UNITED STATES
Standing on My Head
March 9, 2013 By Fr. Dwight Longenecker
A reader asked for the sources for a couple of my statements in a post recently about celibacy and sex abuse. Namely the assertion that most abuse is perpetrated by married men not single men–therefore marriage for Catholic priests will not solve the sex abuse problem.
The reader also questioned my assertion that most of the cases of sex abuse by priests were carried out by homosexuals, and that marriage was unlikely to solve their problem also.
I should therefore point out that just because 80% of the priestly sex abuse cases were homosexual in nature does not imply that homosexuals are necessarily more likely to be child sex abusers than heterosexuals, or that homosexuality necessarily makes a man more likely to sexually abuse children. My point was simply that marriage would not be the answer for pedophiles who were also homosexuals.
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