NEW YORK
The Riverdale Press
September 2, 2018
A recent grand jury report in Pennsylvania singling out dozens of priests embroiled in the Catholic Church’s ongoing child abuse scandal has once again brought this painful topic to the forefront of our conversations.
And it should. It’s so easy to overlook abuse victims, primarily because we see them more as anonymous silhouettes than actual people. That’s terrible, because they are people, and they simply want to live their lives without having what happened to them as kids hanging over them more than it already does.
In the renewed discussions, however, many have taken the position that the forced celibacy by the church is the root cause. But that’s silly. To say the root of child abuse is the absence of much-desired intimate contact ignores all other cases of child abuse outside of the church. Many accused and convicted of such atrocities have had rather active sex lives, and to suggest that abstinence is a needed component that leads to child abuse ignores other evidence that’s out there.
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