A lot of people are pointing to the recent sex abuse scandals (the McCarrick scandal and the Pennsylvania grand jury report) as proof that Catholicism is false. In at least one important regard, though, these scandals prove just the opposite.

I. The Unintended Silver Lining

Suppose there was a group claiming that chewing tobacco caused mouth cancer (this was once a controversial claim, after all). Now suppose it was revealed that several executives of this company were regular chewers, and that this fact was revealed only years later when it was clear that they had, in fact, contracted mouth cancer.

That would surely reveal some unhappy things about those executives – they would be exposed as hypocrites, and people would reasonably wonder whether or not THEY believed their own message. But it would also, ironically, lend support to the group’s message. After all, they warned against the dangers of chewing tobacco, and when these warnings were ignored within their own ranks, the dire consequences came true.

The Church has been waging a losing battle with most of the rest of the world for some time on how seriously to take sex. The other side in this debate defends pornography, fornication, masturbation, sodomy, and sometimes even adultery on the grounds that “sex is no big deal.” The Huffington Post, in an entry aptly titled “Why Sex Is No Big Deal” makes the case this way:

Sex is certainly a worthy subject of inquiry, being arguably the most powerful socio-economic force in America. It drives the $600 billion fashion apparel business and the $50-billion cosmetic industry, as well as the huge, multifaceted entertainment industry, in which a single Hollywood film grossing less than $100 million is hardly worth making. Sex makes millions for psychologists, lawyers, artists, pharmaceutical companies, and sex toy manufacturers. It provides a bully pulpit to politicians and pastors, to abortion rights activists, to LGBT advocates, and mental health workers. It sells toothpaste and tires, detergents and bathtubs, coffeepots, cars, and computers. Sex empowers lovers, grants couples pleasure and progeny, and is the most-often-cited cause of divorce. It teases and taunts, comforts and terrifies, and it holds our society in thrall. It shouldn’t be this way, anthropologist Ava Mir-Ausziehen told the CatalysCon audience. “Sex isn’t some strange, ethereal construct. It’s as normal and necessary as eating and sleeping.” Mir-Ausziehen believes that “when we regard sex as something apart from the mundane, we’re causing anxiety, fear, and dysfunction.”

By this reasoning, the only thing we have to fear about sex is our fear about sex.

But the sexual abuse scandal proves that this isn’t true. The reason sex is such a powerful force (for good, for ill, and for capitalism) is that it’s something powerfully different than eating or sleeping. Adults regularly force children to eat and sleep when they don’t want to, whether it’s forcing them to eat their vegetables or to take a nap. Even in adulthood, you may find yourself forced to go to a business lunch when you’re not hungry, or to go to bed when you’re not tired (although in adulthood, it’s usually being forced to be awake when we’d rather be sleeping). There are even small physical invasions, like the formality of shaking hands even when you don’t want to. These occurrences may be mildly obnoxious, and you might be annoyed for a little bit, but they’re soon forgotten. What you don’t have is trauma that shatters your life for decades, as we’ve seen with the victims of rape and sexual abuse.

I can hear now the objection that this is something fundamentally different – the molestation of a child is on a whole different scale than consensual sex between adults. Understood. But the severity of rape and molestation point to something important — and something that we’ve spent a long time denying as a culture — about the unique power and importance of sexuality. The Church’s argument for sexual restriction isn’t because sex is dirty or evil. It’s because it’s sacred and powerful. As the Gospel Coalition’s Ray Ortlund puts it, “Sex is like fire. In the fireplace, it keeps us warm. Outside the fireplace, it burns the house down.” Or as this XKCD comic reminds us, the people who want sex to be simple repeatedly forget that people are complicated:

II. The Pedophilia Connection

It’s worth remembering that it was EXACTLY this “sex is no big deal” mentality that helped to fuel the sex abuse crisis. A great many of the cases now coming to light involve abuse that occurred in the 1970s and 80s, at a time in which there was a concerted push to normalize pedophilia – particularly as a wing of the gay rights movement. The BBC recounts the shocking history (focusing, of course, on the events in Britain):

