Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI retired in 2013 overwhelmed by the clerical sex abuse scandals besetting his papacy. In a 6,000-word essay published just before Holy Week, Benedict blamed the sexual revolution of the 1960s for the Catholic Church’s clerical sex abuse, which is directly at odds with Pope Francis’s view that the scandal is the result of an abuse of clerical power.
“In the 1960s an egregious event occurred on a scale unprecedented in history,” former Pope Benedict has written in a German magazine titled Klerusblatt. Aiming to explain child abuse by priests, he lays the blame on society in an extraordinary apologia: “It could be said that in the 20 years from 1960 to 1980, the hitherto binding standards regarding sexuality collapsed entirely…”
He cites as evidence the introduction of sex education, with German and Austrian governments in the 1960s showing schoolchildren a film of sexual intercourse. This, in turn, he asserts, led to pornographic films becoming more common in society. On Good Friday 1970, he claims he saw billboards of naked people embracing.
“Closely linked” to this, in his opinion, is violence. He claims that sex films were not allowed on aeroplanes because violence would break out (a statement for which absolutely no proof can be found anywhere by those who have searched for it).
“Clothes,” he adds, also “provoked aggression”. One guesses that (like departed Archbishop Michael Gonzi in the 1960s), he means female clothes.
Moreover, the pontiff-emeritus triumphantly adds that “paedophilia was now diagnosed as allowed and appropriate… It was theorised only a short time ago as quite legitimate”.
Except that it was not. Not ever. Only the maddest and most twisted minorities have ever thought child sex abuse “appropriate”. No civilised country legitimises it.
A first reaction to this strange essay would be amused compassion for a celibate who left the papacy six years ago claiming “failing strength of mind and body”. Yet, aspects of Benedict’s diatribe deserve attention and examination.
The change was less a tsunami of filth and more an overdue dispersal of choking fog.
First, because a seventh of the world’s population is united and enjoined by its Catholicism to revere the throne of Peter. And, second, because inside the Vatican itself the more emotionally intelligent approach adopted by Pope Francis is resented, and being resisted, by conservative clerics and laity.
The first nonsense in his essay is Benedict’s idea that the 1960s – represented by the Rolling Stones and the contraceptive pill, as in some shallow cultural commentary on the era – were an unprecedented earthquake upsetting a steady world and hurling us into a knickerless and trouser-less, rutting free-for-all. As someone whose love life started in the 1950s, experience suggests otherwise.
Sexual standards have indeed changed, sometimes in ways one might shudder at, but the thoughtless, anything-goes culture is far from universal. Faithful intimacy was – and still is – regarded as a treasure by the vast majority.
The change in the 1960s and 1970s, in short, was less a tsunami of filth and more an overdue dispersal of choking fog. The old “binding standards” could be as evil and prurient as porn itself. They affirmed unanswerable patriarchal power which could be abused (still evident in Catholic Malta) and the submission of women, including marital rape.
This outbreak from an abdicated pope is essentially a cry of resentment about the unstoppable secularisation of the world
The “standards” of which Benedict approves gloried in preserving ignorance in adolescents with tragic results. They gave little mercy to single mothers and their confiscated babies and placed far heavier judgement on “fallen” girls than men.
If Benedict believes that before the wicked 1960s everyone was either chaste or willingly acknowledged themselves as sinners, he is severely deluded.
As for his line that paedophilia “did not become acute until the second half of the 1980s”, he forgets not only that children have been prostituted throughout history but that there are old men alive in today’s Ireland and the US (and throughout the Catholic West) who remember rape by their priests well before 1960.
There is no reason to believe that they were the first generation to suffer.
That crime is not about the 1960s. It’s about clerical power at all levels, the deference demanded of the laity and the selfish lust of those priests who think themselves immune.
Benedict believes that the sexual revolution was part of a slippery slope to acceptance of paedophilia. “Part of the physiognomy of the revolution of 1968,” he asserts, “was that paedophilia was also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.” The “dissolution of the moral teaching and authority of the Church” quickly followed.
“The extensive collapse of the next generation of priests in those years and the very high number of ‘defrockings’ were a consequence of these processes,” he asserts. “Why did paedophilia reach such proportions? Ultimately, the reason is the absence of God.”
In his ill-judged essay, Benedict appears to defend the inaction of bishops against abusive priests and the belief that “temporary suspension from priestly office had to be sufficient to bring about purification and clarification”.
Even when admitting that action should now go further, he talks (as some have done in the pages of this newspaper) about the rights of the accused priests. Not the victims. This is of concern. But equally significant is his gloom about Church liberalisation in general.
This outbreak from an abdicated pope is essentially a cry of resentment about the unstoppable secularisation of the world. That’s an absolutely fair complaint. Believing that a society not centred on God “loses its measure” is not offensive. Many faiths share the sentiment. But what is dangerous is the conviction that because the Catholic Church holds the one truth, the highest priority of all is protecting it.
The problem is that we all know where that view has led. It has inspired a culture of clerical concealment, intimidation and complicity. Secular law and humane common sense, however, must be allowed to let in the light because only in this way are raped children heard and given justice. Any suggestion that the Catholic Church should conceal again what was happening is unacceptable.
Some have argued that Benedict is being manipulated by Pope Francis’s conservative enemies and that it underlines the need for clear rules on the role of retired popes. With this essay, Benedict has understandably been accused of wrongly blaming society, not the Church, for the scandals that have plagued it over two decades. But he also stands accused of seeking to undermine the views of his successor.
The essay is directed at emboldening Catholic conservatives who loathe Francis’s mercy-before-doctrine papacy and look to Benedict as a defender of the Church’s “true values”.
The knives are out for Francis. The Catholic Church could go backwards again.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece