do recall reading where a Protestant writer ( he may have been a pastor?)had researched sexual abuse among Protestant clergy…many if not most are married… and found more cases of abuse than among Catholic clergy…also…I believe there are somewhere around 450,000 Catholic priests worldwide…that number would have been much greater decades ago…so going back from the fifties to the present millions of priests would have come and gone…you have to put that into perspective when factoring in the number of sexual abuse cases among Catholic priests…this is not trying to cover up the terrible abuse that victims suffered…maybe someone here can clarify these two instances I have stated…

Let us put the problem into a better perspective. Fist. the percentage of Priests within the total of priests in the Catholic church, that have been accused (not convicted) of sexual misconduct is significantly lower than the percentage of sexual predators in the general population. I cannot speak to the Catholic vs. Protestant statistics.but based on personal experience, I would tend to agree with that assessment.

Since moving to the heart of the “Bible Belt” I have seen several accounts on the news about pastors, elders, youth ministers or other protestant “people of influence” in their churches being arrested or fired because of sexual indiscretions. Probably in the neighborhood of three or four a year in the past ten years.

I have heard of ONE priest in this area being accused and it turned out that the so called victim, later recanted and no actual charges were ever made.

But here is the problem. When a local pastor or youth minister is accused, tried and convicted, it harms his family, his particular church, the community around him, but it is generally written off as an anomaly, a one time occurrence, a problem with one individual. The neighboring churches, even of the same denomination are not harmed in the least.

However when ONE priest is exposed, it reflects on the entire Catholic Church, world wide. It is the only negative thing I can think of that is the direct result of the One Unified Catholic Church. The unfortunate result as a casting of an evil pallor over every priest in the Church.

We all need to realize that the statistics themselves are of much less magnitude than the media makes them out to be. And while the reactions of some Bishops have been to cover up the problems, others have taken the opposite tact and suspended priests at the first unfounded accusations. Those of course do not get reported by a media eager to condemn.

Lastly, I am convinced that a large number of accusations have been falsely made by fortune seekers looking to capitalize on the situation, or by people convinced by acquaintances that the hug they got from their priest 20 years ago in second grade was abuse, not the real, holy congratulations for receiving first communion.

We must keep all of this in our minds and we must all pray for those people effected, both the victims and the priests, remembering that all are sinners, and all can be forgiven, just keep them all in your prayers.

 

[HabemusFrancis]

I don’t dispute that more ministers are molesterss than priests, ( never mind non clerical population!)

But I would be curious if any single profession ( apart from priesthood) has numbers as high as 5% of their total.

5%, may seem small, but for something as strange as pedophilia, among a group of people who are uncommonly schooled and educated, is really quite explosive.

5%. That is about the percentage of African Americans in Minnesota… uncommon… but not that uncommon…

I just wonder if for some who enter priesthood “celibacy” is a cover to hide their unusual sexual preferences? Only for some at least

 

[Arizona_Mike]

I don’t dispute that more ministers are molesterss than priests, ( never mind non clerical population!)

But I would be curious if any single profession ( apart from priesthood) has numbers as high as 5% of their total.

5%, may seem small, but for something as strange as pedophilia, among a group of people who are uncommonly schooled and educated, is really quite explosive.

5%. That is about the percentage of African Americans in Minnesota… uncommon… but not that uncommon…

I just wonder if for some who enter priesthood “celibacy” is a cover to hide their unusual sexual preferences? Only for some at least

Men as a whole probably have a higher percentage of sexual contact with children than priests as a group, HabemusFrancis:

"**ased on the surveys and studies conducted by different denominations over the past 30 years, experts who study child abuse say they see little reason to conclude that sexual abuse is mostly a Catholic issue. ‘We don’t see the Catholic Church as a hotbed of this or a place that has a bigger problem than anyone else,’ said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children …

"Experts disagree on the rate of sexual abuse among the general American male population, but Allen says a conservative estimate is one in 10. Margaret Leland Smith, a researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says her review of the numbers indicates it’s closer to one in 5 …

“Since the mid-1980s, insurance companies have offered sexual misconduct coverage as a rider on liability insurance, and their own studies indicate that Catholic churches are not higher risk than other congregations … It’s been that way for decades.” **

 

[Arizona_Mike]

I don’t dispute that more ministers are molesterss than priests, ( never mind non clerical population!)

