Mercatornet recently posted an interview with Fr. Giovanni Cucci, S.J., who, along with Fr. Hans Zollner, S.J., is the author of ŒChiesa e pedofilia. Una ferita aperta. Un approccio psicologico-pastorale (The Church and Paedophilia. An Open Wound. A Pastoral-Psychological Approach) Milan, Ancora, 2010.
Obviously, the phenomenon of pedophilia is complex. And just as complex are the reasons why the bishops and others in positions of responsibility in the Catholic Church failed to do anything, and even protected those guilty of sexual abuse.
That said, Fr. Gucci makes an important point about the way in which Western culture has celebrated sexual perversions in recent decades.
As Fr. Gucci observes:
Rarely in newspapers in recent months has it been possible to find anything that goes beyond a timely denunciation, to offer a broad reflection on this problem, investigating its causes, prevention possibilities, and also offering appropriate therapeutic proposals. On this front, there is an almost complete lack of action, not just in terms of opinions, statements, interviews, but also when it comes to publicising this issue.
One reason for this deficiency, in our view, is that the topic of deviance and perversion has become increasingly marginal within psychiatric and psychological research, which undoubtedly makes it difficult to operate in a manner that is equal to the seriousness of the problem. To this deficiency must be added a curious ambiguity: in our culture, while it rightly stigmatizes these acts, it forgets that in the past, society has not only tolerated them but also publicly encouraged them.
The cultural and political climate of the 70s and 80s repeatedly tried to publicly justify paedophilia, without encountering opposition or criticism.
In 1998, the Italian Radical Party published a document entitled:
‘Paedophilia and the Internet: old obsessions and new crusades’, in which, among other things, it stated: “In a state of law, to be a paedophile, to proclaim to be one or to even to support its legitimacy, cannot be considered a crime; paedophilia, like any other sexual preference, becomes a crime at the moment it harms another person.”
The same happened in Germany also now in the news. In 1999, the Humanistische Union (HU) of Berlin fought to permit general pornography and all ³consensual² sexual acts, including with minors. Looking at more recent news, the official birth of a legalized paedophile party, formed in Holland in 2006, arouses not a little astonishment.
All that has happened, therefore, can be put into a radically broader cultural context, one in which there is often uncritical acceptance, approval of transgressions and perversions as manifestations of freedom and spontaneity. It’s a culture which takes a totally negative view of values and the moral law.
Needless to say, the general atmosphere of sexual license in no way excuses the abuse perpetrated by priests, nor the complicity and negligence of church officials in positions of responsibility. But Fr. Gucci’s observations about the larger Western romance with perversion helps us understand an aspect of the scandals rocking the Church. We’re a culture in love with transgression, and it creates an atmosphere that makes moral restraint more difficult.
July 21st, 2010 | 5:57 pm
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July 21st, 2010 | 8:48 pm
This is no time to try to finesse this issue. The Church is guilty of grave crimes against children. Harsh punishments are called for, not subtle arguments or excuses. I myself will never understand the cover-up of these crimes. Anyone out there got an explanation?
July 21st, 2010 | 11:24 pm
“Anyone out there got an explanation?”
The best thing that fits for me is that this is a full-blown sexual addiction, and the occasional loyal parishioners and cover-up bishops are the faithful codependents. Just as sex predators groom parents and kids, they also seek out allies and groom these people, too.
Sick, incoherent, and illogical, but we see it all the time in the families of alcoholics and drug addicts.
July 21st, 2010 | 11:37 pm
“This is no time to try to finesse this issue”
Finney I don’t think anyone is trying to finesse the issue. I think we are trying to figure out how the problem came to be and yes it it is indeed complex. Also if we are honest with ourselves a few decades ago we would not be calling sex with 16 years “child abuse” in all instances. Especially since that often the AGE OF CONSENT in some states.
