UNITED STATES
Meadville Tribune
James Drane
Meadville Tribune
MEADVILLE — For Catholics who remained faithful throughout the pedophile priest scandal, this has been a dark and painful period. Every new revelation of abuse, every testimony by victims of a life ruined, is like another punch in the jaw or kick in the gut. The pain continues and we can expect an added shock. This time it will be a bishop scandal.
The awful things done by emotionally compromised pedophile priests raised all kinds of questions. Pedophilia, however, is a pathology not even well-understood in psychiatry. The word pedophile did not even appear in much of early 20th-century psychiatric literature. When it finally made it into the textbooks and dictionaries, it was called a paraphilia and listed with disorders like exhibitionism and voyeurism.
Freud recognized pedophilia as a sexual deviation. He thought that most male pedophiles were weak and impotent. He also emphasized what he thought was the seductive role of children. Little to no attention, however, was paid to the damage done to the children involved in this secretive and repetitive pathological behavior.
If understanding of pedophilic behavior was weak in psychiatry, imagine the level of understanding that existed in the church hierarchy. For bishops, the concept of sin alone was used to understand the acts of pedophile priests. For this reason, many bishops thought that confessing the sin, followed by a serious penance like a retreat, would solve the problem. After confession and penance, a pedophile priest would be considered forgiven and could then be returned to parish work. Like every sin which was confessed, a priest’s pedophile behavior had to be kept secret.
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