Another Point Here

Peter Hitchens writes:

Do they really want [the Catholic Church] gone, including all its many charitable activities, its educational institutions, its provision of help and comfort at the end of life, its uncompromising stand on many moral issues (whoops, perhaps that's what they don't like)?

And what of its artistic, musical and architectural heritage? How will that survive if the church that nurtured and sustained them is gone?

But there's another point here.

Let's go through the case as it stands in general.

Did Roman Catholic priests engage in abuse of children? Yes.

Were these crimes sometimes covered up? Yes.

Does the Church admit this? Yes.

Does anything in Roman Catholic theology or belief mandate or excuse such behaviour? No.

Is the RC Church the only institution in which such abuse has taken place? No.

Have the transgressors been punished and have steps been taken to prevent them having renewed opportunities to transgress? Yes, though not as swiftly as it should have been, some are now beyond the reach of the law, or dead.

Has the Church admitted that it was at fault? Yes, unequivocally and repeatedly.

Have steps been taken to prevent a repetition? Yes.

Has the current Pope in any way condoned the crimes? No.

Has he repeatedly and explicitly condemned them and those who failed to act against them? Yes.

So what I want to know, in detail, is what those who now call for the prosecution of the Pope specifically allege against him?

Then we can debate the strength of these charges.

But my point about pre-Christian societies and what we now call paedophilia remains. Some people will actively wish to misunderstand me here, so forgive me if I make this point in a rather heavy-handed way.

In some pre-Christian societies, activities which now rightly fill us with nauseated disgust, particularly the sexual exploitation of pubescent boys by older men, were once regarded as normal and acceptable. It was Christian sexual morality, with its belief that sexual acts should be confined to lifelong marriage between a man and a woman, which led to their being first made unacceptable and then made illegal. That morality has largely been discarded for heterosexual acts and our continuing taboos survive mainly because of public opinion (though as anyone over 50 can attest, public opinion on sexual matters can change immensely in a very short time).

If this is so, there appears to be no 'universal' instinctively-discoverable code of sexual ethics (independent of Christianity) which mandates that paedophilia is wrong. In which case, what precisely is the moral basis on which the atheist critics of the church found their ferocious disapproval of this activity, while they take a pretty much Kinseyist anything-goes attitude to almost all other sorts of sex? I'm not saying they don't have such a basis. I just would like to know exactly what it is. I have no doubt that 'consent' will play a major part in their answer. Yet this contains problems of its own. Are those who consent really capable of giving it? How old does someone have to be, to be able to make such a momentous decision free of pressure? It's a murky area.

For as I also pointed out, the radical materialist left has been active for decades in sweeping away almost all restraints upon sexual behaviour - in minimising the importance of marriage for heterosexuals, in separating sexual acts from their natural consequences with powerful drugs and easy abortion, and in lowering the age of consent, especially for homosexual acts. Some want it lower still. Even where the age of consent laws have blatantly been broken, the authorities are often highly reluctant to prosecute, so making the law a dead letter.

Meanwhile, what of all the other places where sexual abuse of the young takes place? Does anyone have any figures on how common sex abuse by priests is, as compared (for instance, to pluck some samples of other potentially risky occupations and relationships out of the air) to youth workers, scoutmasters, secular school teachers, sports coaches, stepfathers in marriage-free households, stepbrothers in similar situations, etc etc? Is our concentration on the undoubted misdeeds of the RC church proportionate?

Once we have sorted these matters out, we can decide if this is really a campaign on behalf of the victims of disgusting priests, or a campaign against the Roman Church, which some would like to vanish.