But I would be curious if any single profession ( apart from priesthood) has numbers as high as 5% of their total.

5%, may seem small, but for something as strange as pedophilia, among a group of people who are uncommonly schooled and educated, is really quite explosive.

5%. That is about the percentage of African Americans in Minnesota… uncommon… but not that uncommon…

I just wonder if for some who enter priesthood “celibacy” is a cover to hide their unusual sexual preferences? Only for some at least

More important to note, though, is that you are completely misunderstanding what those statistics are reporting, HabemusFrancis. You seem to think that 5% of the total number of current priests are pedophiles. If that was true, I wouldn’t let my children within a country mile of a priest. That figure is actually completely untrue, however. I doubt you are purposely telling a lie and I don’t think that you are at fault. I suspect you trusted the media’s reporting, and it’s the media’s fault for playing fast and loose with the statistics from the John Jay study to misrepresent the truth. Figures may not lie, but liars sure can figure.

The actual statistic is that 5% of the total of all the U.S. priests who were working between 1950 to 2002 were accused (not convicted) of abuse. That’s incredibly important for every Catholic to know. Not: 5% of all current priests are pedophiles, that’s insane. But it’s also the figure the media has managed to make a lot of people believe.

That’s 4,392 priests out of the 109,694 priests estimated to have worked in the U.S. from 1950 to 2002.

We’re not even sure if that figure is accurate. It’s based on a best-guess estimate used in the John Jay Study, as there are no good figures on the total number of priests working in the U.S. during that time. Here’s how they came up with their figures:

The total number of priests with allegations of abuse in our survey is 4, 392. The percentage of all priests with allegations of sexual abuse is difficult to derive because there is no definitive number of priests who were active between the years of 1950 and 2002. We used two sets of numbers to estimate the total number of active priests and estimated this percentage against whom allegations were made.

o We asked each diocese, eparchy and community for their total number of active priests in this time period. Adding up all their responses, there were 109,694 priests reported by dioceses, eparchies and religious communities to have served in their ecclesiastical ministry from 1950-2002. Using this number, 4.0% of all priests active between 1950 and 2002 had allegations of abuse.

o The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) reports a total of 94,607 priests for the period 1960-2002. When we look at the time period covered by the CARA database, the number of priests with allegations of sexual abuse is 4,127. Thus, the percentage of priests accused for this time period is 4.36% if we rely on the CARA figures assessing the total number of priests.

o If we examine the differences between diocesan and religious priests, then our numbers result in a total of 4.3% of diocesan priests with allegations of abuse and 2.5% of religious priests with allegations of abuse. The CARA numbers yield a total of 5% of diocesan priests from 1960-2002 with allegations of abuse and 2.7% of religious priests from 1960-2002 with allegations of abuse.

johnjay.jjay.cuny.edu/churchstudy/_pdffiles/exec.pdf

We also don’t know how many of those were true.

Obviously, those 4,127 cases are all tragedies. They were all either horrible cases of abuse by a cleric in whom trust was placed, or calumnies against an innocent man whose life was destroyed. But 4,127 allegations over a 1960 to 2002, over a 42 year period is way, way, way lower than the number of allegations lodged against any group of a similar size that has frequent access to children - such as teachers - during an equivalent period.

By comparison, the Associated Press found more than 2,500 cases over only five years in which U.S. public school educators were punished for actions from bizarre to sadistic. That’s 2,570 educators whose teaching credentials were revoked, denied, surrendered or sanctioned from 2001 through 2005 following allegations of sexual misconduct. That is not including all the allegations that were dismissed, that are included in the John Jay report. One report mandated by Congress estimated that as many as 4.5 million students, out of roughly 50 million in American schools, are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade. That figure includes verbal harassment that’s sexual in nature.

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/21/AR2007102100144.html

I’d be curious to know (maybe it should be a poll) - how many of you reading this thought that 4% of current priests are pedophiles, instead of an estimate of derived from the total of all the alleged cases for the past 46 years, before you read this?

 

[Arizona_Mike]

So, what percentage of current priests have actually been credibly accused of abuse? Is it 4%?

According to the UCSSB, there are currently 40,271 diocesan and religious-order priests in the United States (27,284 diocesan priests +12,978 religious-order priests (Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, etc.) (old.usccb.org/comm/catholic-church-statistics.shtml).

