Catholic Church Mistakes Paedophilia for Homosexuality

Of course, it’s not a mistake. The Catholic Church deliberately tries to blame gay people for the hundred of thousands of child abuses conducted by its clergy. This is what the Vatican and the rest of the church have done every time a paedophile priest is caught.

I think Andrew Sullivan is on to something:

Ask yourself: how many openly gay and adjusted priests have been found to have abused minors? Or ask yourself another question: if straight men were forbidden to marry women, had their sexual and emotional development truncated at the age of 13, and were forced into institutions where they were treated by teenage girls as gods, an given untrammeled private access to them, how much sexual abuse do you think would occur there? Please. This is not that hard to understand.

I think it’s compounded by the shame gay bishops feel about their own sexual orientation. They […] secretly associate their homosexuality with dysfunction, disorder, chaos, evil. So when they come across a fellow priest found to have molested teenage boys or children, they associate it with homosexuality—not pederasty—associate themselves with it, and try to cover it up—partly because they want to protect the church (which is their sole refuge) and partly because they want to protect those they wrongly associate with themselves.

He concludes:

I don’t believe, in other words, that you can tackle this problem without seeing it as a symptom of a much deeper failure of the church to come to terms with sexuality, sexual orientation and the warping, psychologically distorting impact of compulsory celibacy in the priesthood. If women and married men were allowed to be priests, if homosexuality were regarded in Catholic theology as a healthy and rare difference rather than as a shameful disorder, this atmosphere would end, and these crimes would for the most part disappear and the cloying, closeted power-structure which enabled them to go unpunished for so long would finally crumble.

Amen.