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	Benedict: Protect Children from Future Abuse By Susan Brooks On Faith April 21, 2008 http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/susan_brooks_thistlethwaite/2008/04/benedict_protect_children_from.html A papal apology to those sexually abused by Catholic priests is certainly long overdue and it is good that Pope Benedict met with some of the victims of sexual abuse by priests on his U.S. trip. But as Mother Jones was fond of saying, "Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living." We need to know from Pope Benedict how future abuse will be stopped. Bernie McDaid, one of the survivors of priestly sexual abuse who met with the Pope, rightly called attention to the fact that this abuse is still going on and will continue to go on unless something is done about it. He said in an interview with CNN that he told the pope he was an altar boy when he was abused and "it wasn't just sexual abuse, it was spiritual abuse. And I want you to know that. And then I told him that he has a cancer growing in his ministry, and needs to do something about it." This cancer has not been eradicated, and indeed, it may be getting worse because Benedict himself, as well as the Vatican leaders, do not seem to understand what are the root causes of priestly abuse of children, both boys and girls. To date, in Benedict's papacy, how has the Catholic Church shown it is planning to go about preventing more abuse by priests? Disturbingly, it seems that Pope Benedict believes that this problem of sexual abuse by priests lies with having gay men in the priesthood. Not many months after he was elected Pope, the Vatican issued the "Instruction Concerning the Criteria of Vocational Discernment Regarding Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in View of Their Admission to Seminaries and Holy Orders." Sadly enough, the impetus for that document seems to have been the child sexual abuse scandal in the American Catholic Church. Many psychologists and psychiatrists have responded to this teaching by noting that child sexual abuse by priests comes not from homosexuality per se, but from an immature sexual identity compounded by the frustrations of celibacy and the climate of secrecy in the church about sex. American Catholic seminaries, a target of this teaching, have ironically been doing a really good job in recent decades of creating a seminary climate and curriculum that addresses human sexuality in a frank and open way. While I teach at a Protestant seminary, we have students in our graduate programs from Catholic seminaries and our faculties and administrators all go to many of the same meetings where we discuss curriculum, student formation and all other questions of how to do good theological education. Many American Catholic seminaries have created a teaching environment that addresses some of the root causes of pedophilia in priests, namely immature sexual identity and a negative attitude toward sexuality. This 2005 document explicitly targets gay men who teach in seminaries and seminarians who are discovered to have this "profoundly deep-rooted homosexuality". It was inevitable that a net result of this targeting has been a renewed climate of secrecy and hiding from one's own sexual identity. This will again surely produce sexually immature candidates for the priesthood, just the kind of person who tends to abuse children. I would like to acknowledge the good step that this 2005 Vatican teaching seems to take, i.e. the simple acknowledgment that being homosexual is a biological fact. In addition, the document includes a clear rejection of "every mark of unjust discrimination with respect to them [homosexuals]" is a very much-needed religious teaching today as state-by-state Americans try to pass legislation that will restrict or reject altogether equal civil rights for gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people. That it comes from the Catholic Church itself is very helpful in the struggle for equal human rights for all people in the United States and around the world. The Pope's speech today at the U.N. stressed the need to protect human rights. But it is a tragedy that the apparent impetus for the teaching, the safe-guarding of Catholic children from abuse by their priests, has targeted gay men with no evidence. It is an even greater tragedy that if this teaching is enforced, the result will be to re-create the climate in Catholic seminaries that has produced so many pedophiles in the past. It is no surprise that the Pope is addressing the issue of the sexual abuse by priests in his first U.S. visit. Well over 4,000 priests have been accused of molesting minors in the U.S. since 1950, and the church has paid out more than $2 billion, much of it in just the last six years. The Boston case of a priest who was a serial molester and failure of Cardinal Law to do anything about it gained national attention and inspired many victims to step forward. Six dioceses have been forced into bankruptcy because of abuse costs. The U.S. Catholic church has lost many members over not only the abuse by priests, but by the church's failure to address the problem and sometimes even engaging in a cover-up. It is a huge tragedy that even in recognizing the near-total failure of the Catholic Church to protect its children from sexual abuse by priests, the Church is still, because of deep-seated homophobia, going about dealing with the risk of future abuse in exactly the wrong way. And generations of children and their parents and their caring church communities will continue to pay for the mistake.
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