Since the furor over the Catholic sex abuse cases started, many conservative Catholics have pointed out that many of the cases happened in the ’60s and pointed their finger at the spirit of the times. The argument goes that the guilty priests had internalized the permissive, free love, anti-authoritarian attitude of the era.
Actually, this is popular with social conservatives of all types. It’s called the “Blame Woodstock” defense.
The Church has just released a new study that seems to strengthen this line of argument. According to the NYT, the study itself has a good pedigree:
… this study is likely to be regarded as the most authoritative analysis of the scandal in the Catholic Church in America. The study, initiated in 2006, was conducted by a team of researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City at a cost of $1.8 million. About half was provided by the bishops, with additional money contributed by Catholic organizations and foundations. The National Institute of Justice, the research agency of the United States Department of Justice, supplied about $280,000.
But while the source may be credible, the study is only as good as the data that went into it. A number of groups have pointed out that the data was supplied by the church itself.
Accuracy aside, there are some interesting admissions in the report. Another of the conservatives’ favorite arguments is to blame homosexuals in the priesthood. But the results of the report don’t back that up:
The report notes that homosexual men began entering the seminaries “in noticeable numbers” from the late 1970s through the 1980s. By the time this cohort entered the priesthood, in the mid-1980s, the reports of sexual abuse of minors by priests began to drop and then to level off. If anything, the report says, the abuse decreased as more gay priests began serving the church.
One conclusion that is destined to be misunderstood is that the overwhelming majority of priests involved were not pedophiles. This comes out of the problems with defining the word “pedophile.” The researchers used a definition from the DSM IV that defines the classic pedophile as a mental disorder, and most of the priests lack the characteristic symptoms. Simple having sex with children is not enough to qualify in this circumstance.
More controversially, they also set the bar at 10 years old, rather than the DSM IV’s 13 years. This gets at the confusing difference between pedophile and pederast. If you set the bar lower, than means more people were pederasts rather than pedophiles, which allows you to spin the argument and say that it’s not about pedophilia.
But none of this gets at the largest cause of the sex abuse scandal. Unfortunately, a certain number of priests will always be predators. The Church’s inability to admit to this and deal with it prevented the priests from being arrested and properly jailed or treated. Instead, the guilty were shuttled from diocese to diocese. As a result, priests were able to harm far more children than would have been possible for any other predator. You can’t blame pot, hippies, free love and Woodstock for that.
“You can’t blame pot, hippies, free love and Woodstock for that.”
Of course you can, they just did that and they will get away with that, which is a good thing for them, because it shifts the focus from the real issue, of the church being responsible for moving these guys around the place and protecting them.
Mean while everyone will be jumping on the pot and free love thing and beating that instead.
Ignore the fake and go after the real thing.
Can I recommend a viewing of this little nugget of gold? It totally debunks these conclusions.
One of the biggest Catholic abuse scandals is the one in Ireland. The majority of abuse cases happened between the ’30s and the ’70s. So blaming it on the sexual revolution is pretty pathetic.
Anyway, HOW THE HELL does the free love ideology help to justify pedophilia? Was it somehow more morally acceptable to force yourself on children in the ’60s and ’70s (or, for that matter, today, where in many areas we’re more liberal than ever in our views of sex)? No, it f*cking wasn’t!
Those poor priests, led astray by a decadent, liberal society. Yeah, right. As if society is to blame for them putting their dicks into kids.
What they did, and continue to do, is inexcusable under any defense. But oh, are they gonna try.
If only the Catholic Church had some non-worldly source they could turn to for moral guidance, this might never have happened.
SMBC says it succinctly.
They always do. But I was thinking more of Stephen Fry.
I like how they pretend that the problem only existed in the last part of the 20th century. It surely can’t be that this was the time that enough people could actually come forward and be believed. There is no way I believe that this suddenly began to occur in the recent past. It is like pretending that child abuse and spouse abuse are recent happenings because 100 years ago no one talked about them.
The two sources for this entire problem and scandal, both now and earlier in history, are the corruptive nature of power and self mortification of of a God given sexual desire. Mix the two problems and you have a bomb that doesn’t require a free love idealology or a blame the homosexual attack to explain it.