According to the annual audit of abuse allegations for the last year available (2012), only six credible abuse allegations were made against priests by current minors in all of 2012 - out of 40,271 active priests, so far less than 1% of current priests - actually, about 0.01%, any number is still too high, but it’s much better than the media reports, and better than most any other group.

usccb.org/issues-and-action/child-and-youth-protection/upload/annual-report-on-the-implementation-of-the-charter-for-the-protection-of-children-and-young-people-2012.pdf

And the majority of all allegations arising in 2013 are historical:

o 45% of all identified priests who were accused in 2012 were already long deceased (this is the second year in a row of this record high figure);

o 77% of all identified priests who were accused in 2012 are either already deceased, already removed from ministry, already laicized, or simply missing;

o 77% of all abuse accusations last year allege incidents from before 1985; and
accusations against priests in 2012 were down 20% and were the lowest recorded numbers since annual audit reports began.

 

[michaelhager]

Here is my belief, based on my personal life experience, not on statistics or records. My guess would be that 50% if not more of all abuses reported to have happened fifteen years or more before the allegations were made are false, or miss-remembered events. There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is gold-digging by disgruntled or fallen away Catholics. People jumping om the payment wagon from the Church.

Second, human beings are tactile creatures. We touch, we hug, we cuddle and comfort our children. It is quite natural to pick up a small child and embrace them in genuine love and affection to comfort an injury, or congratulate a success. There is nothing sexual or abusive abut it and it is part of the natural law of human relationships.

Years late, gullible people hear of the “Rampant” sexual misconduct of priests, and recall that moment after first communion when the priest sat them on his lap to congratulate them, and their mind converts that holy, loving embrace into sexual misconduct.

I coached my kids soccer teams for years. My daughters six year old team members suffered injuries often. (Mostly small bumps and bruises, but enough to bring tears to a six year old. I would pick them up, hug them and comfort them, and carry them to the sidelines to the arms of a mother or father and go on with the game. Sadly, in our society today, ion the same situation, I would be forced to tell the child to stop crying and go to their parent, without compassion or any physical contact for fear of being accused of sexual abuse.

Since priests are held to the highest standards, the tiniest bit of physical contact on their part is often misconstrued as malicious in intent. I long for the days when we would see a small child run to a priest and embrace them in love without the look of fear on the face of priest.

 

[HabemusFrancis]

ArizonaMike, you say that men as a whole have a sex abuse rate higher than 5%?

That is probably true unfortunately

If one calculates all the pedophile incidents even in last 10 years ( many go unreported)

from every different country in the world, it coudl well be even more than 5%!

Let us not forget about cultures where pedophilia is not considered “wrong”. Take the middle east for example. Child marriage is fairly common in the less developed parts of it, often with the official sanction of Islamic clerics.

Even worse in my mind, is historical ( and perhaps current) acceptance of pederastry in islamic lands. Though Islam considers it a sin, homosexual pederastry was (and is) widely seen as normal in Islamic lands, perhaps because women were so completly sequestered from men until marriage…

From what I have read of history, the abhorrence of pedophilia is something of a Judeo-Christian oddity rather than a key component of human nature !

From Ancient Greece/Rome, to Pre and Post Islamic Orient, to Certain regions of China, there seems to have been little approbrium toward it. I might be wrong that Christianity helped stigmatize pedophilia, but it would certainly seem that way…

 

[SinnersAnonymus]

HabemusFrancis: The human mind is developing until the mid-twenties. An interesting topic to read up on is the latest studies on white matter pathway development of the brain as a person becomes an adult. It is like rewiring a circuit board several times as the brain goes from child to adult. There are good reasons why pedophilia is stigmatized, the first scientific reason off the top of my head is that the child’s brain is not developed enough to fully handle what is going on and its consequences.

For example, by the time a normal person is a teenager the reward centers are highly overdeveloped but the self control centers are underdeveloped. Normally the brain will prune the overdeveloped reward areas as the self control area becomes more developed. By engaging in sexual behavior at young ages, a person is training their mind to prune or remodel the brain in favor of pleasure seeking behaviors and not self control. This can lead to addictive personalities as adults plus poor impulse control issues which may last a life time. Just like any drug abuse is a bad idea, dopamine (the feel good neurotransmitter from sex, food, gambling, and such) can be abused in children. Sexuality is the highest dopamine surge a person can normally get outside of drugs.

