When it comes to the Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandal, the one voice literally no one was asking to hear from has finally chimed in with a downright embarrassing response.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI said in an 11-page letter to be published in a German magazine for priests, Klerusblatt, that the scandal is the fault of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and more liberal sexual ethics… which is to say he’s placing more blame on gay people than the Catholic Church itself.

Among the freedoms that the Revolution of 1968 sought to fight for was this all-out sexual freedom, one which no longer conceded any norms. The mental collapse was also linked to a propensity for violence. That is why sex films were no longer allowed on airplanes because violence would break out among the small community of passengers. And since the clothing of that time equally provoked aggression, school principals also made attempts at introducing school uniforms with a view to facilitating a climate of learning. Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ’68 was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate. … The long-prepared and ongoing process of dissolution of the Christian concept of morality was, as I have tried to show, marked by an unprecedented radicalism in the 1960s. This dissolution of the moral teaching authority of the Church necessarily had to have an effect on the diverse areas of the Church… In various seminaries homosexual cliques were established, which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the climate in the seminaries…

It’s impressive, really, how the Catholic Church can take an awful situation and always find a way to make it worse.

His arguments make no sense — pedophilia wasn’t some hip new fad in the 1960s, and homosexuality isn’t synonymous with men in power abusing boys with none.

He didn’t stop there, adding that it was only recently that we realized pedophilia was wrong… and that atheism bears some of the blame.

… That is the case with pedophilia. It was theorized only a short time ago as quite legitimate, but it has spread further and further. And now we realize with shock that things are happening to our children and young people that threaten to destroy them. The fact that this could also spread in the Church and among priests ought to disturb us in particular. Why did pedophilia reach such proportions? Ultimately, the reason is the absence of God…

Or, better yet, it was belief in God that provided cover for the abuse to continue as long as it did.

As one Catholic theologian noted, the entire letter “is an embarrassingly wrong explanation for the systemic abuse of children and its coverup.” How embarrassing is it? Well, the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue thinks the letter is wonderful: “Thank God we still have the seminal voice of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI to guide us. He is indispensable.”

If that guy is praising you, you’ve failed at life.

Even though Benedict is no longer at the head of the Church, his ideas aren’t unique, and that’s the problem. There are plenty of Catholic defenders eager to blame “homosexuality” for priests’ crimes while absolving the Church of most or all of its complicity. This is just a reminder that the poison lies within the Church, and the Church can’t be relied on to fix its own problems.

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