I know most people on this site don’t look to the Bible as guide for morality, but I think a cursory reading of some relevant texts should lead Catholics to reevaluate both their theological stances on forced celibacy and their hunger for a power over structure rather than a servant like one.
“some relevant texts” is the key reason to reject the bible. You can justify just about anything by taking the right passages from the bible. You can also justify the exact opposite.
and one day, my generation will be old enough to blame everything on flannel and expensive coffee
The “Blame Woodstock” defense, huh?
Well, at least it wasn’t the Chewbacca defense…
that does not make sense!
So they used that first bit of info because it helped them, but they ignored the second bit because it hurt their case. I wonder where they learned to pick and choose stuff from books like that.
Does Woodstock also account for all the Priest pedophelia across Europe and other places during that time? If so, that is quite the wide reaching influence. If free love drove priests to pedophilia there should also be a measurable increase in pedophila outside of the priesthood during that same time.
The real cultural shift was that the ‘code of silence’ that protected predators began to break down and the abused not only began to point the finger at their abusers but society started to listen to them.
They are correct but for the wrong reasons.
The sexual revolution made the idea of sex no longer a taboo and sex became freely discussed alongside the idea of sex for pleasure and the rights of women to say no. Rape became a lot more “serious” as a crime due to this.
Do you think that utilisation of religious power to commit rape (both against minor and adults) is endemic solely to the Catholic church? It’s there in all religions, it’s just that the catholic church has a heirarchy that tried to hide this and did so effectively so when we did discover the abuse it was a “whole big bunch of it” by contrast the protestants priests show up as abusers with relatively regular intervals (1-3 a year in the big news). This isn’t a recent thing, this has been going on for centuries.
If it were not for the sexual revolution, we would not have had the social awareness of rape to consider it a big problem. Prior to this people would have either told the abused to shut up for telling lies or simply “avoided getting into the situation”. Only with the sexual revolution have we been able to fight this.
In contrast we know that a similar rate of abuse should be occurring in islam and judaism and all other faiths. We don’t see that, mainly as it is covered up by society. No one wants to admit what’s happened in case of community backlash.
Consider that even in our enlightened society we have people like Bill Donaghue actually blaming victims and the media blowing it out of proportion for this.
I’m not sure what you mean by that last sentence. How can you blow the sexual abuse of thousands of children , the mass cover-up and facilitation of the crimes and the blaming of victims out of proportion?
By being Bill Donaghue?
According to UNESCO, the Protestant churches, currently, have a much higher incidence of sexual abuse. Abuse in the Catholic Church peaked in 1985 and then began to decline. For that reason, almost all of the cases are decades old. Everyone acts like the Catholic Church is unique in moving offenders from one church to another. This is not true. For example, it is a well-known fact that the Baptist church routinely removes offenders or someone suspected of being an abuser. What most people do not know is that this predator preacher routinely just moves on to another Baptist church to begin the process all over again. It continues until the victim cries “rape” ,and the police are called. The Southern Baptist Convention refuses to even publish a list of known predator preachers of which other churches should be aware. Of course, it’s not just the Baptist church where this occurs. At least the Catholic Church would usually counsel abusers for a few months before sending them elsewhere. This does not even happen in the Protestant churches.
So all religions suck as much as the catholics? Good to know!
Ughhh. It’s always somebody else’s fault with these guys. Hippies, homosexuals… what’s next?
I heard this on NPR and couldn’t believe it. Well yeah i can, its the Catholic church. the study fails to even discuss “rape” because the sex was non consensual.
What a horrible institution that Catholic church is. They:
- raped tens of thousands of children
- moved the rapists
- lied about it
- ignored the victims
They don’t practice Catholicism, so they have no place on this earth.
Parents – keep your kids out of the Catholic church.
Teenagers – get out as soon as you can. Find another religion. Following these Catholic leaders won’t get you into heaven. They aren’t going to be there.
Better yet, find your way out of religion completely. That’s the only answer that makes sense.
“Teenagers – get out as soon as you can. Find another religion. Following these Catholic leaders won’t get you into heaven. They aren’t going to be there.”
Nor are people who post to blog sites while touting for business at the same time …