Catholic Church and Pedophila (Conclusion)

Pedophilia and ephebophilia

In Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention, Cimbolic & Cartor (2006) noted that because of the large share of post-pubescent male minors among cleric victims there is need to further study the differential variables related to ephebophilia (sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19, versus pedophilia (sexual interest in prepubescent children, generally those 13 years of age or younger) offenders.[376] Cartor, Cimbolic & Tallon (2008) found that 6 percent of the cleric offenders in the John Jay Report are pedophiles, 32 percent ephebophiles, 15 percent attracted to 11 and 12 year olds only (both male and female), 20 percent indiscriminate, and 27 percent mildly indiscriminate.

They also found distinct differences between the pedophile and ephebophile groups. They reported that there may be "another group of offenders who are more indiscriminate in victim choice and represent a more heterogeneous, but still a distinct offender category" and suggested further research to determine "specific variables that are unique to this group and can differentiate these offenders from pedophile and ephebophile offenders" so as to improve the identification and treatment of both offenders and victims.

All victims in the John Jay report were minors. Using a non-standard definition of "pre-pubescent", the Causes and Context Study of the John Jay College estimated that only a small percentage of offender priests were true pedophiles.  The study classified victims as pre-pubescent if they were age 10 or younger, whereas the age bracket specified in the current guidelines issued by the American Psychiatric Association is "generally age 13 or younger".   A recent book estimates that if the latter definition were used instead of the former, the percentage of victims classified as prepubescent would have been 54% rather than the 18% figure cited by the Causes and Context report, and that a higher percentage of priests would therefore have been classified as pedophiles.  The same book also points out that with the pending new definition of "pedohebephilic disorder" in DSM-5, an even higher percentage of victims would fall into a category consistent with their abusers having a recognized psychosexual disorder.

Statement of Pope Francis

In July 2014, Pope Francis was quoted as having said in an interview that about 8,000 Catholic clergy (2% of the total), including bishops and cardinals, were pedophiles. The Vatican indicated the interview had not been recorded nor notes taken during it and that quotes may have been misattributed in a deliberate attempt to manipulate readers. They stated that Pope Francis had not indicated that any cardinal abusers remained in their position.

Gay priests and homosexuality

According to the John-Jay-Report, 80.9% of the abuse victims in the United States were male;  and a study by Dr. Thomas Plante found the number may be as high as 90%.  A number of books, such as The Rite of Sodomy: Homosexuality and the Roman Catholic Church have argued that homosexual priests view sex with minors as a "rite of passage" for altar boys and other pre-adult males.  William Donohue of the Catholic League argued that the Church's pedophile problem was really a "homosexual crisis",  which some have dismissed as unwarranted by arguing that there's a lack of correlation between a man identifying as homosexual and any particular likelihood he will abuse children.  In the United States Father Cozzens quoted figures from 23 percent to 58 percent of homosexual priests, with a higher percentage among younger priests.  On the other hand, research on pedophilia in general shows a majority of abusers identify themselves as heterosexual, and the Causes and Context Study of the John Jay Institute found no statistical support for linking homosexual identity and sexual abuse of minors.  Additionally The New York Times reported "the abuse decreased as more gay priests began serving the church."

Clerical celibacy

Opinion seems divided on whether there is any definite link or connection between the Roman Catholic institution of celibacy and incidences of child abuse by Catholic clergy.

A 2005 article in the conservative Irish weekly the Western People proposed that clerical celibacy contributed to the abuse problem by suggesting that the institution of celibacy has created a "morally superior" status that is easily misapplied by abusive priests: "The Irish Church's prospect of a recovery is zero for as long as bishops continue blindly to toe the Vatican line of Pope Benedict XVI that a male celibate priesthood is morally superior to other sections of society."[389] Christoph Schönborn and Hans Küng have also said that priestly celibacy could be one of the causes of the sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church.

Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said, "We don't see the Catholic Church as a hotbed of this or a place that has a bigger problem than anyone else. I can tell you without hesitation that we have seen cases in many religious settings, from traveling evangelists to mainstream ministers to rabbis and others."  Philip Jenkins, a long-time Catholic turned Episcopalian, asserts that his "research of cases over the past 20 years indicates no evidence whatever that Catholic or other celibate clergy are any more likely to be involved in misconduct or abuse than clergy of any other denomination—or indeed, than non-clergy. However determined news media may be to see this affair as a crisis of celibacy, the charge is just unsupported."

Male culture of the church

Italian academic Lucetta Scaraffia [it] wrote in L'Osservatore Romano that a greater presence of women in the Vatican could have prevented clerical sexual abuse from taking place.

This view has been challenged and severely criticized by several scholars for denying the cases of nuns implicated in sexual abuse and pedophilia. In 1986, a history scholar from Stanford University recovered archival information about investigations from 1619 to 1623 involving nuns in Vellano, Italy, secretly exploiting illiterate nuns for several years.  In 1998, a religious research national survey on revealed a very high number of nuns reporting childhood victimizations of sexual abuse by other nuns. It was further noted that the majority of nun-abuse victims are of the same sex.  In 2002, Markham examined the sexual histories of nuns to find several cases of nuns sexually abusing children.

Priest shortage

It has been argued that a shortage of priests caused the Roman Catholic hierarchy to act in such a way to preserve the number of clergy and ensure that sufficient numbers were available to man their congregations despite serious allegations that some of these priests were unfit for duty.  Others disagree and assert that the Church hierarchy's mishandling of the sex abuse cases merely reflected their prevailing attitude at the time towards any illegal or immoral activity by clergy.