Ultimately, faith objects to what it unnatural or harmful to the natural order. Just because ancient peoples did it does not mean there is not a good reason to avoid said behavior. I have found that given enough time, it is possible to learn that many of the statements faith makes about harmful things can have very good reasons for making such statements. However, modern science is relatively young and it takes time and patience to discover the objective truth.

God Bless

 

[on_the_hill]

Way too much for me to read through (unfortunately this happens a lot… )

Anyway, maybe a previous post mentioned this:

I haven’t followed the abuse scandals very closely, but it seems like a lot of the priests were moved from one parish to another as the bishops’ way of trying to fix the problem. Maybe it wasn’t the only action they were taking, but it’s the most evident.

I’m a manager, of sorts. And I can tell you that it can be very, very hard to manage people. Most bosses, when they have a bad employee, want nothing more than for the person to go away because they don’t want to deal with him or her. My predecessors in my current position let several bad employees stick around for years because they either didn’t know how or didn’t want to deal with them.
The issue with the Church is not only are the “bosses” human beings just like all the other bosses in the world, but they have the added complications of dealing with people who are ordained, consecrated, who have given themselves to God. It’s not as simple as saying, “You’re fired.” Plus, the Church is constantly attacked by the media, who are always looking for a reason to take more shots.

It takes a great deal of fortitude, courage, dedication, and foresight to handle a situation like an abusive priest and make it work for the best.

Anyway, that’s my reasoning on it. They blew it. Hopefully now they realize they blew it and won’t let it happen again. There are a lot of reasons I don’t trust the Vatican hierarchy, this is but one of them. At this point I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on the abuse scandals. Now hopefully Pope Francis will continue to clean house.*

 

[Arizona_Mike]

ArizonaMike, you say that men as a whole have a sex abuse rate higher than 5%?

That is probably true unfortunately

If one calculates all the pedophile incidents even in last 10 years ( many go unreported)

from every different country in the world, it coudl well be even more than 5%!

Let us not forget about cultures where pedophilia is not considered “wrong”. Take the middle east for example. Child marriage is fairly common in the less developed parts of it, often with the official sanction of Islamic clerics.

Even worse in my mind, is historical ( and perhaps current) acceptance of pederastry in islamic lands. Though Islam considers it a sin, homosexual pederastry was (and is) widely seen as normal in Islamic lands, perhaps because women were so completly sequestered from men until marriage…

From what I have read of history, the abhorrence of pedophilia is something of a Judeo-Christian oddity rather than a key component of human nature !

From Ancient Greece/Rome, to Pre and Post Islamic Orient, to Certain regions of China, there seems to have been little approbrium toward it. I might be wrong that Christianity helped stigmatize pedophilia, but it would certainly seem that way…

We are probably talking about several different behavioral disorders, and trying to categorize them all under the broad category of “pedophilia.” A lot of men have criminal sexual contacts with pubescent minors (15, 16, 17 year olds) without being classic “pedophiles.” They are just sinful men who thought having sex with a teenager was what they wanted to do. That happens a lot in schools, with youth group leaders, with “johns” who seek underage prostitutes, etc. They may have “normal” sex lives with people their own age, but decide to risk it because they are attracted to a boy or girl. This can happen with homosexuals or heterosexuals. Homosexuals and bisexuals report a much higher early rate of sexual contact with a male adult as a minor, than heterosexuals report sexual contact with an adult of the opposite sex.

If the attraction is more prevalent in a person’s sexuality, and his preferred sexual partners are pubescent teenagers, he is technically considered a hebephile. If the attraction is to male teenagers, it is pederasty, which seems to be the majority of substantiated abuse claims among clergy. Although very controversial among gays, there is substantial support for the idea of legalizing “pederasty” (as opposed to “pedophilia” with young children, which is opposed by a large majority of male gays) by some (by no means all) in the gay community, and it is often not presented as an exploitative relationship by those who advocate for it.

Someone who sexual interest in primarily or exclusively young children is considered a pedophile, this seems to occur at a much lower rate in the studies of clerical abuse than the first two categories.

 

[HabemusFrancis]

I understand that pedophilia is widespread everywhere, but there are several factors why I think the Catholic situation was particularily bad.

First off, the idea of “once a priest always a priest” that made it extremly hard for the church to “fire” one, which is what I believe they should have been able to do. I know in the old days pedophilia wasn’t well understood. But I have to believe that in 1972, if a burger king employee kept molesting the customer’s children he would be fired, if for no other reason than him being a liability. Part of me wonders if because of the priest shortage, the church was just desperate to hold on to whoever they could?

