Fallen Under The Influence

Stuart Reid writes:

I used to hide in the garden shed and go into denial whenever there was a sex abuse scandal in the Church, or any other scandal for that matter, but not any longer. These days I feel pretty damned aggrieved. The constant drip of grubby revelations tests my loyalty to the Church. How dare these inadequate men hold us all up to ridicule, obloquy and contempt?

On the other hand, it never does any harm to bring a sense of proportion to bear on these things. Let us not be manipulated by the newspapers, which in the past week have got a bit ahead of themselves, not least by trying, disgracefully, to implicate the Pope in the German scandal. Things are bad, but not as bad as they are sometimes made to appear. Last week the New York Times seemed less than impartial, for example, when it carried a couple of stories about the "new" clerical sex scandals - one dealing with an incident that occurred 40 years ago in Austria, and another that occurred 31 years ago in Germany - but failed to carry a report of the conviction in the same week of Rabbi Baruch Lebovits on eight counts of sexually abusing a Brooklyn boy. No sex, please, unless it's Catholic.

And yet it would be wrong to see a Satanic conspiracy in the media to undermine Christ and His Church. Journalists no longer have the time to engage in a conspiracies; they scarcely have time to go to the pub. The truth is that sex sells newspapers, and never more so than when it is "illicit sex" and is discovered to exist in an institution that claims Divine mandate and sets itself up as the world teacher in matters of sexual morality.

What a mess. How are we, the newly empowered laity, supposed to respond to our atheist and agnostic friends, who already think that the Church's rules are barmy and who now touch the sides of their noses when the subject of sexual morality and the Roman Catholic Church is raised?

An apologetic smile won't get us far, but neither will belligerence. Still, facts and figures have their place in discussions such as these. It is worth recalling that in September last year Archbishop Silvano Maria Tomasi, Permanent Observer of the Holy See in Geneva, declared that in the last 50 years somewhere between 1.5 per cent and five per cent of the Catholic clergy has been involved in sexual abuse cases. These figures, he said, were comparable with those of other groups and denominations. It is not a problem unique to the Catholic Church, in other words.

Nor were the so-called "cover-ups" necessarily as fraudulent and cynical as the narrative now suggests. Some were honest, if misguided, attempts to deal with these matters though the confessional, the retreat house and the psychiatrist's couch; to combine justice and mercy.

Perhaps also we are too squeamish these days. Perhaps we judge people too harshly. Perhaps we are unwilling to forgive. That is the case with poor Jon Venables, and perhaps it is the case with the so-called "paedophiles", too, very few of whom were in fact paedos. The report commissioned by the US bishops into the American sex abuse scandal - in which about four per cent of priests in a 50-year period were implicated - found that the majority of the victims were post-pubescent adolescents, with a small percentage of pre-pubescent children.

The problem increased in the United States in the 1960s and the 1970s, in the years immediately following the Second Vatican Council. It is very boring to blame Vatican II and the Sixties in general for all our ills, but there can be little doubt that a small minority of priests started to get in touch with their feelings at a time when lay boys and girls were enjoying (or being destroyed by) sex, drugs and rock and roll.

You can get some idea of how things were in those days by what the former Bishop of Palm Beach said in March 2002 after acknowledging impropriety with a 15-year-old boy in 1977. In a statement he put out to mark his resignation he said that he had fallen under the influence of the "sexologists" Masters and Johnson, and added, apparently by way of mitigation, that he had made "wonderful Jewish friends" and "wonderful friends in the Muslim community". Poor man. He had a strange idea of what a bishop is for, and it is safe to say that no bishop in 1957 would have been capable of thinking or speaking as he did.

No, you can't lay all the blame on the Sixties for everything that is wrong today, but could it be that the Church is in its present state - with discord, anger, backbiting, paranoia, calumny, and ongoing sex scandals - because of the revolution that began 50 years ago? Yes, it could. But we have more hope now than we have had for perhaps 50 years. Thank God for Benedict XVI.