… In recent decades, however, the Church in your country has had to confront new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society. Fast-paced social change has occurred, often adversely affecting people’s traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values. All too often, the sacramental and devotional practices that sustain faith and enable it to grow, such as frequent confession, daily prayer and annual retreats, were neglected. Significant too was the tendency during this period, also on the part of priests and religious, to adopt ways of thinking and assessing secular realities without sufficient reference to the Gospel. The programme of renewal proposed by the Second Vatican Council was sometimes misinterpreted and indeed, in the light of the profound social changes that were taking place, it was far from easy to know how best to implement it. In particular, there was a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations. It is in this overall context that we must try to understand the disturbing problem of child sexual abuse, which has contributed in no small measure to the weakening of faith and the loss of respect for the Church and her teachings.
Only by examining carefully the many elements that gave rise to the present crisis can a clear-sighted diagnosis of its causes be undertaken and effective remedies be found. Certainly, among the contributing factors we can include: inadequate procedures for determining the suitability of candidates for the priesthood and the religious life; insufficient human, moral, intellectual and spiritual formation in seminaries and novitiates; a tendency in society to favour the clergy and other authority figures; and a misplaced concern for the reputation of the Church and the avoidance of scandal, resulting in failure to apply existing canonical penalties and to safeguard the dignity of every person. Urgent action is needed to address these factors, which have had such tragic consequences in the lives of victims and their families, and have obscured the light of the Gospel to a degree that not even centuries of persecution succeeded in doing…
I learned that my colleague had written editorials and articles for a NAMBLA periodical [North American Man/Boy Love Association] which I read. They were painful diatribes that rationalized pedophilia as a high form of consensual love. I couldn’t imagine him writing them. I later talked to him in prison. He told me it started with his uncle seducing him in childhood. Later, at Boarding School, he became the seducer and it had continued for fifty years. At the time he got arrested, he said he’d already stopped. I asked him why he never got help. He told me that until he was caught and put through a treatment program, he genuinely thought it was okay – that others just didn’t understand. He was sure right about that. I didn’t understand at all.
I’ve learned that this is a somewhat typical story – particularly the part about a "higher form of love." In fact, when such people get caught and put into treatment, they often have cognitive dissonance and get sort of crazy when they realize how horrified other people are at what they say. Their rationalizations and denial has rarely been heard except by other pedophiles, if at all.
Which brings me to the Pope’s letter. His notion that the cause of so much childhood sexual abuse in the Church is secularization or insufficient religious practice is absurd. Pedophiles are frequently like my colleague, pious to a fault. Congressman Mark Foley was on committees to draft laws about sexual abuse. The ranks of the pedophiles are filled with teachers, church workers, preachers, coaches, etc. In reading the entirety of the Pope’s long letter, the only thing I read that sounded right was, "a misplaced concern for the reputation of the Church and the avoidance of scandal, resulting in failure to apply existing canonical penalties and to safeguard the dignity of every person." Everything else sounds like stuff the Pope thinks – uninformed by any understanding of the condition that he’s looking at.
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