Really? Hippie-punching? Does the Vatican think this is going to work?
A five-year study commissioned by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops to provide a definitive answer to what caused the church’s sexual abuse crisis has concluded that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality were to blame.
Instead, the report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s.
[...]
The “blame Woodstock” explanation has been floated by bishops since the church was engulfed by scandal in the United States in 2002 and by Pope Benedict XVI after it erupted in Europe in 2010.
Of course. Because when you and I hear this…
We think peace and love and maybe we just like Joni Mitchell a whole lot and will take any excuse to post one of her songs.
But when Catholic priests hear it…
They diddle kids? Really? This is what the Catholic Church is going with?
[h/t Matthew Yglesias via Tbogg]
Well, at least they are not blaming us.
but they are ignoring that this has been a documented problem for AT LEAST 700 years.
It’s in chaucer and Bocaccio. it’s in the recent irish report going back a century. It’s in a book on a problem in 1620 called “Fallen Order” by Karen Liebreich.
Putting it another way, it is IN THE GODDAMNED and GODDAMING CATHOLIC CHURCH!
Every time I think I’ve heard it all some crazy sh*t like this comes along….
Disgusting intial response to the report by Bill Donahue on his website. He’s blaming gays of course.
The man is an apologist for rapists.
My take on the little that is stated in NYT is that it would be very foolish to assume that just because the 70s-90s saw an increase in reporting of abuse, does not mean there wasn’t plenty going on before that.
“Hippies Caused Catholic Priest Child Sexual Abuse Problem, Says Catholic Church”
For the church, the problem was never the sexual abuse, it was always the exposure of it. The latter 20th century culture didn’t cause the abuse, it facilitated its exposure by weakening the church’s power to maintain its traditional culture of deference.
This just shows me once again that the church and their “independent” group that did the study just don’t understand what the scandal is actually about. If they had turned these priests over to the authorities when the abuse happened the scandal wouldn’t have happened. And Bill Donohue is just a bigoted nutbag.
*facepalm*
*headdesk*
Really? REALLY?!
Mario would be impressed by that leap of logic.
How about: REPRESSSION NEVER WORKS. PERIOD.