If we want to prevent this now we have to understand the cause and not just worry about PR all the time
July 22nd, 2010 | 8:38 am
jh: * Thanks for your response. I’m not interested in PR, I’m interested in justice. I object to the psychologizing of this issue. At this point, we don’t need to “figure out how the problem came to be”. The focus should be on the crimes committed and the just punishments. Once the perpetrators are in jail, there will be plenty of time to read about their psychological issues, if anyone’s interested.
July 22nd, 2010 | 11:08 am
This is an absolute insult. No, the West does not have a “romance with perversion.” Is this the next ploy of the Catholic Church? To try to convince us that we’re all just filthy pigs anyway? Actually, as I recall, that’s been the message of the Catholic Church all along. But it’s especially galling now. I grew up during the 70′s and 80′s and the only perversion I saw was what was going on out at the priest’s cottage. The denial that the Catholic Church is mired in is becoming more and more dangerous for our society and our children.
July 22nd, 2010 | 11:13 am
>>…a few decades ago we would not be calling sex with 16 years “child abuse” in all instances.>>
According to a lawyer who was apparently involved in many if not most of the US suits against the church, most (he said 80%, I believe) of the cases were actually pederasty, not pedophilia. It’s a difference of age and maturity, which throws the incidents more into the homosexual category than child abuse. (please understand that I’m not attempting to justify it in any way) However the press doesn’t want to “tar” homosexuals and it _did_ want to tar Catholic priests, so it uses the more objectionable term. Either that or they didn’t know the difference.
As for why…please do some research on Bella Dodd, and the efforts of Communism to bring down the Roman Catholic Church. I think it’s probably relevant in this context – in several ways.
July 22nd, 2010 | 11:44 am
I do think we need to understand the causes. My experience is that many naive liberal theologians back in the 60′s were eager to show that the Church was not “hung up on sex”. So they constantly trumpeted the “sex is beautiful” theme, and “sexuality is gift from God”, downplaying the moral evil of sex outside its proper bounds — they did not wabnt to alienate young people with such an uncool message. Instead, sex was described simply as an “expression of love” — without differentiating one kind of “love” from another. The constant mantra was that “sins of the flesh are less serious than sins of the spirit”. Sexual sin was simply no big deal, as they told it — of course, they were thinking of things they saw as harmless, such as premarital sex, not child molestation. But the law of intended consequences came into play: Their lightheartedness about sexuality HAD to have made it easier for perverts to rationalize their behavior, and bishops to rationalize covering it up. We now know that some of these bishops were themselves guilty of some of these things, and had doubtless made an art of rationalizing it in their own cases. What made all this possible was rationalization — a culture of rationalization.
RRR’s point, Mr. Feeney, is not to rationalize, but precisely to point out the culture of rationalization that made all this possible.
The theologians and those outside the Church who were doing this doubtless had no idea what demons they were helping to unleash.
July 22nd, 2010 | 12:43 pm
I agree with ‘SarahTX2′ that the post is an insult. At one point, Fr. Gucci seems to say that priestly pederasty is understandable because the Greeks or Romans condoned it. And how did the cultural and political climate of the 70s and 80s repeatedly try to publicly justify pedophilia? My recollection is that every time the media tried to make underage sex more “acceptable”, there was a great deal of opposition, and the effort failed. I admit that the issue is somewhat complex, but perhaps some of that complexity would disappear if we aknowledged what ‘suek’ and William Donohue have told us; namely that this is overwhelmingly a pederasty, not a pedophilia, problem.
July 22nd, 2010 | 1:12 pm
Another possible contributing cause: More kids growing up without fathers mean more potential victims desperate for adult male attention.