The Paedophile Information Exchange was affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties – now Liberty – in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But how did pro-paedophile campaigners operate so openly? A gay rights conference backs a motion in favour of paedophilia. The story is written up by a national newspaper as “Child-lovers win fight for role in Gay Lib”. It sounds like a nightmarish plotline from dystopian fiction. But this happened in the UK. The conference took place in Sheffield and the newspaper was the Guardian. The year was 1975. [….] PIE was formed in 1974. It campaigned for “children’s sexuality”. It wanted the government to axe or lower the age of consent. It offered support to adults “in legal difficulties concerning sexual acts with consenting ‘under age’ partners”. The real aim was to normalise sex with children. Journalist Christian Wolmar remembers their tactics. “They didn’t emphasise that this was 50-year-old men wanting to have sex with five-year-olds. They presented it as the sexual liberation of children, that children should have the right to sex,” he says. It’s an ideology that seems chilling now. But PIE managed to gain support from some professional bodies and progressive groups. It received invitations from student unions, won sympathetic media coverage and found academics willing to push its message.

One of PIE’s leaders openly boasted to newspapers that “I am a paedophile. I am attracted to boys from about 10, 11, and 12 years of age. I may have had sexual relations with children, but it would be unwise to say,” and yet “on at least two occasions the Campaign for Homosexual Equality conference passed motions in PIE’s favour.” The National Council for Civil Liberties argued that “childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in with an adult result in no identifiable damage.” This was nowhere near as fringe as you may be imagining: the NCCL was headed by Harriet Harman, who went on to become Labour Party Chair, and Leader of the House of Commons.

Such claims were not limited to Britain or to the 1970s and 80s. In 2009, Germaine Greer (“Australia’s most famous feminist” and “one of the godmothers of second-wave feminism“) responded to a case of lesbian child molestation by a teacher by saying, “I’m supposed to think that falling in love with people under the legal age of consent is evidence of deep perversion and vileness, but I don’t.” She explained further that “in Shakespeare’s play of star-crossed love, we are told repeatedly that Juliet is 14. We don’t know how old Romeo is. There’s nothing to say he isn’t 27.”

In America, figures like Allen Ginsberg and Harry Hay (“one of the most important and influential activists in the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual (LGBT) movements”) were open supporters and advocates for the pedophilic North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), and NAMBLA remained an official part of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) until 1993, when conservatives (led by Jesse Helms) used the NAMBLA-ILGA connection to have ILGA’s consultative status on the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) revoked. At the heart of this advocacy for pedophilia is the repeated claim that it’s harmless sex, nothing more than a rite of passage – particularly for homosexuals. As Harry Hay explained, “if the parents and friends of gays are truly friends of gays, they would know from their gay kids that the relationship with an older man is precisely what thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-old kids need more than anything else in the world.” By this logic, as long as the children or teenagers think that they want the sexual encounter, they’re consenting, and their molester is doing them a favor.

As late as 2000, we find Vanderbilt’s Robert Ehman (and even later, the psychologist Bruce Rind) arguing that “the case for a causal connection between a child’s sex with an adult and psychological harm is at best inconclusive, and that “much of the harm from pedophilia arises from the negative social reaction to it,” which “provides an argument against pedophilia only when it cannot be successfully concealed from public view.” In other words, if you cover up the pedophilia, nobody gets hurt.

These days, that argument doesn’t fly. Any movement – even on the radical left – to normalize pedophilia is over, and Vice Magazine is left asking, Whatever Happened to NAMBLA? Mary Eberstadt has argued convincingly that “what happened” was the Catholic sex abuse scandals:

First, the scandals made clear that one point was no longer in dispute: The sexual abuse of the young leaves real and lasting scars. In the years before the scandals, as the foregoing examples and many others show, a number of writers contested exactly that. Today, however, thanks to a great many victims testifying otherwise in the course of the priest scandals—it’s hard to imagine them daring to do the same. All those grown men breaking down on camera as they looked back on their childhood, describing in heartrending testimony what it meant to be robbed of their innocence: It will take a long time to wipe such powerful images from the public mind again. At least for now, no one would dare declare that the victims had gotten what was coming to them, or that they had somehow asked for it, or that seduction by an adult wasn’t as bad as all that—three notions that were most definitely making the rounds before the scandals broke. Moreover, that the vast majority of victims were male—81 percent, according to the definitive study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice—proved a particularly potent antidote to the poison about boys that had been circulating earlier.

