I might be mistaken, but I’m under the impression that many of the sex abuse scandals we’ve heard of in the past and that we’re hearing of today occurred prior to Vatican II.
Quite so. A look at early Church law shows that clerical sexual crime was known from the earliest times in the Church. The Didache, for example, condemns many sexual practices including a specific ban on ‘corrupting youth’ and the Council of Elvira (309AD) also specifically condemns men who sexually abuse young boys and sets out ways and means by which youth may be protected from predatory clergy.
St Peter Damian, a monk who became a bishop and later a Cardinal, wrote extensively about the sexual crimes of the clergy of his day (c1050AD) particularly condemning clergy who abused young boys. He attacked the Church hierarchy who ordained offenders and who failed to expel them. Sounds sadly familiar.
On 30 August 1568, Pope Pius V issued
Horrendum which addressed the issue in no uncertain terms and ordered that priests who offended were to be stripped of the priesthood, deprived of all income and privileges and handed over to the secular authorities (this would have meant their execution).
More recently in 1947, Fr Gerald Fitzgerald founded the Servants of the Paraclete to minister to struggling and ‘fallen’ priests. His correspondence and files, released in 2008, reveal that sexual abusers among the clergy had become a very real concern for him. In 1957 he wrote to the then Bishop of Santa Fe: that he thought it unwise to ‘offer hospitality to men who have seduced or attempted to seduce little boys or girls’ …‘If I were a bishop I would tremble when I failed to report them to Rome for involuntary laicization. Experience has taught us these men are too dangerous to the children of the parish and the neighborhood for us to be justified in receiving them here…They should ipso facto be reduced to lay men when they act thus’. Again, how sadly familiar.
The first report on clerical sexual abuse here in Ireland was the Ferns report (2005) which independently investigated a sample number of over 100 credible allegations of sexual abuse made between 1962 and 2002 against 21 priests in that diocese. With the exception of 2 of the priests, the offenders were brought up and ordained in the pre-Vatican II church. The Ryan and Murphy reports show a similar pattern.
My point here is not to suggest in any way that something about the pre-Vatican II Church bred offenders, rather that there was never a ‘golden age’ of the Church in which the sexual abuse of children by clergy did not occur. It undoubtedly has continued post Vatican II although one hopes and prays that in another 40 years we will not have reports similar to the ones that have made the headlines over the last couple of decades.
A final point. In his recent letter to Irish Catholics, Pope Benedict suggested that ‘the rapid transformation and secularisation of Irish society’ were to blame for clerical abuse. With all due respect to His Holiness, this is unconvincing argument here in Ireland and he is either poorly informed on the situation here or he has allowed his preoccupation with secularisation and its evil twin, relativism, to cloud his analysis. As one Irish commentator noted ‘clerical abuse predated the process of secularisation – and it was in fact the very absence of secularisation that postponed its exposure’. And as a follow on from that point it should be noted that it was the secular state rather than the Irish Church in Ireland that exposed the whole scandal.
(and yes, this was prior to Vatican II). One particular bishop of Vienna had a Jewish mistress for whom he built quite an estate with a very beautiful garden (which can be seen in Sound of Music during the singing of “Do, Re, Me…”).
