An article in Chiesa this week analyses the widespread scandal of sexual abuse by priests and bishops of the Roman Catholic Church. The scandal of pedophilia has always been there, the article says, but was magnified by the cultural revolution of the half a century ago.
The Hippy-Dippy Sixties was a decade of "liberation" -- political, cultural and sexual -- which changed the world. Fruits of this revolution were the "liberation" of women, the spread of feminist ideology, and the acceptance of divorce, birth control pill, and abortion.
The Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) was a product of the turmoil of its times. The Church, which for nearly two millennia stood like a rock for certain principles and revealed truths, started to bend to the winds of fashion. Out of this came the corruption and rot which pervades Her seminaries, rectories and even chanceries today.
The Holy Father, Benedict XVI, makes the claim in his recent letter to the Catholics of Ireland. The Chiesa article provides commentary by two cardinals and a sociologist. Worth repeating here are a couple of paragraphs written by Professor Massimo Introvigne, president of the CESNUR, the Center for Studies on New Religion, in a commentary that appeared on 22 March in the Italian edition of the Zenit online news.
"There was in the 1960's an authentic revolution – no less important than the Protestant Reformation or the French Revolution – that was fast-paced and dealt a tremendous blow to traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values....
"In the Catholic Church, there was not at once a sufficient awareness of the scope of this revolution. On the contrary, it infected – Benedict XVI maintains today – 'also priests and religious', created misunderstandings in the interpretation of [Vatican II], and caused 'insufficient human, moral, intellectual and spiritual formation in seminaries and novitiates'.
"In this climate, certainly not all priests who were insufficiently formed or infected by the climate following the 1960's, and not even a significant percentage of them, became pedophiles. We know from the statistics that the real number of priest pedophiles is much lower than the ones presented by certain media outlets. And yet this number is not equal to zero – as we would all want – and justifies the extremely severe words of the pope.
"But the study of the revolution of the 1960's, and of 1968, is crucial to understanding what happened afterward, including pedophilia. And to finding real remedies.
"If this revolution, unlike those before it, is moral and spiritual and touches the interiority of man, it is only from the restoration of morality, of the spiritual life and of comprehensive truth about the human person that the remedies can ultimately come. But for this reason the sociologists, as always, are not enough: there is a need for fathers and masters, teachers and saints.
"And we all have a great need for the pope: for this pope, who once again – to borrow the title of his latest encyclical – speaks the truth in charity and practices charity in truth."
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