July 22nd, 2010 | 1:17 pm
The article at hand is about the effect of a sea change in sexual mores. It is not about punishing those within the Church who violated their office. That could be and has been in other articles. For anyone to think that an honest attempt to explore possible causes for this scandal is ducking the issue either has their own agenda(Sarah) or is incapable of getting beyond their own disgust that it happened (Feeney). In either case they are not addressing what the article is about which from what little it said, though I agree with it, didn’t say enough. Of course the broader culture effected the Church and all of it’s members. Just one example should suffice to demonstrate that effect. More or less starting from the middle sixties, when the undercurrents of counterculture reached a kind of critical mass and burst full throated into the public consciousness, the Church started hemorrhaging Priests and Nuns by the tens of thousands.Either this was a coincidence or as a result of changes in the larger culture. Many of which directly or indirectly resulted in a loosening of sexual constraints in all of their manifestations.
July 22nd, 2010 | 1:59 pm
Dear SarahTX2,
This is not a blog for bigots.
You “saw” perversion going on at the priest’s cottage? Did you report it to the police? What is the address of the priest’s cottage in question and on what date did you make the report to the police? If you really did see something and did not report it, you are as guilty as those you condemn.
You use the present tense; the Church “is” mired in it. The fact is that the Church has been (belatedly, to be sure) purging itself of this. Almost all the priests who engaged in this are either dead, in prison, or are now gone from the priesthood. Only a few new cases have been reported. Virtually all the cases you read about were from before the clean-up.
The fact that you say that the Church is currently mired in this shows that you don’t know what you are talking about.
The fact that you say the Church teaches that we are all filthy pigs shows you are a bigot. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” This blog is for serious discussions not for venting one’s hatred.
July 22nd, 2010 | 3:13 pm
Some of the worse cases of clerical abuse occurred in Ireland in the 1950′s – anyone who thinks that 1950′s Ireland was influenced by the “counterculture” (whatever that means) of the 1960′s etc is seriously deluded.
July 22nd, 2010 | 4:36 pm
PIUSXXX: No one claims that the abuse only started in the 1960′s. However, the statistics in the U.S. have been very carefully studied by a respected group of scholars, who looked at the complete data of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy starting in 1950. There was large upsurge in the incidence of abuse starting at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, peaking in the 1960s and 1970s. The incidence of cases fell dramatically starting around 1980. (I am talking about when the actual cases of abuse took place, not when they were revealed.)
July 22nd, 2010 | 5:58 pm
“However the press doesn’t want to “tar” homosexuals and it _did_ want to tar Catholic priests, so it uses the more objectionable term. Either that or they didn’t know the difference.”
It’s not that the press doesn’t want to “tar” homosexuals. The press is actively lying about and covering up most cases of violence that involves a homosexual perpetrator, whether it concerns minor sexual abuse, sexual harassment, dysfunctional parenting, domestic violence or other types of adult violence. The press usually does not outright lie, although the case of calling priests “pedophile” instead of “homosexual” in just about every headline, is a considerably manipulative way of misleading the public, given the high number of homosexual abuse cases in the Church scandal. What is much graver is the fact that the press is seriously lying by omission or trivializing data concerning violence and other harmful behaviors perpetrated by homosexuals (or bisexuals). Specially if the question involves heterosexuals or minors as victims, then the propaganda machine goes into full gear. In this way, they are coddling a large number of perpetrators.
In the media, and in popular and political discourse, we observe an emphatic reinforcement of a “victim” stereotype for homosexuals. To a large degree, concerning bisexuals, there is a different, largely popular attitude, an invisibility of the entire category of bisexuals, more than the hammering of the victim stereotype.
If you look at the mass media and popular discourses on homosexuals and homosexuality, homosexuals are often portrayed in an extremely simplistic way, as gentle, benign creatures, oppressed by the horrible conservatives who don’t accept and normalize their homosexuality. “All they want to do is love each other,” is a very popular meme. Another one is that “homosexuals aren’t violent (in any way),” “most child abusers are heterosexuals (to the point of implying that homosexuals are thus practically incapable of abusing children), “homosexuals do not sexually harass anyone, specially heterosexuals,” “a large number of homosexuals are driven to suicide because their homosexuality is not accepted, (thus, not only are they are more at risk of death by suicide than other vulnerable groups),” “homosexuals are in considerable personal danger everywhere because of the threat of ‘hate’ crimes, (and not because of how violent they are themselves to other homosexuals)” “homosexuals are discriminated against, but do not discriminate against others,” etc.
