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

Why Attack the Pope?

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2010/why-attack-the-pope

By Richard Bastien, April 5, 2010

Sexual abuse is deplorable, no matter where it occurs. But one wonders: Why the near hysteria regarding sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, most of which occurred decades ago, from a society that celebrates the lack of constraints against almost every form of sexual activity, no matter how degraded? Is there any other instance of sexual abuse that generates similar outrage in the media? One answer might be that the Church is held to a higher standard because it professes a higher standard. But there is a deeper reason for the media attack that has nothing to do with moral outrage.

 

One of the stark features of modernity is the conflict between two very different views of morality: moral relativism versus the natural law. The difference between these views resides in the way they draw a line between right and wrong.

Moral relativism says the line is set uniquely according to one’s estimation of the good and bad intentions or consequences of an act. Natural law says the line is set according to three criteria: the nature of the act itself, the intentions of the person, and the context of the act. In other words, the follower of natural law holds that a bad act — for instance, fornication — cannot be made good by good intentions (affection) or by its consequences (physical relief or fulfilment).

At the most basic level, what separates the two sides is the ultimate meaning of life. One believes that that meaning is immanent: It is essentially about having fun. You might say it has its own trinitarian god: Food, Fantasy, and Fornication. The other side believes that the purpose of life is transcendent: to know, love, and serve God. The morality of natural law seeks to maintain our humanity as traditionally understood through the Judeo-Christian heritage. Moral relativism seeks its complete re-engineering. For the former, freedom means freedom to do what is objectively right. For the latter, it means freedom to define what is right.

While this may seem abstract and of interest mainly to academics and intellectuals, it has implications that spill out into the public square, principally in the form of a debate about the proper attitude toward sex.

The traditional concept of sex, rooted in the sexual revolution initiated 3,000 years ago by Judaism and later reinforced by Christianity, asserts that sex is meant to bond man and woman and to be open to new life. To be truly human, sex must be part and parcel of a person-to-person relationship based on a lifelong commitment open to life.

Moral relativists uphold the recreational view of sex — perhaps best characterized as the Playboy view — emanating from the sexual revolution of the 1960s. It postulates that sex is essentially a pleasure game, with orgasm as the goal and the partner as the means to achieve it. It admits of no God and no personal conscience and assumes we are driven by instincts we can’t control. Attempts at self-control may even be viewed as unhealthy.

The recreational view of sex, propagated often by the media and academia, is now dominant, which explains a good deal of the sea change that has taken place over the past half century in Western society: the prevalence of common-law partnerships over marriage, the high rate of divorce, the widespread practice of contraception and abortion, the legitimization of gay lifestyles, and, coming soon, the acceptance of polygamy and bestiality.

As for the traditional view of sex, it has been forced into beating a retreat. Mainstream Protestant churches have long abandoned it and are now competing among themselves to determine which is most liberal. The Roman Catholic Church stands virtually alone in defending traditional sexual morality and is constantly mocked for doing so — even by some of its own laity and clergy.

The one institution within the Church that has been unflinching in its resistance to this onslaught is the papacy. It stands as a rock against the winds of sexual liberalism. This is precisely what makes it the favorite target of moral relativists: It won’t yield to the pressures to usher in a new age liberated from the old Judeo-Christian morality, thus preventing them from claiming total victory in the culture wars of the 21st century.

This helps explain why the mainstream media are constantly attacking Pope Benedict XVI. The first attack took place in September 2006 when, in Regensburg, his appeal for a reasoned debate on freedom of conscience was depicted as a rant against Muslims. The second came a little over a year ago, when he was raked over the coals for saying that recourse to condoms was worsening the AIDS crisis in Africa. In the latest attack, the denunciations of sexual abuse are meant to tarnish his moral integrity.

The media are going for the jugular because they now understand that the Catholic Church will never water down its sexual morality, and that the only way to neutralize its moral influence is to discredit its highest authority. Where mockery will not do the trick, try defamation and distortion.
Should I stay or should I go? Clerical-abuse scandal

http://www.churchofsaintann.org/pastorsportion/Should%20I%20Stay.pdf

http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/14543

Timothy Radcliffe O.P., April 11, 2010

As the scandal of child sexual abuse and its cover-up swirls around the Church, some Catholics are considering their options as regards their very membership of the institution. Here a former Master of the Dominicans explains why the Church is stuck with him, whatever happens

Fresh revelations of sexual abuse by priests in Germany and Italy have provoked a tide of anger and disgust. I have received emails from people all around Europe asking how can they possibly remain in the Church. I was even sent a form with which to renounce my membership of the Church. Why stay?

