Note that Theodore McCarrick's alleged victim was 16. But even had he been three years younger than that, Catholic priests are the only people who would receive any social or legal sanction for having sex with teenage boys.
For example, imagine that such a stricture were to be applied to the Anglo-American prestige media. It would as ruinous as an enforcement of the law against cocaine would be. Of course, that is why there will never be either.
More than 10 years ago, it might have been 15 or even slightly more, I was told that if the activities of Cardinal McCarrick ever became public knowledge, "then the dominoes really would start to fall." The dominoes really are starting to fall.
He had been a priest since 1958. How you howled on here when I stated matter-of-factly that while of course 50 per cent or slightly more of Catholic priests in the West were homosexual today, that was also the case in the 1950s, or the 1850s, or the 1750s, and on back, so that the whole thing had always been the stuff of popular humour in Catholic countries.
None of that has anything to do with the morality or otherwise of acts, just as the fact that the Latin Church made a calculated choice in favour of this by superseding its previous practice of normatively married priests has nothing to do with the merits of that calculation or of that choice.
This is not a doctrinal question (unlike, say, the absolute impossibility of the ordination of women), and the pastoral arguments in favour of a normatively celibate Priesthood remain very strong indeed. Such a Priesthood will, however, be at least 50 per cent homosexual, just as it always has been.
But you have always known all of this. It is just that you can no longer pretend that you did not.
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