WASHINGTON D.C.
Washington Post
February 4, 2021
By Candida Moss
Actually, the pope isn’t always infallible — and Francis isn’t a liberal.
For the second time in its history, the United States has a Catholic president. The 2020 election season was distinctive for the ways Joe Biden’s Catholic credentials were challenged by his opponents even as they were highlighted by his own campaign. Though there have always been misconceptions about the beliefs of Roman Catholics — the second-largest religious group in the country — the last year has underscored the considerable confusion about what the Catholic Church teaches and what it means to be Catholic.
Myth No. 1: Celibacy and homosexuality caused the pedophilia scandal.
For the last two decades, the biggest scandal in the Catholic Church has been the child sex abuse crisis. In explaining the genesis of the abuse, a number of Catholic leaders and organizations have claimed that it was caused by the presence of gay priests among the clergy. In 2005, the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education issued a document arguing that ordaining gay men would be “absolutely inadvisable and imprudent, and from the pastoral point of view, very very risky.” A statement by Archbishop Silvano Maria Tomasi to the United Nations in 2009 sought to recategorize the child abuse as “a homosexual attraction to adolescent males.” Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, claimed in an op-ed in The Washington Post in 2010 that the pedophilia crisis was “a homosexual crisis all along.”
Others have traced the problem to the church’s insistence on celibacy. A 2019 op-ed for the National Catholic Reporter suggested that celibacy creates a culture of secrecy and lies that protects pedophiles as well as sexually active priests. And a number of letters to the NCR have said that sex abuse among the clergy will end when celibacy does.
But sexual orientation, sexual abstinence and child abuse are in no way linked to one another. An independent study overseen by Margaret Smith at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice found no connection “between homosexual identity and an increased likelihood of sexual abuse.” In her report to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Smith said: “We have not found that the problem [of sexual abuse of minors] is particular to the church. We have found it to be similar to the problem in society.” Writing in Psychology Today, Thomas Plante, a psychiatry professor, cited further evidence that celibacy “doesn’t increase the risk of child sexual abuse.” At the risk of pointing out the obvious, if priests want to break their vows of celibacy, there are many consenting adults with whom to do so.
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