Homosexuality not to blame for sex abuse, say bishops

BY MARK GREAVES
THE BISHOPS of England and Wales have contradicted claims by a senior Vatican cardinal that paedophilia is linked to homosexuality.
Fr Marcus Stock, general secretary of the bishops’ conference, said there was “no empirical data” to support such a view.
His words came after Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, told reporters in Chile that, while there was no proven link between celibacy and paedophilia, research had shown “a relationship between homosexuality and paedophilia”.
His comments were swiftly clarified by Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi, who said Church authorities were not qualified to make “general statements of a specifically psychological or medical nature” and instead had to rely on experts.
Fr Lombardi pointed to research which found that 60 per cent of 3,000 abuse cases handled by the Vatican involved adolescent boys. Thirty per cent involved girls and the remaining 10 per cent of cases involved paedophilia “in the strict sense”.
“Obviously this data refers to the problem of abuse by priests and not to statistics regarding the general population,” he said.
Fr Stock issued a more forceful rebuttal of Cardinal Bertone’s comments in a statement that had the approval of all the English and Welsh bishops.
He said: “The consensus among researchers is that the sexual abuse of children is not a question of sexual ‘orientation’, whether heterosexual or homosexual, but of a disordered attraction or ‘fixation’.
“Many abusers of children have never developed the capacity for mature adult relationships. Instead, their sexual attractions focus on children – boys, girls, or both. In the sexual abuse of children the issue is the sexual fixation of the abusers and not their sexual orientation.” The statement was welcomed by gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, who said it was “intelligent, calm and rational”.
Cardinal Bertone’s comments also drew strong criticism from Scottish Bishop Peter Moran of Aberdeen, who reportedly described it as “stupid”. He told the EU Observer, an online news service, that he was “shocked to know that someone in Rome had said that this [paedophilia] is a problem of homosexuality”.
The bishop said: “This kind of abuse is found in all parts of society – in families, in heterosexual situations, in homosexual situations. It is not attached to any of those.” He said that the sex abuse coverup in Ireland had been caused by an “exaggerated deference” to clergy and urged Christian leaders in Europe not to be similarly deferential. “To put it very simply, if the Church says something that is wrong or stupid, even Christian leaders should have the courage to say: ‘No. I disagree with that. You are wrong. That was a stupid thing to say’.” Meanwhile, Bishop Malcolm McMahon of Nottingham, speaking on the BBC’s Hard Talk programme, said the Vatican response to the sex abuse crisis had been “too defensive”.
He said: “That doesn’t go down well with people nowadays. Transparency is what we expect, is what we practise here in the Church in England and Wales, and we would hope that other countries would follow our example.” He said there were “good reasons” why the Vatican emphasised confidentiality, both to preserve the safety of missionary priests and to protect the reputation of priests falsely accused of wrongdoing.
But he said he believed the Vatican would follow the same “sharp learning curve” as America and England and Wales in the way that it dealt with clergy sex abuse.
Asked why the Vatican had “got it so wrong” in its communication, Bishop McMahon said: “I think they are probably not very good at it. The Vatican is seen as a big monolithic structure, something like our government or civil service here in Britain, but in fact it’s really quite small.” He also said it had been “a big mistake” for the Pope’s preacher, Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, to compare the outcry over sex abuse with antiSemitism.
And he said the Church had been “wrong” in the 1922 document Crimen Sollicitationis (“Crime of Soliciting”) to say that allegations of sex abuse in the confessional should be kept out of the public domain.
But he said: “There was nothing in that document to say that police should not be informed or the social workers should not be informed.” He also defended Pope Benedict XVI, saying that if he had made a mistake in handling sex abuse cases, he would apologise.
“[The Pope] is the most humble and gracious man – I cannot imagine that if he made a mistake he would deny it,” he said.