Leprosy in the house!

On 14 July 2014, Pope Francis I was quoted thus in an interview with Eugenio Scalfari, of the Italian Catholic newspaper, La Repubblica:

"This state of affairs is intolerable… This leprosy is also present in our house…

Many of my colleagues who are working against it assure me with reliable data that paedophilia inside the Church is at the level of 2 per cent. This finding should reassure me but I must tell you that I do not reassuring at all. I consider it very serious indeed. Among the two percent who are paedophiles are even bishops and cardinals.”

Shortly after the interview was published, Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said that the report had ‘captured the spirit’ of the conversation, but denied that the Pope had said any cardinals were paedophiles.

Regarding the political elite of the 1960s, do you remember what 16-year-old prostitute, Mandy Rice-Davies, once said:

"They would say that, wouldn’t they?"

On 20 December 2010, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the Roman curia thus:

“We had begun the Year for Priests with great joy… (but) it unfolded so differently from the way we had expected. In this year, of all years, and to a degree we could not have imagined, we came to know of abuse of minors committed by priests… and, under the mantle of the sacred, profoundly wound human persons in their childhood, damaging them for a whole lifetime…

But neither can we remain silent regarding the context of these times in which these events have come to light. There is a market in child pornography that seems in some way to be considered more and more normal by society. The psychological destruction of children, in which human persons are reduced to articles of merchandise, is a terrifying sign of the times….

In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children… It was maintained, even within the realm of Catholic theology, that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself… Everything depends on the circumstances.”

Pope Benedict XVI blows the whistle on the sexually ‘liberated’ 1970s nicely here. 

Those would be the liberated times where Harriet Harman, MP, her husband Jack Dromey, MP, and Tony Blair’s former Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, were (via their leadership roles in the National Council for Civil Liberties) all content to excuse the behaviours of the perverts of the Paedophile Information Exchange.

However, is the former Pope trying to downplay the paedophilic crimes of the Catholic clergy (and others) by suggesting that ‘context’ somehow diminishes the evil done? Is he seriously suggesting that because evil, as demonstrated in this instance by ‘child pornography,’ is ‘considered more and more normal by society,’ that we should be more ‘understanding’ or, indeed, forgiving of it?

I think he might be, don’t you? If this is the case I must say that I’m not impressed by the argument. The ‘psychological destruction of children’ caused by the paedophile, those who excuse his destructive behaviours, those who cover them up and those who pretend not to notice them, far outweighs any excusatory ‘context.’

At least it does in the hearts and minds of the righteous.

As for ‘the realm of Catholic theology’ and the 'two percent who are... bishops and cardinals,' I’m not so sure.