In our society, we find that all three categories of sexual orientation (hetero, bi, homo) perpetrate all kinds of violence related to sexuality and personal relations. However, while society has come (after a long fight to crack its thick denial walls) to recognize that heterosexuals abuse children, batter spouses, rape and sexually harass women in large numbers, we observe an intense public misinformation campaign that suggests that homosexuals basically never commit such crimes and the bisexual category is never even usually mentioned in popular discourse.
Taking minor abuse as an example, how does this impact cases of real abuse against children? If it is already a nightmare to bring to justice any case of child abuse, and get justice for it, then it becomes even more dire if the perpetrator is held by the public to be basically incapable of committing the crime, and, furthermore, the propaganda reaffirms that any suggestion of such a violent incident is due to “homophobia.” The same is true for sexual harassment, rape, and domestic violence. For example, the Gay Men’s Domestic Violence Project reports estimates of one in four homosexual men suffering domestic violence.
The graver consequence of reinforcing a stereotype of non-violent victims for a population that clearly includes a large number of perpetrators of aggression and crimes is that you victimize every single REAL victim of all this violence. The media and “gay” activists do form a profoundly irresponsible and damaging force in society, because as everyone knows, silence and denial about aggression and violence only further severely damage the victims, ensure the harmful dynamics continue unaddressed, and they give a green light to further violence by the perpetrators.
Given that public resources are limited, and are employed to deal with different violence problems in society in part due to a hierarchy of cultural values, this is another way that spreading lies and myths about violence can and often hurts the victims who have less power in society, less organized lobbies, less millionaire coffers to buy their influence, change laws that affect them, etc.
Isn’t there a compelling state interest to stop lying about who is violent in society? This systematic cover-up homosexual activists and the media engage in is profoundly corrupt.
July 22nd, 2010 | 11:30 pm
This is no time to try to finesse this issue.
A theologian I once knew put it well, An explanation is not an excuse. It is important to find explanations, but not to use them as excuses.
I believe the authors were looking for explanations, so as to avoid similar problems in the future. If instead they were trying to use them as excuses, you have a point.
SarahTX2, if you grew up in the 70s and 80s and the only perversion you saw was in the priests “cottage” (do you mean the “rectory”? or a vacation getaway?) then you lived a truly sheltered life. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and the only place I could get away from the perversion on television, in film, and in common discourse, was in the Church. Maybe I was just lucky.
July 23rd, 2010 | 10:13 am
There was large upsurge in the incidence of abuse starting at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, peaking in the 1960s and 1970s. The incidence of cases fell dramatically starting around 1980.
Does this apply to other churches or only the Catholic Church? If it only applies to the Catholic Church, then we would have to explain abuse as the peculiar interaction of Catholic clerical culture with the broader culture rather than attributing it to only one or the other.
July 25th, 2010 | 4:43 am
I’d be curious to know if there really was an upsurge in the 50s and 60s, or if the willingness to talk about rape and pedophelia in the 70s and 80s allowed victims to seek retribution in greater numbers. In my grandmother’s generation, there were no family problems – alcoholism and the accompanying abuse were swept under the rug and absolutely never discussed because it was shameful. It may be that abuse (not just by clergy, of course … statistically priests are no more likely to abuse than others) has been going on in secret for generations and it is only in the last 30 years that victims are getting justice because we’re finally willing to address it as a society.
July 26th, 2010 | 1:31 am
I am all for justice in these situations, but also agree with the fact that we need to understand the root of the problem, and that is sex addiction. A friend of mine went through a lot of struggles with this, and read a really great book during her recovery by Judith Sagé called, “FREE SEX. EXPENSIVE THERAPY.” She said the author did a great job of tackling a heavy subject and presented it in a very light way. For anyone who would like to understand this growing problem in our society I highly recommend getting this book.
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