Saturday, April 20, 2019

Is Benedict correct in blaming 1960s for abuse crisis?

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has blamed the 1960s as the decade at the root of the clerical sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.

In an essay he has written for Klerusblatt he writes: "It could be said that in the 20 years from 1960 to 1980, the previously normative standards regarding sexuality collapsed entirely, and a new normalcy arose that has by now been the subject of laborious attempts at distruption."

Nothing in life is that simple and certainly nothing in areas of  sexuality, celibacy, clerical paedophelia is at all that simple.

1920, 1922, 1922, the years of birth of three priests, all three alledged notorious paedophiles.

Dates picked with little or no effort.

Benedict also blames a breakdown in 'preparation for priestly ministry in seminaries'.

Preparation for priesthood cannot have been that great in the 1940s and indeed, earlier.

What happens when alleged notorious paedophiles, now deceased, were vocation directors?

Material for an interesting tale.

3 comments:

Michael said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Póló said...

Morgan Costello, Ireland's worst abusing priest, was born c.1933.

Link

Michael said...

Michael
Typos corrected from earlier message.
Michael

CORRECTED TEXT BEGINS
I regard this as a very sad intervention, the ramblings of an old man reflective of a dying church who is at a loss to find the tools to place the blame where it belongs.
Paedophilia did not arise as a social norm. It came about in no small part in clerical circles because of the dreadful attitudes to human sexuality that the church continues to propagate instead of learning from the psychological, biological, and social sciences. This is apparent across several different domains, but was most particularly evident in the Humanae Vitae crisis.
Benedict’s letter is a classic example of group think, where he is exposed only to a tiny number of voices, all of whom believe that they alone have the sole grasp of reality and that everybody else is wrong. Sadly, it reflects the mindset of a very powerful minority within the church, who are hellbent on destroying the pontificate of Pope Francis and returning the church to its pre Vatican II darkness under the guise of moral certitude.

CORRECTED TEXT ENDS

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