Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church

We had a big spike in readers yesterday with a couple of links to Andrei's post. As is normal with these sorts of spikes, very few of the readers leave comments, so unless you're looking at the stats, you'll have hardly noticed anything different around here.

Over at the Dim Post, a number of commenters keep bringing up the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. How dare we comment on the likelihood of any other group committing sexual abuse of children when so many in the Catholic Church were abusers and had their abuse covered up by some in the hierarchy. Or so it goes.

Well, the thing is when you've spent a bit of time really looking at the crisis here in the Church, you'll notice a few things and a very big glaring thing. That very big glaring thing is the sheer number of pederast cases, where post-pubescent boys were abused by homosexual men, something like 80% of cases.  The media has been very clever in hiding that fact from the public, trying to make it more a widespread paedophile problem, which it is not.

And then when you bring that horrendous statistic into focus, you then notice that normal heterosexual men were actively prevented from joining the priesthood in some areas for many decades creating "lavender seminaries" in a number of countries.  I don't know how many homosexual priests we have right now, but it seems there are quite a few.

A couple of books are worth reading in order to get your head around this concept that those men who have abnormal sexual desires are not good men to have around children. While not every man who has homosexual desires is going to abuse teenage boys, statistically they are more likely to, and because of this and other problems with such men, the Vatican has ordered all seminaries not to admit them for training for the priesthood.

The first book is Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations From the Priesthood by Michael Rose.

In this explosive new book, investigative reporter Michael S. Rose reveals how deliberate discrimination against traditional, or "orthodox," men has been effected by well placed ideologues who want to change the Catholic Church in America to suit their personal tastes and politics.

Also find out:

• How seminary "gay subculture" and its "heterophobia" drive away healthy heterosexual men
• How traditional expressions of the faith and acceptance of the Church's teachings often disqualifies a candidate
• How psychological counseling is unethically used to expel healthy men from their seminary

The other book is The Faithful Departed by Phil Lawler.

The Faithful Departed traces the rise and fall of the Catholic Church as a cultural dynamo in Boston, showing how the Massachusetts experience set a pattern that has echoed throughout the United States as religious institutions have lost social influence in the face of rising secularization.

The collapse of Catholicism in Boston became painfully apparent in 2002, with the full explosion of the sex-abuse crisis. But Lawler brings an insider’s knowledge and a journalist’s sense of drama to show that the sex-abuse scandal was neither the cause nor the beginning of Catholicism’s decline in Boston. In fact, the scandal was itself a symptom of corruption that was already well advanced.

Full of colorful anecdote and gripping social history, The Faithful Departed will be of interest not only to Catholics and to those acquainted with Boston’s rich political tradition, but to anyone concerned about the interplay between religious faith and public policy. The demise of Catholic influence in Massachusetts is an especially vivid example of a secularizing trend that is visible throughout the United States.

CONCLUSION

Given everything we know about sexual abuse of minors, you'd think those people who condemn us for our sexual abuse problems would also be very interested in preventing such problems from occurring anywhere else. But no, this does not seem to be the case. There is no interest in preventing abuse, there is only a desire to make us stay silent. No lie is too big in order to make this happen. Even saying the current Pope was actively involved in covering up child abuse causes them no shame for maligning an innocent man who has done everything in his power to clean up the Church, removing the "filth", as he called those who would abuse children and young people.

With this is the whole bigger problem that people have, the abuse of children and young people is so horrendous, they cannot believe anyone but a religious person (that other type of weirdo they don't understand) could ever be capable of it. Certainly not people like them or their friends no matter what their other sexual proclivities. And this attitude means that they will turn the other way when obvious signs present themselves. They will presume the best explanation of an unsuitable couple's motives if they want to change the laws of the land to enable them to adopt children, rather than erring on the side of caution. And thus will enable very vulnerable young children to be placed with couples who should never be given children in the first place. Some of those children will be just fine, some won't - we won't know for decades as to how large the problems will be, but in the future I certainly hope those that have been pushing for gay adoption now will be suitably excoriated for not knowing better.

POSTSCRIPT

As an aside, the longing of men to have children comes from a good place. Rather than remaking society into their own image, this longing for children could be God's way of reminding them that they are men, not animals, and that their sexual desires do not have to define them. That through the forgiveness and grace of God, they may be able to have children and a life in the proper way, not in a distorted way, if they just ask Him to help them. That help and forgiveness is always there waiting for them, God will never abandon them.  It's always the other way around, we abandon God to follow our own desires, no matter how destructive they are.  But there is always a way back for every single one of us.