But these conclusions can’t be confined to cases of pedophilia or statutory rape. You cannot credibly claim that sex between an adult and a teenager is life-shattering the day before the kid’s 18th birthday, and harmless fun the day after.

Nor, if you do treat the 18th birthday like magic, can you avoid minimizing the abuse of adult victims. One of the accusations against now-Archbishop McCarrick is that he made his seminarians share a bed with him, wherein he would sexually harass them. If sex between adults is just like eating or sleeping, it’s hard to see (a) how McCarrick can be blamed for ignoring his promise of celibacy – after all, you can’t expect a man to go without eating or sleeping!; and (b) how the seminarians could be considered victims (or at least, any more than employees or subordinates who have to endure the triviality of an unpleasant work meal).

III. The Catholic Message vs. The Catholic Messengers

These abuse scandals discredit hundreds of Catholic priests (many of them now deceased), but it confirms what the Catholic Church has been claiming on sexual issues. None of this reduces the severity of the sins (and felonies) of which these rotten clerics are accused. It’s just to distinguish the message from the messengers. In Matthew 23:2-7, Jesus Christ warns,

The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; so practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do; for they preach, but do not practice. They bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with their finger. They do all their deeds to be seen by men; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues, and salutations in the market places, and being called rabbi by men.

The Pharisees didn’t practice what they preached – they simply said the right things for public approval and to secure their social position. But it’s easy to overlook that Jesus instructs the crowds to “practice and observe whatever they tell you.” Just because someone’s a hypocrite, it doesn’t mean that they’re wrong.

So, too, the disgraceful hypocrisy of some Catholic priests and bishops doesn’t invalidate the message that they preached… even if they ignored the message themselves. And that message is an important one, one which I wish that they had listened to, both for their own and for their victims’ sake, So what is that message? It’s about what St. John Paul II called the “nuptial meaning of the body“:

The human body, with its sex, and its masculinity and femininity seen in the very mystery of creation, is not only a source of fruitfulness and procreation, as in the whole natural order. It includes right from the beginning the nuptial attribute, that is, the capacity of expressing love, that love in which the person becomes a gift and—by means of this gift—fulfills the meaning of his being and existence.

Sexuality is both powerful and inherently meaning-laden. That’s key to understanding the beauty and significance. Sex doesn’t just mean whatever we want it to mean, any more than we can turn a punch in the face into a friendly greeting. By the very action of giving yourself to another person sexually, you’re giving them all of yourself. If you understand this, you can see why the Church cares so much about making sure that people are only having sex within marriage – that is, that the inherent meaning of sexuality (total gift of yourself to the other person) matches the circumstances (a lifelong bond in which you have given yourselves to each other entirely).

The Catholic bishops and priests who caused so much harm, and wrecked so many lives didn’t cause that harm by living out the Gospel too much. The problem wasn’t that they were too Catholic. The problem is that they weren’t Catholic enough. They failed to live according to the teachings of the Church, and in many cases, seemingly didn’t even try. If they had practiced what they (or, at least, their Church) preached, the entire sexual abuse scandal would have been avoided. It’s a dark day for Catholics, but a day of vindication for Catholic teaching.

It’s a remarkable thing, if you think about it. When the whole world seemed (from the 1960s onwards) to want to treat sex as something merely recreational, something harmless (or, if harmful, only so because of public mores and shame). The Church kept on insisting, kept on proclaiming something very different, something that she wasn’t succeeding in persuading even some of her own ministers on, by the looks of things. But at the end of the day, the scandal shows that she was right to insist in claiming that sex is more powerful than we might expect or might desire. And if the Church is right on this, maybe she’s right on all of those other areas in which she proclaims something countercultural and unexpected, like that her Founder rose from the dead.