The sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church was the subject of a new report released today by the bishops. The findings of the second annual audit of the dioceses and eparchies show how they are complying with the norms adopted by the bishops in 2002.
Here’s what Catholic League president William Donohue said about it:
“The report is loaded with statistics that many will find useful, the most revealing of which are: the majority of the allegations of abuse made in 2004 involved incidents that occurred between 1965 and 1974; 71 percent of the alleged offenders were deceased, already removed from ministry or had been previously laicized when the allegations were made; only 2 percent of the allegations involved incidents in 2004; and 78 percent of the alleged victims were male.
“In other words, the homosexual crisis in the Catholic Church is largely behind us. While those who wrote the report would no doubt wince at this conclusion in public (for purely political reasons), the fact remains that molesting priests and their enabling bishops were a more commonplace phenomena during the sexual revolution than at any time since. For example, seminarians are no longer assigned books like Father Anthony Kosnik’s Human Sexuality, a volume so obscene that it excused every type of sexual perversion; the book was commissioned by the Catholic Theological Society of America. Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe that this same organization wouldn’t do so again today, provided, of course, the book was updated to include the latest perversions. Thus, the seeds of the scandal are extant.
“The victims’ group SNAP says that all the reports and training sessions in the world are not going to change things. They’re partly right. It is undeniably true that those dioceses that properly handled cases of sexual abuse in the past did so without the benefit of bureaucratic wisdom; the bishops in charge had the common sense and courage to know what to do. But it is also true that much progress has been made, and this is something that everyone needs to acknowledge.”
