Ex-Pope Benedict XVI has published a letter in a German
magazine making one of the most distasteful, poorly judged and ill-informed claims
I've ever heard. He blames clerical sex abuse on the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
The social changes of the 60s and early 70s resulted from improvements
in and availability of contraception. This enabled consenting heterosexual adults
of all ages (and near-adults) to express their sexuality with little fear of
unwanted pregnancy. No doubt the increased financial independence of women over
the preceding twenty-five years was also a factor. Neither of those drivers changed
attitudes towards paedophilia or rape. (Except maybe women's increased independence
made rape even less acceptable.) Indeed, fifty years on those things are still taboo
in the wider society. Benedict claims that the sexual revolution led to
paedophilia being "diagnosed as allowed and appropriate". Well, not outside
of the Catholic Church it didn't!
He also claims that the sexual revolution led to
"homosexual cliques" in seminaries. That is so ridiculous as to need little
critique, but just in case you are inclined to believe anything a Pope says:
how could any rational person believe that homosexuality in seminaries began in
the 60s? It is only recently that the spotlight has changed sufficiently for
victims to put themselves through the trauma of describing what happened to
them as children, but even so some allegations date back to decades before the
1960s. There is little doubt that clerical abuse has been widespread for a very
long time.
If those claims weren't sickening enough, he went on to say
that the only solution is "obedience and love for our Lord Jesus
Christ". Wrong. A pretty good solution would be to remove perpetrators
from positions of authority. Instead of which the Catholic Church has regularly
acquiesced in the criminality and frequently covered it up. Indeed, the Church was
often complicit in encouraging it by moving the criminals away from growing
calls of outrage, to new parishes where they could continue to fiddle with
children and rape them.
I suppose in this post-truth era we are getting inured to
baseless claims no matter how facile, but Benedict's nonsense is particularly
galling as he is widely suspected of suppressing investigations into clerical
abuse.