First of all, why go? Some people feel that they can no longer remain associated with an institution that is so corrupt and dangerous for children. The suffering of so many children is indeed horrific. They must be our first concern. Nothing that I will write is intended in any way to lessen our horror at the evil of sexual abuse. But the statistics for the US, from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2004, suggest that Catholic clergy do not offend more than the married clergy of other Churches.
Some surveys even give a lower level of offence for Catholic priests. They are less likely to offend than lay school teachers, and perhaps half as likely as the general population. Celibacy does not push people to abuse children. It is simply untrue to imagine that leaving the Church for another denomination would make one’s children safer.  We must face the terrible fact that the abuse of children is widespread in every part of society. To make the Church the scapegoat would be a cover-up.
But what about the cover-up within the Church? Have not our bishops been shockingly irresponsible in moving offenders around, not reporting them to the police and so perpetuating the abuse? Yes, sometimes. But the great majority of these cases go back to the 1960s and 1970s, when bishops often regarded sexual abuse as a sin rather than also a pathological condition, and when lawyers and psychologists often reassured them that it was safe to reassign priests after treatment. It is unjust to project backwards an awareness of the nature and seriousness of sexual abuse which simply did not exist then. It was only the rise of feminism in the late 1970s which, by shedding light on the violence of some men against women, alerted us to the terrible damage done to vulnerable children.
But what about the Vatican? Pope Benedict has taken a strong line in tackling this issue as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) and since becoming Pope. Now the finger is pointed at him. It appears that some cases reported to the CDF under his watch were not dealt with. Isn’t the Pope’s credibility undermined? There are demonstrators in front of St Peter’s calling for his resignation. I am morally certain that he bears no blame here.
It is generally imagined that the Vatican is a vast and efficient organisation. In fact it is tiny. The CDF only employs 45 people, dealing with doctrinal and disciplinary issues for a Church which has 1.3 billion members, 17 per cent of the world’s population, and some 400,000 priests. When I dealt with the CDF as Master of the Dominican Order, it was obvious that they were struggling to cope. Documents slipped through the cracks. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger lamented to me that the staff was simply too small for the job.
People are furious with the Vatican’s failure to open up its files and offer a clear explanation of what happened. Why is it so secretive? Angry and hurt Catholics feel a right to transparent government. I agree. But we must, in justice, understand why the Vatican is so self-protective. There were more martyrs in the twentieth century than in all the previous centuries combined. Bishops and priests, Religious and laity were assassinated in Western Europe, in Soviet countries, in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Many Catholics still suffer imprisonment and death for their faith. Of course, the Vatican tends to stress confidentiality; this has been necessary to protect the Church from people who wish to destroy her. So it is understandable that the Vatican reacts aggressively to demands for transparency and will read legitimate requests for openness as a form of persecution. And some people in the media do, without any doubt, wish to damage the credibility of the Church.
But we owe a debt of gratitude to the press for its insistence that the Church face its failures. If it had not been for the media, then this shameful abuse might have remained unaddressed.
Confidentiality is also a consequence of the Church’s insistence on the right of everyone accused to keep their good name until they are proved to be guilty. This is very hard for our society to understand, whose media destroy people’s reputations without a thought.
Why go? If it is to find a safer haven, a less corrupt Church, then I think that you will be disappointed. I too long for more transparent government, more open debate, but the Church’s secrecy is understandable, and sometimes necessary. To understand is not always to condone, but necessary if we are to act justly.
Why stay? I must lay my cards on the table; even if the Church were obviously worse than other Churches, I still would not go. I am not a Catholic because our Church is the best, or even because I like Catholicism. I do love much about my Church but there are aspects of it which I dislike. I am not a Catholic because of a consumer option for an ecclesiastical Waitrose rather than Tesco, but because I believe that it embodies something which is essential to the Christian witness to the Resurrection, visible unity.
When Jesus died, his community fell apart. He had been betrayed, denied, and most of his disciples fled. It was chiefly the women who accompanied him to the end. On Easter Day, he appeared to the disciples. This was more than the physical resuscitation of a dead corpse.
In him God triumphed over all that destroys community: sin, cowardice, lies, misunderstanding, suffering and death. The Resurrection was made visible to the world in the astonishing sight of a community reborn. These cowards and deniers were gathered together again. They were not a reputable bunch, and shamefaced at what they had done, but once again they were one. The unity of the Church is a sign that all the forces that fragment and scatter are defeated in Christ.
All Christians are one in the Body of Christ. I have deepest respect and affection for Christians from other Churches who nurture and inspire me. But this unity in Christ needs some visible embodiment. Christianity is not a vague spirituality but a religion of incarnation, in which the deepest truths take the physical and sometimes institutional form. Historically this unity has found its focus in Peter, the Rock in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and the shepherd of the flock in John’s gospel.
From the beginning and throughout history, Peter has often been a wobbly rock, a source of scandal, corrupt, and yet this is the one – and his successors – whose task is to hold us together so that we may witness to Christ’s defeat on Easter Day of sin’s power to divide. And so the Church is stuck with me whatever happens. We may be embarrassed to admit that we are Catholics, but Jesus kept shameful company from the beginning.
The Definitive Paper Showing Homosexuality at Root of the Sex Abuse Crisis

