August 8, 2015 Sexual predators are more prevalent among rabbis, pastors and yogis than among Catholic priests But they are not as widely reported by the secular especially the international media

Pedophilia's Roots and the Catholic Church - Interview with Author Lorenzo Bertocchi
http://www.zenit.org/article-29344?l=english

By Antonio Gaspari, Rome, May 23, 2010

If pedophilia is so widespread in society, what has caused its growth? And how did it infiltrate the Church?
These and other questions have been tackled in a book by Francesco Agnoli, Massimo Introvigne, Giuliano Guzzo, Luca Volonté and Lorenzo Bertocchi. The Italian-language work, titled "Indagine sulla pedofilia nella Chiesa" (Investigation on Pedophilia in the Church), considers the roots of the phenomenon of pedophilia.
ZENIT spoke with one of the authors, Lorenzo Bertocchi, about their conclusions and what wavering Catholics can do to restore faith in the Church.

ZENIT: How many cases of pedophilia are there in the Church?
Bertocchi: Even if there was only one case, obviously it would already be too many. In this regard, within the Church the one who has shown himself to have very clear ideas is precisely Benedict XVI. 
Having said that, I think it is useful to understand the dimensions of the phenomenon and, in the first part of the book, Massimo Introvigne helps us to frame the problem. In the United States, for example, according to authoritative academic research, from 1950 to 2002, there were 958 priests accused of actual pedophilia out of more than 109,000 priests, but the
convictions are drastically less -- a figure just under 100.
In a statement last March 10, Father [Federico] Lombardi [the Vatican spokesman] mentioned the case of Austria where, in the same time span, verified accusations attributed to the Church totaled 17, whereas in other environments they rose to 510. These numbers can say much or nothing; nevertheless they undoubtedly show a tendency that enables one to deflate the hypothesis in regard to the Church that would like to make "a bundle of the grass" [an Italian expression that means to generalize].
The subject of false accusations would merit a separate discourse, as for example the cases of Father Giorgio Covoni, of two women religious of Bergamo, of Father Kinsella and Sister Nora Wall in Ireland, each accused of abuses and then acquitted. These facts are important because they give credit to the not-always-clear dynamics in which the accusations take shape.
ZENIT: And in society?
Bertocchi: Reading the data it seems that the plague of pedophilia is really extensive and impressive. A World Health Organization report --"Global Estimates of Health Consequences Due to Violence Against Children" (Geneva, 2006) -- indicates, for example, that in 2002, it can be estimated that close to 150 million girls and 73 million boys worldwide were subjected to different forms of sexual abuse.
A U.N. report, presented to the General Assembly on July 21, 2009, focused attention instead on the situation of the Web: On a worldwide scale, the number of on-line sites of a pedo-pornographic nature has increased at a dizzying rate; for example, if in 2001 there were 261,653, in 2004 they numbered 480,000, a tendency that is also confirmed by consulting annual reports from Father Di Noto's Meter Association.
This fact about the Internet seems to me paradigmatic, given the role already assumed by the Web in our social life. Thus it gives weight to the idea that there is a good dose of prejudice in the type of media campaign carried out to make the Church seem as the place par excellence of pedophilia.
ZENIT: What kind of culture promotes pedophilia?
Bertocchi: At the heart of the problem is the "sex culture" that, especially since '68, promoted a real revolution geared to "abolish the taboos." The spread of pornography -- which in some way represents the flag of this revolution -- can be seen by everyone. The dominant mentality today is one that justifies sexual unions of every sort, and is a fruit of the thought rooted in De Sade, Freud, Fromm, Reich, Marcuse, etc. -- those whom we could describe as prophets of the exaltation of the orgasm.
In our book, Francesco Agnoli gives examples of how this culture is still alive today. Representative is the case of the Dutch Pro-Pedophiles political party, recently dissolved for lack of signatures, but not because of a legal prohibition. At its root, the sexual revolution of those years had the objective of attacking all types of authority, beginning with God's, and this, sadly, has left its mark also within the Church.
ZENIT: How, when and why did the culture that fosters pedophilia penetrate seminaries and the Church?
Bertocchi: We find an indication in the letter Benedict XVI wrote to Catholics of Ireland, in which, in addition to addressing the problem of the cases of pedophilia in the Irish clergy, the Holy Father also looks for the roots of the phenomenon. In his argumentation, he makes reference to the fact that the "program of renewal proposed by the Second Vatican Council was sometimes misinterpreted." Undoubtedly this is an allusion to that period of the 60s and 70s of the last century in which the so-called opening to the world led the Church to a weakening of the faith and to progressive secularization.
The social attack on the principle of authority, the famous slogan "it is prohibited to prohibit," insinuated itself in the Church, and thus in the seminaries a certain interpretation ended up confusing discipline with dialogue. The result was a wider approach in the selection of candidates to the priesthood.
