Pope blames Society at large for church’s humiliating record on child abuse by priests
This is flame deflection writ large Vatican style. Trying to say that child sexual abuse is considered normal in any modern society goes well beyond the pale.
He’s beating around the bush here, but trying to blame the Church’s and priest’s evil on society at large or secular humanism, take your pick. That might work if the church itself were not so withdrawn from society at large that they Think it is ok to violate laws to protect their pedophiles.
The Pope said the church was well aware of the gravity of this sin committed by priests, and of the church’s responsibility. But nor could he be silent about ”the context of these times”.
”There is a market in child pornography that seems in some way to be considered more and more normal by society,” he said on Monday. ”The psychological destruction of children, in which human persons are reduced to articles of merchandise, is a terrifying sign of the times.”
He also said he heard from bishop after bishop in developing countries how sex tourism threatened an entire generation, while the problem of drugs was extending ”its octopus tentacles around the entire world”.
He criticised moral relativism from the 1970s that discarded absolutes, leaving only a ”better than” and ”worse than”. ”Morality is replaced by a calculus of consequences, and in the process it ceases to exist.”
The Pope was pessimistic about the future, saying: ”For all its new hopes and possibilities, our world is at the same time troubled by the sense that moral consensus is collapsing, consensus without which juridical and political structures cannot function.”
H/T abourque at Michigan Skeptics
The thing most aggravating by this pope’s statement is that prior to secular law gaining full authority in the West it was religious authority that was used to allow child sexual abuse and child marriage. In cases where you see organized long term child sexual abuse practiced it is often fundamentalist religious organizations who are practicing and promoting it: you find it in the US with sub-cults of FLDS and Evangelicals, and in the Sub Continent of Asia and Africa it’s the Taliban and other tribal religious authorities promoting and practicing it.
