The newly elected president of the U.S. bishops’ conference (USCCB) is correct in linking clerical sexual abuse to homosexuality, declares Catholic League president Bill Donohue.
Archbishop Timothy Broglio has been pilloried by the Catholic left this week because of statements emphasizing the preponderance of male victims of clerical sexual abuse, but he should not allow himself to be bullied because he is correct, writes Donohue, who holds a doctorate in sociology and published an authoritative study of clerical abuse.
During a press conference following his election this week as USCCB chief, Archbishop Broglio was asked whether he stood by a comment he made in 2018 that the clerical sexual abuse crisis in the USA is “directly related to homosexuality” and he did not back down, Dr. Donohue notes.
“What Broglio said is undeniably true,” Donohue writes, despite the lies of those “who persist in promoting the myth that homosexuality has nothing to do with the sexual abuse of minors.”
A 2011 study by John Jay College of Criminal Justice found that 81 percent of the victims of clergy abuse in the United States were males and the vast majority of these were post-pubescent, Donohue notes, an incontrovertible fact explored in depth in his 2021 book The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and the Causes.
While many of the abusing priests do not self-identify as “gay,” the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of abuse was, in fact, homosexual in nature.
The true error has been to qualify the abuse as “pedophilia,” Donohue observes, since less than 4 percent of the incidents fit this description.
“While self-identity is an interesting subjective phenomenon, it is no substitute for objective reality. The fact is the clergy sexual abuse crisis was caused overwhelmingly by homosexual priests, and attempts to deny this verity are intellectually dishonest,” Donohue states.
The intervening variable between homosexuality and the sexual abuse of minors is immaturity, Donohue asserts, since homosexuals are more likely to be “emotionally and sexually immature.”
Freud attributed homosexuality to “a certain arrest of sexual development” and the John Jay researchers themselves observed that many accused priests cited their own immaturity as a factor.
“Archbishop Broglio was right in 2018 and he is right today. He doesn’t have to walk back anything. It is his uninformed critics who need to do so,” Donohue concludes.
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