As a Catholic seminarian back in the early ’60s, I knew several young men who would later be accused of pedophilia. Some of them were loners, some gregarious; some were effeminate, some macho; some were eggheads, others jocks, some neither. They wore no scarlet letter alerting us to their latent tendencies.
When the pedophilia crisis exploded in 2002, the future head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops righteously characterized the abusers as “moral monsters,” and implied homosexuality was to blame.
More recently, the Vatican has tried to place the blame on seminaries, claiming they have become too lax in their discipline, too negligent in their psychological screening processes, and too tolerant of homosexuality.
The media is now blaming the hierarchy, with good grounds, since we now know that, back in 2001, the bishops of the Catholic Church were given direct orders by then-Cardinal Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI — to keep abuse cases secret, effectively shielding them from prosecution in civil courts. ...