The rash of stories about priestly sexual abuse in Europe, especially in Ireland and Germany, has put many Catholics on the defensive. They should not be. While sexual molestation of any kind is always indefensible, the politics surrounding this story is also indefensible.
Employers from every walk of life, in both the U.S. and Europe, have long handled cases of alleged sex abuse by employees as an internal matter. Rarely have employers called the cops, and none was required to do so.
I'm guessing Donohue must have been in a coma when females teachers are arrested for sexual assault on their students, as it was highly publicized and was a major topic of discussion within the conservative realm.
Why, for example, are the psychologists and psychiatrists who pledged to "fix" abusers treated so lightly? After all, employers from the corporate world to the Catholic Church were told over and over again that therapy works and to give the offender a second chance.
Indeed, the zeitgeist of the day was that rehabilitation not only works, it is virtuous. That such advice was wildly oversold can now be agreed upon by almost everyone, and that is precisely why it smacks of politics to deny how strongly held the rehabilitative ideal was. Had the Catholic Church simply tossed the offenders out, it would have been branded as heartless.
No. The church would have been seen as taking a very harsh, and moral, stance against the molestation and rape of children. From not only my perspective, but that of a plurality of people within both the religious and secular worlds, but the Catholic church has a rich and storied tradition of protecting those that have sexually assaulted children.
No one is foolish enough to believe that simply having a pedophile recline back on a couch and tell his life story to a psychiatrist is going to prevent this from ever happening again. So to essentially claim that it is the fault of the behavioral sciences field - in essence claiming you were duped into letting these priests to stick around - is further proof that the Catholic Church lacks that ability to take responsibility for their membership.
The hyper-concentration on the Catholic Church is not by accident. The Church preaches an ethic of sexual restraint -- a profoundly countercultural idea -- so when a priest fails, it's tempting to highlight it. Human nature being what it is, that's understandable. But it's also immoral. Quite frankly, if sexual abuse is wrong, it should not matter what the identity of the abuser is. Selective justice is the highest form of injustice.
Donohue, more so in this piece than just about anything else he's ever written or spoke, is basically telling everyone that the Catholic Church should not be put under any type of scrutiny. He wants you to laud the accomplishments of the church, but when it comes to something like sexual abuse, then we aren't supposed to speak of it. But we do, because the church ( and not just Catholics ) set themselves up as institutions of purity and spirituality.
Why is this man defending the molestation and rape of children?
