It's the '60's!!

Oh, this is choice. It can't be the church's fault! It's gotta be something else!

When are people going to realize that religion is simply toxic to the soul, to society and the world at large. Pull your nose out of the "Good Book" and take some personal responsibility, people!!

Church study blames Swinging Sixties for deviant priests

Kelly McParland May 20, 2011

If you hadn’t already given up hoping the Catholic Church would belatedly awake to the seriousness of the sex abuse scandal that has driven untold numbers of formerly-faithful Catholics from their pews, this should do it for you: A study commissioned by U.S. bishops has concluded that the inability of priests to keep their hands off young boys is not a reflection of anything inherently wrong with the Church itself. It’s all the fault of Woodstock.

The study, conducted by researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, and billed as the most expensive and extensive study of sexual abuse in the Church to date, maintains that priests fell victim to the expanded permissiveness of society, especially way back in the 1960s, when they found themselves inadequately prepared to deal with the temptations and social upheaval of the times.

According to the Religion News Service, the study blames a spike in abuse cases in the ’60s and ’70s to ill-equipped priests who “lost their way in the social cataclysm of the sexual revolution.” Trained mostly in the 1940s and 1950s, they found themselves overwhelmed by an era in which liberalized attitudes led to greater acceptance of drug use, premarital sex, divorce and a general questioning of values and accepted behaviours. It also concluded that:

• Priests were no more likely to abuse children than anyone else in society.

• Fewer than 5% of abusive priests could be classed as paedophiles because most of their victims were between ages 11 and 14.

• Priests’ vow of celibacy did not make them any more likely to abuse children.

• Gay priests were no more likely to abuse children than straight priests.

• Better screening by seminaries wouldn’t have helped, because “no single psychological, developmental, or behavioral characteristic differentiated priests who abused minors from those who did not.”

Put another way, here’s the argument the Church is hoping you’ll buy:

• You can’t blame us for the fact that an army of deviant priests spent years abusing helpless children, since there were a lot of temptations around. (Ignore the fact that the entire basis of Catholic teaching is the resistance of temptation.

• Priests are no more likely to abuse than anyone else (and hey, why should we expect people who have devoted their lives to God to be any less abusive than the rest of society?)

• They weren’t really abusing kids. Most of the victims were almost teenagers!

• Gay priests and straight priests are pretty much even on the abuse front, which proves…. Um, we’ll have to get back to you on that.

• Celibacy “is not directly to blame”, so presumably married priests would be just as enthusiastic about abusing young boys. By the same token, if abusers hadn’t joined the priesthood, they could be out there teaching in schools or coaching kids’ hockey teams, where the opportunities to abuse are just as great, if not greater.

• It’s all old hat anyway, since the big increase in abuse was in the 1960s, and priests today actually abuse far fewer children than they used to.

All of which suggests that, despite a decade or more of revelations, accompanied by sickening details of abusive priests being shuffled from one parish to another while their crimes were hushed up by a Vatican hierarchy skilled at mouthing the words of repentance … Despite all that, the upper echelons of Catholicism remain overwhelmingly concerned with finding a way to absolve themselves of blame while paying reparations and hoping the problem will finally go away. What they don’t seem to understand is that it can’t go away as long as they refuse to accept that the fault lies at the heart of the Church itself, not in Woodstock, or the Sixties, or the difficulties of spotting bad priests when they turn up at the seminary door. Until then, all the cockamamie studies in Christendom won’t change a thing.

Original.