The Vatican’s summit on clerical sex abuse ended Sunday without ever confronting the strong statistical links between homosexuality and priestly abuse, confirming warnings from a number of prelates.
Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, one of the summit’s organizers and a defender of gay priests, denied any relationship between homosexuality and abuse, and dismissed claims that “homosexual people are more prone to abuse children than straight people.”
Another spokesman for the summit, Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna, took a similar position, stating that homosexuality does not predispose a person to sinful actions.
Homosexuality and heterosexuality are “human conditions,” Scicluna told reporters this week, and “they are not something that predisposes to sin.” The archbishop’s comments would seem to contradict the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states that the homosexual inclination is “objectively disordered,” meaning that it disposes to sin.
Recent studies of priestly abuse in Belgium and Germany, as well as a comprehensive report produced in the United States following the 2002 sex abuse crisis, suggest that males make up at least three out of four victims of clerical abuse.
As Catholic League president Dr. William Donohue has noted, homosexuality does not cause someone to be a predator, but “homosexuals are disproportionately represented in the sexual abuse of minors.”
A 2005 report found that “a number of studies performed over a period spanning more than half a century — many of which were performed by homosexuals or their sympathizers — have shown that an extremely large percentage of sexually active homosexuals also participate in child sexual molestation.”
“This is not ‘homophobia’ or ‘hatred,’ this is simple scientific fact,” the report said.
As just one example, the report noted that Alfred Kinsey, the preeminent sexual researcher of the last century who was himself homosexual, “found in 1948 that 37 percent of all male homosexuals admitted to having sex with children under 17 years old.”
Similarly, a 1989 study in the Journal of Sex Research noted that “the proportion of sex offenders against male children among homosexual men is substantially larger than the proportion of sex offenders against female children among heterosexual men,” leading to the conclusion that “the development of pedophilia is more closely linked with homosexuality than with heterosexuality.”
None of this suggests that all or most homosexuals are predators, but to completely ignore the statistical correlation between homosexuality and child abuse when discussing the latter seems negligent at best.
Just prior to the Vatican summit, a former papal nuncio to the United States warned that the meeting was unlikely to be successful because of an unwillingness to address the root causes of the crisis, notably the extensive homosexual network in the Church.
“Why does the word ‘homosexuality’ never appear in recent official documents of the Holy See?” asked Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò in a recent symposium, noting that “the overwhelming majority of abuse has been inflicted on post-pubescent boys by homosexual clerics.”
“It is mere hypocrisy to condemn the abuse and claim to sympathize with the victims without facing up to this fact honestly. A spiritual revitalization of the clergy is necessary, but it will be ultimately ineffectual if it does not address this problem,” the archbishop stated.
The existence of an extensive homosexual network in the Church, which has been affirmed over and over by numerous prelates and observers with direct knowledge of the situation, affects the sex abuse crisis in another way as well, with the protection offered offenders by a homoclerical culture.
In his statement, Viganò touched on this point as well, wondering aloud why Pope Francis continues to elevate “notorious” homosexuals to positions of influence if he is serious about eradicating the problem.
“Why does Pope Francis keep and even call as his close collaborators people who are notorious homosexuals?” Viganò said. “Why has he refused to answer legitimate and sincere questions about these appointments? In doing so he has lost credibility on his real will to reform the Curia and fight the corruption.”
Last fall, a prominent American theologian predicted that ongoing revelations about clergy sex abuse will ignite “a #MeToo movement about homosexual abuse” both in seminaries and among priests.
Janet Smith, a well-known author and theologian at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, said that although homosexual abuse in seminaries had been partially cleaned up, she fully expects “a #MeToo movement about homosexual abuse in seminaries in the past and in the priesthood both in the past and currently.”
“It won’t be easy for men to come forward — they are likely mortified that they submitted to the vile approaches made to them,” she told the National Catholic Register. “We will need some mechanism for reporting that does not endanger their privacy and protects them from retaliation.”
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