I am all in favour of Equality Now's campaign through the United Nations for a global end to marriages before the age of 18.
The Catholic Church makes it a specific canonical offence for clerics or Religious to engage in sexual acts with persons under the age of 18, even if the age of consent in the territory in question is lower. Hundreds of priests who engaged in such acts were laicised by Pope Benedict XVI.
In Italy, the age is consent is 14. But in the Vatican City State, the age of consent is 18, a full four years higher. And the four years between 14 and 18 are four very full years indeed.
The Holy See was recently lambasted by and before the United Nations over the sexual abuse of children, almost without exception adolescent boys engaging in consensual homosexual acts.
However, the Church's mishandling of these matters in former decades does at least contrast favourably with, say, Britain in the 1970s. Sexual acts between adults of either sex and adolescents of either sex were then illegal but very common, both of which they still are.
But unlike today, they were wholly respectable, with a universal expectation that the laws against them would very soon be repealed, with a huge volume of academic literature actively encouraging them, and with the mass celebration of them in both high and popular culture, something of which there is still quite a lot.
No stigma attached to their practitioners at any economic, social, cultural or political level. Quite the reverse, in fact.
At least, by moving the guilty priests around, the Church acknowledged that there was a problem. That was a very great deal more than many Social Services Departments, secular state schools, or non-Catholic commercial schools ever managed.
Even now, no jurisdiction has any right to comment, either on the Catholic Church, or, more narrowly, on the Vatican City State, if that jurisdiction itself has an age of consent lower than 18.
For example, the United Kingdom.
For goodness sake, 18?
ReplyDeleteWe'd have to arrest 90% of the country.
Did you really just say the mass rape of children by priests was "almost without exception consensual"?
ReplyDeleteAre you sick?
These acts were, almost without exception, consensual and between men and teenage boys. That was what happened.
ReplyDeleteIt is reprehensible enough in itself. But that is what it is.
Don't criticise Catholic priests for it unless you would say exactly the same about anybody else.
They were not always teenage (plainly you haven't read about the Catholic orphanages and schools). And the child abuse victims were under the age of consent.
ReplyDeleteThey were under 18, yes.
ReplyDeleteThis was about teenage boys experimenting homosexually with men who knew better.
All examples of that deserve equal abomination of the older parties.