Facts and Logic

Peter Hitchens writes:

Nothing – especially facts and logic – seems to be able to stop the ill-informed frenzy of rage against the Roman Catholic Church (to which I don’t belong). A few thoughts for those who are taken in by this.

First, what do they think happened to small boys and girls in the pre-Christian world, when the molesting of the young by the old was considered normal? Haven’t they also noticed that one of the main campaigns of the sexual liberation front is the reduction of the age of consent? For whose benefit is this? Anyone would think the Vatican told its priests to be paedophiles when in truth the opposite is the case.

Second, the gripping blog written by a social worker calling himself Winston Smith records the result of mass abuse of children by the liberal, secular state in ‘care homes’. In this case, the abuse takes the form of feeble neglect. It receives innocent children betrayed by their parents (thanks to the relaxed morals of liberal Britain) and turns them into feral monsters doomed to lives of misery, violence, drugs and crime. Who speaks out against it? Not the Left. [Speak for yourself.]

The anti-Pope campaigners must work out what they really care about. Are they, as they claim, trying to help the children? Or is this all just a pretext to attack one of the last remaining strongholds of Christianity?

Of course, we all know the answer to that one.

Furthermore, wicked though the neglect of children is, in many a Social Services Department such as ran the homes in which, at the same time as the Church was hushing up sex between men and teenage boys on the part of a small number of priests - and thus, however imperfectly, indicating disapproval of it - such behaviour was absolutely endemic, with major figures in that world publishing academic studies, used for many years in the training of social workers, which presented it as positively beneficial to both parties and therefore actively to be encouraged.