In this connection, Cardinal [Carlo] Caffarra specified that the fact that "the Church gives itself criteria to discern whom to admit and whom not to admit to the priesthood is a right that no one can reasonably deny it" (La Verita chiede di essere rivelata -- Rizzoli 2009). 
Today more than ever this right must be exercised. Whoever thinks that the problem is priests' celibacy should at least explain why in the Protestant clergy, where marriage is allowed, there are cases of abuses not inferior to those of the Catholic clergy.
ZENIT: Why does organized pedophilia practiced with sexual tourism not cause a stir, and why can it not be stopped?
Bertocchi: Research by ECPAT [End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes] reveals that in the world, close to 80 million tourists each year travel in search of a sex offer. According to Intervita -- an Italian organization -- there are 10 million minors involved in this global market, with a revenue estimated at U.S. $12
billion.
The research of the University of Parma carried out by ECPAT establishes the robot portrait of the "tourist type," who is certainly not a monster: In 90% of the cases, he is between 20 and 40 years old, of mid- to higher-level education, a good income level, often married. On the other hand, the victims are between the ages of 11 and 15, in the case of girls, and between 13 and 18 for boys.
This type of "tourism" is regarded as a crime in many countries, but despite this it is a flourishing industry and precisely because it is "an industry" it is difficult to stop. But there is also a more radical motive to investigate within the "sex culture" of which I spoke earlier; there are political expressions that are the banners of ideas born from that "culture," and that mobilize as a real lobby.
ZENIT: What is the boundary between reality and false moralism?
Bertocchi: A great part of our post-modern societies already accepts or justifies the destruction of embryos inasmuch as it does not consider them human beings, trades in ovules and spermatozoids as if they were crackers, theorizes on masculinity and femininity as simple cultural labels, spreads pornography as a form of amusement and would like to make assisted suicide a noble choice.
By a kind of perversion of truth, today we are faced with an ethical confusion of such proportions that reality is lost in subjectivism. Thus we see that condemnation of the immoral behavior of the religious comes from the same cultural environment that is willing to accept all the arbitrariness of the individual. The reasons are of an ideological type, but also of an economic type, as demonstrated by those U.S. lawyers' practices that have earned billions of dollars, thanks to the free and easy use of pedophilia accusations.
ZENIT: How should one evaluate the line of zero tolerance adopted by Benedict XVI?
Bertocchi: The Holy Father's determination in wanting to bring this to light seems exemplary to me; he points out a path of transparency that is not only valid for the Church, but should be valid for all sectors of society that have had or have to do with this sad phenomenon.
In the 2005 meditations of the Via Crucis, the then Cardinal Ratzinger showed clearly the need to clean up within the Church, a desire that is not avenging, but rather for a real justice to make the Bride of Christ shine even more as "one, holy, catholic and apostolic." This "style" can be seen in all Benedict XVI's teaching, his recipe of purification goes in all directions: the hermeneutics of continuity, the extension of rationality, the example of the Curé d'Ars for the Year for Priests, the attention to the liturgy, zero tolerance against the scandal of pedophilia, etc. The problem might be to read his teachings by taking only what falls closest to one's own ideas, and not considering them in their totality.
ZENIT: How can the Catholic Church overcome the consternation and mistrust so widespread among the people?
Bertocchi: All of us Catholics are called to return to the foundations of the faith to be authentic witnesses of the Risen Lord or, as Luca Volonte says, "the awareness of the company of Christ must be clear," he who accompanies us daily. In his recent apostolic trip to Fatima, the Holy Father said that the Church suffers because of "internal" causes. He certainly was referring to the wounds caused by the cases of sexual abuse but I also believe in the need of an essential doctrinal clarity for a return to the foundations. Today, sadly, this clarity cannot be taken for granted and this also confuses people.
Hence, I am in agreement with the conclusions pointed out by Agnoli in the essay: prayer, recovery of the sense of the supernatural, effective service from the governance of the Church and, I add, a profound recovery of the sense of sin. "The real enemy to fear and to combat is sin, the spiritual evil that, at times, sadly also infects the members of the Church," said
Benedict XVI after the Regina Caeli on May 16.
Unfortunately, in many catecheses, the subject "sin" is increasingly out of fashion, displaced by much psychology and much sociology. However, to acknowledge ourselves as sinners is the way to receive God's mercy. Charity in truth -- there is no other way to give hope to the men of our time.
Pedophilia a Worldwide Issue, Not a Priest Problem - Founder of Protection Agency Laments Media Lobbies

