Thursday, August 30, 2018

Devastating report on Benedictine schools

In an article in The Tablet of August 18 Catherine Pepinster writes on a report into sexual abuse at two Benedictine schools, Ampelforth and Downside.

In the piece, Richard Scorer, who is a solicitor and has worked for many years on abuse cases and represented several survivors, is quoted.

He believes that celibacy is a problem: “I’ve been struck by psychological studies that suggest that once you have crossed the boundary of celibacy, a person does not have the understanding of how to behave.

A theologian suggested the problem went further than celibacy; there was a problem with Catholic theology on sex. “These monks had been led to believe that only sexual intercourse is sex, and so long as they refrained from that, it wasn’t a sin. So you have all kinds of abuse, but they still avoid heterosexual intercourse. The church needs to revisit what it teaches."

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