Purported declining standards in the prevailing culture

In The Courage To Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church, author George Weigel claims that it was the infidelity to orthodox Roman Catholic teaching, the "culture of dissent" of priests, women religious, bishops, theologians, catechists, Church bureaucrats, and activists who "believed that what the Church proposed as true was actually false" was mainly responsible for the sexual abuse of parishioners' children by their priests.  Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick, a retired Archbishop of Washington who was himself later laicized due to sexual misconduct, blamed the declining morals of the late 20th century as a cause of the high number of child molestations by priests.

The hypothesis that a purported decline in general moral standard was associated with an increase in abuse by clergy was promoted by a study by John Jay College funded by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The study claimed that the liberal 1960s caused the increase in abuse, and the conservative Reagan years led to its decline. The study was branded the 'Woodstock Defence' by critics who said that the study's own figures showed a surge in abuse reported from the 1950s, and the passage of time meant that reports of abuse from earlier decades were unlikely.

Criticism, accusations of exaggeration of attachments and silence about other environments

Philip Jenkins, professor at the Department of Religion and History at Penn State University, questioned the theses of increased sexual abuse among priests, saying the percentage of priests accused of molesting minors is 1.8%, much of which is not about pedophilia alone.  Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft was the author of a report on sexual offenses in schools. As she said, the problem of sexual violence is much more serious in schools than in the Church.

Think the Catholic Church has a problem? (...) The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.— Charol Shakeshaft

According to the report, up to 422,000 students from California will be victims of sexual violence in the future.[400] A report issued by Christian Ministry Resources (CMR) in 2002 stated that contrary to popular opinion, there are more allegations of pedophilia in Protestant congregations than Catholic ones, and that sexual violence is most often committed by volunteers rather than by priests.  It also criticized the way the media reported sexual crimes in Australia. The Royal Commission in Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse revealed that between January 1950 and February 2015, 4,445 people alleged incidents of child sexual abuse in 4,765 claims. The media reportedly reported that as many as 7% of priests were accused of being a pedophile, but ignored the same report on the Protestant Churches and Jehovah's Witnesses; Gerard Henderson stated:

That’s 2,504 incidents or allegations in the period between 1977, when the Uniting Church was formed, and 2017. This compares with 4,445 claims with respect to the Catholic Church between 1950 and 2015. And the Catholic Church is five times larger than the Uniting Church. Moreover, the Royal Commission did not include allegations in the period 1950 to 1977 with respect to the Presbyterian, Congregational and Methodist communities which folded into the Uniting Church in 1977. This would take the number of allegations beyond 2,504, especially since it seems that child sexual abuse was at its worst in the 1960s and 1970s. (...) Allegations against the Jehovah Witness religion, on a per capita basis, are dramatically higher than for either the Catholic or the Uniting churches.— Gerard Henderson

Popular culture

Many popular culture representations have been made of the sex abuse of children cases.

Publications

A number of memoirs and non-fiction books have been written about these issues, including Andrew Madden's Altar Boy: A Story of Life After Abuse, Carolyn Lehman's Strong at the Heart: How it Feels to Heal from Sexual Abuse, Larry Kelly's The Pigeon House which deals with abuse in the Pigeon House TB Sanatorium at Ringsend;, and Kathy O'Beirne's bestseller Kathy's Story, which details physical and sexual abuse suffered in a Magdalene laundry in Ireland. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Ed West has asserted that Kathy Beirne's story is "largely invented", based on Hermann Kelly's Kathy's Real Story, a book by the journalist on the Irish Daily Mail; Kelly is also former editor of The Irish Catholic.

Films and documentaries

The Magdalene laundries were the subject of a drama film called The Magdalene Sisters (2002), which generated controversy as it was early in the revelations about abuses at Catholic homes. In 2006, a documentary called Deliver Us From Evil directed by Amy Berg and produced by Berg and Frank Donner was made about sexual abuse; it primarily focused on one priest and his crimes. It showed how far some clergy went in order to cover up the many reports of sexual abuse.

Many other fictional feature films have been made about the continuing revelations of sex abuse within the Church, including:

·         Judgment (1990)

·         The Boys of St. Vincent (1992)

·         Primal Fear (1996)

·          Suing the Pope (2002), BBC documentary by Colm O'Gorman

·         Song for a Raggy Boy (2003)

·         Bad Education (2004), film by Pedro Almodóvar.

·         Twist of Faith (2004), an HBO film

·         Holy Water-Gate (2004), documentary

·         Our Fathers (2005), a Showtime movie based on the book by David France

·         Hand of God (2006), documentary filmed for Frontline

·         Sex Crimes and the Vatican (2006), documentary filmed for the BBC Panorama Documentary Series that purports to show how the Vatican has used Crimen sollicitationis to silence allegations of sexual abuse by priests.

·         Doubt (2008), based on the eponymous play

·         What the Pope Knew, 2010 Panorama (BBC) episode

·         Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, 2012 HBO film

·         Calvary, 2014 Irish drama

·         Obediencia Perfecta, 2014 film

·         Ray Donovan Showtime TV Series (2013)

·         Spotlight (2015), drama based on the Boston Globe's investigation and publishing about clergy abuse

·         The Keepers (2017), American documentary web series that was released on Netflix

·         By the Grace of God (2019), French-Belgian drama

·         Tell No One (2019), Polish documentary film by Tomasz Sekielski

A daily updated list of films and documentaries is available at the "Literature List Clergy Sexual Abuse" composed by journalist and author Roel Verschueren [nl].

Music

In 2005, Limp Bizkit released the album The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1), which focuses on dark lyrical subject matter, including Catholic sex abuse cases, terrorism and fame.[408] Comedian Tim Minchin has the songs "The Pope Song", and "Come Home (Cardinal Pell)".