http://www.zenit.org/article-30036?l=english

Rome, July 29, 2010

The founder of a children's protection organization laments that pedophilia only makes the news when it is linked to priests, which misses the point that it is a worldwide problem.
Father Fortunato Di Noto of the Meter association noted this deficiency in an interview with H2Onews.
Pedophilia is not just a crime but also a money machine, he explained, with an annual yield of €13 billion ($17 billion) and a victim toll of 200,000 abused children, increasingly even babies and toddlers.
And yet, Father Di Noto lamented, much of the press is scandalized only by pedophile priests and not by this phenomenon of enormous proportions. 
"The most striking thing is that while we have talked about pedophilia in the clergy, the global phenomenon of pedophilia has not been discussed," he noted. "And the global phenomenon of sexual abuse is before the eyes of all. What impresses me, and what in essence makes the difference, is that the newspapers, probably influenced much by communication, lobbyists, have spoken more of this than of the gravity of pedophilia itself, more than the seriousness of sexual exploitation of children, the seriousness of the sex tourism of children, the gravity of selling children and of the rape of children. "This is a blatant and visible demonstration of how certain press, moved by certain types of lobbying mentalities, sometimes communicate false, unverifiable, or exploitive information." 
The founder of Meter added that the growth of pedophilia on social networks is another element that calls for greater parent responsibility and attention. 
"The question is," he said, "why are there 180,000 children in Italy under the age of 13 who are enrolled on Facebook without authorization? And this means that there are 180,000 families who do not monitor the actions of these children."
On the Net: Video of interview: www.h2onews.org/english/1-Interviews/224446049-pedophilia-a-crime-that-still-goes-unnoticed.html

Forgotten Study: Abuse in School 100 Times Worse than by Priests

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/forgotten-study-abuse-in-school-100-times-worse-than-by-priests

By James Tillman and John Jalsevac, Washington, DC, April 1, 2010

In the last several weeks such a quantity of ink has been spilled in newspapers across the globe about the priestly sex abuse scandals, that a casual reader might be forgiven for thinking that Catholic priests are the worst and most common perpetrators of child sex abuse.

But according to Charol Shakeshaft, the researcher of a little-remembered 2004 study prepared for the U.S. Department of Education, "the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests."

After effectively disappearing from the radar, Shakeshaft’s study is now being revisited by commentators seeking to restore a sense of proportion to the mainstream coverage of the Church scandal.

According to the 2004 study “the most accurate data available at this time” indicates that “nearly 9.6 percent of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career.”

