A five-year study commissioned by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops to provide a definitive answer to what caused the priest sexual-abuse crisis has concluded that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality are to blame. Instead, the report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed in the midst of the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s.
Those hippies sure did cause a lot of problems, didn’t they? For my own part, I don’t recall any of the folks I hung with (and I confess to having engaged in certain behaviors that shall go otherwise unspecified, but were, shall we say, more stereotypically hippieish) having any particular interest in having sex with children of either sex.
But, in fact, at least by its lights, the Church’s finding is well-founded. Reading on:
Known incidents of sexual abuse of minors by priests rose sharply during those decades, the report found, and the problem grew worse when the church’s hierarchy responded by showing more care for the perpetrators than the victims. (Emphasis added)
So indeed, the hippies were to blame, for if they advocated anything, they advocated questioning authority and that attitude apparently leached through, even to the poor, scared kids that were being, or had been, abused.
it brings to mind that old saw about whether a falling tree makes a noise if no one is there to hear it. Well, at least according to the Church, not only does it make no sound, it never really fell in the first place.
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