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/the-definitive-paper-showing-homosexuality-at-root-of-the-sex-abuse-crisis

By John-Henry Westen, April 19, 2010

A must-read paper produced by Human Life International Research Director Brian Clowes has closed the book on the question of whether homosexuality in the priesthood is a root cause of the clerical sexual abuse crisis.  Citing numerous research studies, Clowes demonstrates that homosexuality is strongly linked to sexual abuse of minors, and that celibacy is definitely not a cause of pedophilia.

Clowes cites studies, including:

- Homosexual Alfred Kinsey, the USA’s preeminent sexual researcher, found in 1948 that 37 percent of all male homosexuals admitted to having sex with children under 17 years old.

- A recent study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that "The best epidemiological evidence indicates that only 2.4% of men attracted to adults prefer men.  In contrast, around 25-40% of men attracted to children prefer boys.  Thus, the rate of homosexual attraction is 6-20 times higher among pedophiles."

- A study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that, "Pedophilia appears to have a greater than chance association with two other statistically infrequent phenomena.  The first of these is homosexuality ... Recent surveys estimate the prevalence of homosexuality, among men attracted to adults, in the neighborhood of 2%.  In contrast, the prevalence of homosexuality among pedophiles may be as high as 30-40%."

- A study in the Journal of Sex Research noted that "... the proportion of sex offenders against male children among homosexual men is substantially larger than the proportion of sex offenders against female children among heterosexual men ... the development of pedophilia is more closely linked with homosexuality than with heterosexuality."

- A study of 229 convicted child molesters published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that “eighty-six percent of [sexual] offenders against males described themselves as homosexual or bisexual.”

For the references for these findings please see Clowes full paper here.
Five Myths about the Catholic Sexual Abuse Scandal

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/16/AR2010041602026.html

By David Gibson, April 18, 2010

VATICAN CITY -- As Benedict XVI prepares to mark the fifth anniversary of his election as pope here on Monday, he is beset by devastating reports about the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests -- and about his own role in the crisis. The reports have prompted sharp condemnations of the pontiff as well as a backlash of media criticism from papal defenders in the Vatican and around the world. Amid the firestorm, myths have emerged that only complicate the search for truth, healing and accountability.
1. Pope Benedict is the primary culprit in the cover-up of the abuse scandal.

Between 1981 and 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's office for doctrinal orthodoxy. A few abuse cases (some from the United States) came before him, and the evidence shows that he did not move with any urgency to defrock priests. In 2001, as the number of cases coming to light worldwide increased, Ratzinger convinced Pope John Paul II to let his office have jurisdiction over all of them. Though the Vatican says church confidentiality did not preclude bishops from reporting crimes to civil authorities, some see Ratzinger's move as an attempt to keep the cases secret.

Nonetheless, there is just one case so far that can be traced directly to Ratzinger's tenure as a bishop, when he was head of the archdiocese of Munich in his native Germany. In that 1980 case, Ratzinger allowed a child abuser into his diocese for psychiatric treatment, and the priest was reassigned to a parish where he went on to abuse more children. It's unclear whether Ratzinger personally signed off on the assignment, but he seems to have acted more or less like most bishops at the time -- giving little oversight to the abuser and doing nothing to remove him from the priesthood. Alas, there is plenty of blame to go around for the church's passivity.

As pope, Benedict has blamed the media for exaggerating the scandals, yet he has moved more aggressively against abusers than John Paul II, his predecessor, who tried to stop defrocking priests altogether and who ignored evidence of the terrible abuses by the late Marcial Maciel Degollado, a well-known Mexican priest who founded the Legionaries of Christ, a secretive order that is under Vatican investigation.

During the 2000s, as Ratzinger came to realize the scope of the abuse, he expedited the defrocking of abusive priests and reopened the Maciel case, which had been closed under John Paul. "We realize that it's necessary to repent," Benedict said in a homily on Thursday. He has still has not punished bishops, however, with the same rigor with which he has targeted abusers.