“Educator sexual misconduct is woefully under-studied,” writes the researcher. “We have scant data on incidence and even less on descriptions of predators and targets.  There are many questions that call for answers.”

In an article published on Monday, renowned Catholic commentator George Weigel referred to the Shakeshaft study, and observed that “The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague” in which Catholic priests constitute only a small minority of perpetrators.

While Weigel observes that the findings of Shakeshaft’s study do nothing to mitigate the harm caused by priestly abuse, or excuse the “clericalism” and “fideism” that led bishops to ignore the problem, they do point to a gross imbalance in the level of scrutiny given to it, throwing suspicion on the motives of the news outlets that are pouring their resources into digging up decades-old dirt on the Church.

“The narrative that has been constructed is often less about the protection of the young (for whom the Catholic Church is, by empirical measure, the safest environment for young people in America today) than it is about taking the Church down," he writes. 

Weigel observes that priestly sex abuse is “a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared,” and that in recent years the Church has gone to great lengths to punish and remove priestly predators and to protect children. The result of these measures is that “six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members.”

Despite these facts, however, “the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young.”

Outside of the Church, Shakeshaft is not alone in highlighting the largely unaddressed, and unpublicized problem of child sex abuse in schools. Sherryll Kraizer, executive director of the Denver-based Safe Child Program, told the Colorado Gazette in 2008 that school employees commonly ignore laws meant to prevent the sexual abuse of children.

“I see it regularly,” Kraizer said. “There are laws against failing to report, but the law is almost never enforced. Almost never.” “What typically happens is you’ll have a teacher who’s spending a little too much time in a room with one child with the door shut,” Kraizer explained. “Another teacher sees it and reports it to the principal. The principal calls the suspected teacher in and says ‘Don’t do that,’ instead of contacting child protective services.”

“Before you know it, the teacher is driving the student home. A whole series of events will unfold, known to other teachers and the principal, and nobody contacts child services before it’s out of control. You see this documented in records after it eventually ends up in court.”

In an editorial last week, The Gazette revisited the testimony of Kraizer in the context of the Church abuse scandal coverage, concluding that “the much larger crisis remains in our public schools today, where children are raped and groped every day in the United States.” “The media and others must maintain their watchful eye on the Catholic Church and other religious institutions,” wrote The Gazette, “But it’s no less tragic when a child gets abused at school.”

In 2004, shortly after the Shakeshaft study was released, Catholic League President William Donohue, who was unavailable for an interview for this story, asked, “Where is the media in all this?”

“Isn’t it news that the number of public school students who have been abused by a school employee is more than 100 times greater than the number of minors who have been abused by priests?” he asked.

“All those reporters, columnists, talking heads, attorneys general, D.A.’s, psychologists and victims groups who were so quick on the draw to get priests have a moral obligation to pursue this issue to the max.  If they don’t, they’re a fraud.”
Is the Catholic Church in that Time of Purification that Ratzinger Predicted?

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/editorial-is-the-catholic-church-in-that-time-of-purification-that-ratzinge

Editorial by John-Henry Westen

April 7, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com)

The near-constant battering of the Catholic Church during the past month over the sexual abuse scandal has most Catholics reeling and much of the media in a feeding frenzy, seeing the scandals as an opportunity to bring down the archenemy of the sexual revolution.  This latest cycle of the sexual abuse scandal is different from that which took place in Canada and Boston years ago.  It involves new and disastrous revelations daily and from all over Europe and North America, with sustained coverage in the media.

For over 35 years Pope Benedict XVI has predicted a smaller, more faithful church. The 1970 book Glaube und Zukunft, based on five lectures by then-Fr. Joseph Ratzinger given in 1969 at radio stations in Baviera and Hessen, is the first recorded mentioning of this prediction. 

