By Sohrab Ahmari New York Post.
When Pope Benedict XVI resigned the papacy in 2013, he vowed to live the rest of his days in seclusion, to serve the Catholic Church “through a life dedicated to prayer.” But the church’s spiraling abuse crisis prompted him this week to return to the limelight.
The retired pontiff has drafted a 6,000-word document in his native German and aims to publish it in a monthly periodical for clergy in his home region of Bavaria. Benedict says the document, an English translation of which I’ve reviewed, is meant to assist the Church in seeking “a new beginning” and making her “again truly credible as a light among peoples and as a force in service against the powers of destruction.”
In the preface, he makes it clear that he is “no longer directly responsible” for the church and that he consulted Pope Francis before resolving to make the document public.
Nevertheless, Benedict’s “The Church and the Scandal of Sexual Abuse” has the unmistakable ring of a papal document. You might even call it a post-retirement encyclical.
It’s written with his signature precision and clarity of insight and offers a piercing account of the origins of the crisis and a vision of the way forward.
The church’s still-radiating crisis, Benedict suggests, was a product of the moral laxity that swept the West, and not just the church, in the 1960s. The young rebels of 1968, Benedict writes, fought for “all-out sexual freedom, one which no longer conceded any norms.”
Benedict adds: “Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of 1968 was that pedophilia was now also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.” This might strike contemporary readers as puzzling. But those who lived through that wretched decade will remember that some of the leading ’68ers also advocated “anti-authoritarian education,” which involved some pretty unsavory interactions between adults and children. Hippie communes weren’t child-friendly places, either.
“I have always wondered how young people in this situation could approach the priesthood and accept it, with all its ramifications,” Benedict writes. “The extensive collapse of the next generation of priests in those years and the very high number of laicizations were consequence of all these processes.”
The church, in other words, was no more immune to the disorders of that decade and its aftermath than the rest of society.
How come? Benedict blames clerics and theologians who, in the aftermath of Vatican II, abandoned natural law — the notion that morality is written into human nature itself and can therefore be grasped by human reason — in favor of a more “pragmatic” morality.
Under the new dispensation, “there could no longer be anything that constituted an absolute good, any more than anything fundamentally evil; there could only be relative moral judgments.”
PAT SAYS
As the head of the CDF for many years Benedict was the most informed man in the RC church about sexual abuse by bishops, priests and religious.
He was also the Cover Upper In Chief.
Because he thinks the RC is perfect and of divine origin he cannot admit that the institution is rotten to the core.
So he must find things in “the world” to blame.
So he blames the 60s and the sexual revolution.
But the problem is that paedophilia and pederasty has been rampant in the church for at least 1500 years.
On the one hand we must realise that these predelicitions are deeply embedded in human nature and society. The majority of abuse takes place in the family setting.
Add to that the preduluvian approach to sex in the RCC and the fascination with unachievable notions of virginity, chastity and celibacy and you have a monster. And add to that the negative attitude towards women and their sexual organs you have many Male monsters.
If you do not allow clerics to fcuk adults they will fcuk children. They will target the powerless and vulnerable.
People like Benedict can live in the Vatican with arch Episcopal boyfriends and blame the world for evil.
The truth is that they are vicious wolves in sheep’s clothing who will ravage the sheep – and target the helpless lambs.
Jesus wept!
BISHOP PAT BUCKLEY 