Second, the old tradition of the Catholic Hierarchy not wanting it’s clergy members particularly answerable to Secular law. A famous example of this is the whole Thomas a Beckett affair. I mean there is not any instance ( or very few) of a Bishop turning over a priest to the police. In fact, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, a 2005 Papal contender, wrote a letter of congradulation in 2001 to a French Bishop who refused to turn in a priest to the police !

I also find it stunning that Cardinals like Cardinal Law, Cardinal Bevilaqua and so many others seemed to think Pedophilia among priests was “tolerable” as long as it didn’t cause a “scandal”, a trite and abusrd word for something as bad as sex abuse!

I mean if our hierarchs were historically as aggressive at cracking down on sex abusers as they were on dissenting priests, women “priests” or married clergy in midieval times, we would be FAR better off. I just think its kind of pathetic how much lawyers, grand juries, and secular media have to twist some bishops arms to do the right thing on this issue…

Also, I have examined the oath a cardinal takes before he is installed… In it, there is a clause saying a cardinal “will not reveal anything that brings harm to the Church” Could that not be interpreted to mean “keep pedophilia silent no matter the cost?”

Tell me, please!

 

[polki]

The New Evangelization is going to fall on deaf ears if the hierarchy continues to brush off sexual deviancy of their own members. I know droves of cradle Catholics who do not practice their faith because of this type of hypocrisy. I don’t blame them. They all need our prayers.

 

[HabemusFrancis]

I think the Church structure needs to be more democratic.

I think the laity should have more power than we do, if only to make so a culture of insularity and secrecy would be impossible.

The problem of this whole thing was a culture of secrecy and entitlement. I feel if the Church doesn’t institute serious reforms in this matter, and soon, they will become a financailly bankrupt institution

 

[manualman]

I understand that pedophilia is widespread everywhere, but there are several factors why I think the Catholic situation was particularily bad.
…

Also, I have examined the oath a cardinal takes before he is installed… In it, there is a clause saying a cardinal “will not reveal anything that brings harm to the Church” Could that not be interpreted to mean “keep pedophilia silent no matter the cost?”

A couple problems in this line of thought.

1. The actual data has already been presented to you. The problem has NOT been “particularly bad” in the catholic church, it has been “particularly bad” in western society at large since the sexual revolution (and contrary to popular opinion, the roots of that lie as far back as the 1920’s). We’ve lived through a period where society has intentionally decided to forget what human sexuality really is and what it is for and create a false identity for it. Once you open the door to that, ANY false identity is fair game since redefining reality is already on the table. The tragedy is that the church should have been situated to do BETTER than the culture at large, but far too many fell for the initial redefinitions of human sexuality that then made them as likely as anybody else to fall for the follow-on redefinitions. The hard sociological data clearly indicate that the lesson is NOT that the “catholic church has a sexual abuse problem” it is that EVEN the catholic church has a sexual abuse problem. We live in a sick culture and we’ve failed to live the call to be in the world while not being OF it.
2. Your concern about the cardinals stems from viewing the “church” the same way one would view Harvard. Clearly such a vow from prospective deans of Harvard would be appalling. But the church isn’t primarily an institution, it is a FAMILY. Cardinals making that vow promise to do what is best for the FAMILY of God. Insofar as some chose courses of covering up abuse for a short term convenience of reduced embarrassment, they failed to do what was best for the family of God. I can’t explain why certain bishops made the choices they did. You and I both simply lack enough information. In cases like Bishop Weakland in Milwaukee, it’s rather easy to see (since he was gay himself with a penchant for young and impressionable men). I have no idea what reasoning process Cardinal Law used. God have mercy on them both.

 

[HabemusFrancis]

I really do question whether the pedophilia crisis had anything to do with any sexual revolution, whether in the 1920s or 1960s.

Sinful sexual behavior has existed throughout history, including pedophilia I believe.

I think though that really until the past 30 years or so ( give or take) there was no knowing about pedophilia because the victim was often too sad and confused to talk to anyone about it.

I hear that even if they did try and talk about it in the olden days, no one really was sympathetic or tried to help them that much . Even as it is pedophilia is a notoriously underreported crime.

So how can anyone be sure that there was less pedophilia in 1800 as opposed to today?