In those lectures the future pope said, "From today's crisis, a Church will emerge tomorrow that will have lost a great deal. She will be small and, to a large extent, will have to start from the beginning. She will no longer be able to fill many of the buildings created in her period of great splendour. Because of the smaller number of her followers, she will lose many of her privileges in society."

In discussing the matter with my colleagues the consensus is that this crisis is definitely part of that long-predicted purification. Unfortunately, however, it comes in a very confusing package.  It would be easier to see truth in an obvious conflict between good and evil: where, for instance, some in the church were advocating for abortion or at least ‘choice,’ versus those who maintained the defense of the sanctity of human life. 

But the murkiness of this crisis has the influence of evil written all over it. 

The abuse is not exclusively tied to liberalism in the Church, such as was the case with former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland.  Weakland was a notorious liberal who, in addition to admitting to transferring priests with a history of sexual misconduct back into churches without alerting parishioners, admitted to homosexual encounters while serving as archbishop.  Weakland retired in 2002 after it was revealed he paid hundreds of thousands of church dollars to a former homosexual lover who threatened to publicly accuse Weakland of sexually assaulting him. 

But the ongoing and mindboggling revelations of abuse by Legion of Christ founder Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado show that this crisis touches even what seemed like an oasis of orthodoxy.

This crisis reminds me of Christ’s prophecy in Matthew 24:24 where he warns that times will come when ‘even the elect’ will be deceived.

It shakes the faith of many as even bishops are found to be guilty not only of horrendous cover-ups and unthinkable enabling by shuffling around abusive clergy, but also of sexual abuse and perverse activity themselves.

Today’s revelations about Norwegian Bishop Georg Muller are devastating.  Muller, 58, who resigned last year saying only he was unsuited to the work, now has admitted that the reason for his resignation was his sexual abuse of a 10-year-old choir boy 20 years ago.

In another devastating revelation this week, retired French Bishop Jacques Gaillot of Evreux in France said of his taking in a convicted Canadian pedophile priest in 1987, who later went on to abuse children in France: "back then, that's how the Church operated." 

But at the same time the media’s coverage on the scandal must be viewed with a very critical eye, as was seen in the recent attempts by the New York Times to unjustly smear Pope Benedict.

As Colleen Raezler of the Culture and Media Institute points out, the broadcast media relentlessly pursued their objective of smearing the Catholic Church during the holiest week of the year for Catholics.

“ABC, CBS and NBC featured 26 stories during Holy Week about Pope Benedict’s perceived role in the sex abuse scandal the Catholic Church is now facing,” she reported. “Only one story focused on the measures the church has adopted in recent years to prevent abuse. In 69 percent of the stories (18 out of 26) reporters used language that presumed the pope’s guilt. Only one made specific mention of the recent drop in the incidence of abuse allegations against the Catholic Church.”

While the media is now focused on the Catholic Church, this is an attack on all Christianity and Christian morality.  That is why Lutheran pastor John Stephenson has come out so strongly in defense of the pope.

Will the church survive the crisis? Believing Catholics say that it will, since Christ promised (Matthew 16:18) that the gates of Hell would not overcome it. But, as the pope predicted, it will likely be a smaller and purer church.

Many Catholics are ramping up their prayers for the church, and the pope.  The Knights of Columbus are encouraging all their members around the world to join in a special novena for Pope Benedict XVI, beginning Divine Mercy Sunday, April 11, and concluding Monday, April 19, the fifth anniversary of the Pope Benedict’s election in 2005.

Canadian Catholic author Michael O’Brien, a good friend of mine, spoke with me today about the crisis. Michael warns of where he sees things going from a spiritual vantage point. And while his is a stark vision, it remains hopeful.

The famed author of the prophetic novel Father Elijah said: “It has been ever thus with the Church. Satan sifts us like wheat.”

“In a generation (if we should be granted that much more time in history), the aging self-deceived liberalism of the Churches in the West will be gone, as dead wood that has dropped from the tree. At the same time, the internal rot that has disguised itself as orthodoxy will have been burned away by trial and tribulation, indeed by persecution.”