The Catholic Church's Sacraments, all of them, are being questioned, challenged and neutered by the current and might I say hysterical responses to the clergy sex abuse scandal.
At the core of this scandal is the desire to keep scandal quiet, hidden to preserve the ministry of the Church and its institutions. This has backfired to say the least, but it wasn't and is't just a Catholic thing and was quite common prior to the Information Age and talk shows like Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer.
People now, rather than recoiling from salacious details of scandal eat them up and want more and more kind of like an addiction to pornographic images and videos. Have you read the pornographic details of sexual abuse or seen it on the news? Even the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia had details of what he forced (allegedly) his girl friend to do and words like "gag" were used for the general public to hear! If I were a parent, and in a sense I am, I would be horrified for my children no matter their age to hear this kind of stuff and see it reported on television. It is also a kind of abuse, no?
But the problem I see with Catholic Jansenism, which is Catholic puritanicalism is that we expect people to be angels and we divorce their disorders from mercy and forgiveness and second and third or more chances at life. One strike and you are out is puritanism pure and simple. I am speaking about trysts with adults not the sexual abuse of minors.
But even with minors, civil law has age limits for them if a sex act is to be considered illegal. In some places it is 13 (South Carolina allows men to marry girls who are 11 years old as I have reported before). In their places it is 16 or 18 and maybe 21 in other more enlightened states. But is it enlightened? Wasn't the Blessed Virgin Mary 14 when she conceived and was betrothed to Saint Joseph?
The fact of the matter is that priests do break the 6th commandment in the variety of ways it can be broken. Most of it isn't criminal and all of it can be forgiven in the Sacrament of Penance. That doesn't mean that further sanctions should not be taken in serious cases that are actually abusive. But not all cases are abusive unless you believe the puritanical media of our day.
Priests are not always the ones who commit the abuse. Sometimes they are pursued and seduced. This is an inconvenient fact that the Jansenistic and pruritancial leftist media ignore. Of course I am speaking of adults here not minors. But in today's world we know that teenagers are also prostitutes for various reasons and quite versed in the art of seduction. Why they are this way is never discussed or acknowledged or that it even exists in the minds of the political left puritans.
I think the Church must be open with the laity when a priest falls into a consensual sexual situation with adults. And it isn't always because of psychological issues, but simple human weakness exacerbated by loneliness, alchohol abuse or clinical depression/anxiety. It is consensual regardless of the fact that one is a priest and the other is a lay person. To claim abuse in these settings is simply a hoax for some other agenda on the left be it the Church's left of the political left.
Do we insist now that a husband who in a drunken stupor commits adultery must be divorced from his wife and forbidden to ever marry again?
Let's stop with the Jansenism and Puritanism of the left because it stands in the way of adequately addressing the real pathologies that are associated with the abuse of minors and even here not all cases are equal.
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We should be cautious of it, of course. The shepherd goes after the single lost sheep, certainly. But he does not abandon the rest of the flock. They are safely away from harm. It is a false dilemma to refuse to compare acting on the attacks on society and the Church to persecution and physical violence against homosexuals. We have focused so intently on helping those who need help, people with same sex attraction, that we have allowed them to continue behavior that is unacceptable regardless of any viewpoint on homosexuality.
It is also a fool’s errand to discriminate the acts based on any age criteria. Any acolyte, whether in seminary, basic training, or out of trade school is vulnerable to predatory senior leadership. Many if not most can be easily led astry. It is an arbitrary and often convenient line to establish adulthood on a date. You see that excuse used in universities all the time although that line has been rebutted in recent years. A twenty something seminarian is almost indistinguishable from a fifteen year old altar boy at the emotional level.
Here are two terrible predictions: 1) that a surprising number of clergy who are not endorsing or supporting the homosexual agenda have evidence of experimentation with homosexual acts while younger being held against them as blackmail. 2) that a large number of Catholic charites and relief organisations participate in sex trafficking. Get ready.
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