2. Gay priests are to blame.
Some defenders of the Catholic Church's response to the abuse crisis say that homosexual priests are responsible for the majority of abuses, in part because more than 80 percent of the victims are male. They argue that true pedophiles -- adults who are pathologically attracted to pre-pubescent children -- constitute a small minority of offenders. Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone repeated this gay-pedophile link on Wednesday, and such reasoning was partially behind a 2005 Vatican policy barring gays from seminaries.

Such assertions have numerous flaws. For one thing, research shows that gay men are no more likely to molest children than straight men. (And celibacy doesn't seem to be a determining factor, either.) Yes, 80 percent of the victims were male, but many offenders assaulted children of both sexes. Maciel abused boys and fathered children with several women. Moreover, the abusers had access to boys; an adult male couldn't go on overnight trips with girls or take them away unchaperoned.

Finally, while critics of gay clerics fret that homosexuals dominate the priesthood and endanger children, in fact the ostensible increase in gay priests in recent years has coincided with a sharp decrease in reports of child abuse by clergy.

3. Sexual abuse is more pervasive in the Catholic Church than in other institutions.

Sexual abuse of minors is not the province of the Catholic Church alone. About 4 percent of priests committed an act of sexual abuse on a minor between 1950 and 2002, according to a study being conducted by John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. That is roughly consistent with data on many similar professions.

An extensive 2007 investigation by the Associated Press showed that sexual abuse of children in U.S. schools was "widespread," and most of it was never reported or punished. And in Portland, Ore., last week, a jury reached a $1.4 million verdict against the Boy Scouts of America in a trial that showed that since the 1920s, Scouts officials kept "perversion files" on suspected abusers but kept them secret.

"We don't see the Catholic Church as a hotbed of this or a place that has a bigger problem than anyone else," Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, told Newsweek. "I can tell you without hesitation that we have seen cases in many religious settings, from traveling evangelists to mainstream ministers to rabbis and others."

Part of the issue is that the Catholic Church is so tightly organized and keeps such meticulous records -- many of which have come to light voluntarily or through court orders -- that it can yield a fairly reliable portrait of its personnel and abuse over the decades. Other institutions, and most other religions, are more decentralized and harder to analyze or prosecute.

Still, it is hardly good news that the church appears to be no different from most other institutions in its incidence of abuse. Shouldn't the Catholic Church and other religious institutions hold to a higher standard?

4. Media outlets are biased against the Catholic Church.

While the Vatican and the pope's champions argue -- often in conspiratorial tones -- that the media is biased against the church, the truth is quite the opposite.

The church and the pope do receive major media attention, and with reason. The pope is a world leader as well as the temporal head of one of the world's most storied religious traditions. There are more than 1.1 billion Catholics on the planet, and the Catholic Church is the largest denomination in the United States, with more than 65 million baptized members. In the media, holidays such as Christmas and Easter tend to be dominated by Catholic images.

The pope also makes news with his pronouncements on a range of topics, and his travels are media events. Pope John Paul II's death and funeral in April 2005 produced wall-to-wall coverage for weeks, generating some of the most favorable press the church has ever had.

The annual survey of religion in the news conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showed that in 2008 -- the year Benedict traveled to Washington and New York -- coverage of the pope and of the Catholic Church accounted for more than half of all news stories about religion, and the majority were positive or explanatory. You don't hear the church complaining about this kind of attention.
5. The crisis will compel U.S. Catholics to leave the church.

When the initial revelations of widespread sexual abuse by clergy emerged in 2002, many believed that Catholics would abandon the church en masse, or at least send the institution toward insolvency by withholding donations. But then, as now, American Catholics turned out to be an unpredictable lot. Though critical of the bishops and the Vatican, Catholics tend to love their local parishes and priests. And even if they don't heed all church mandates, they don't easily shed all the cultural and sacramental markers of their faith.

A 2007 Pew survey of the religious landscape in America found that among Catholics who had left the church, the abuse crisis ranked low on the list of reasons -- well behind church teachings on homosexuality, the role of women, abortion and contraception. And a 2008 poll by Georgetown University's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate showed that even the bishops had enjoyed a rebound in approval, with satisfaction with the hierarchy growing from 58 percent in 2004 to 72 percent in 2008.

Still, Catholic leaders can't be complacent. Some 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics, and without immigrants, the number of American Catholics would be falling, not growing slightly. In a competitive marketplace, it's not smart to put your customers' loyalty to such a test.

David Gibson is the author of "The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and his Battle with the Modern World." He covers religion for PoliticsDaily.com.