A jarring blast from the past
JUST AS Pope Francis struggles to stop his well-regarded papacy being overshadowed by charges of laxity over child abuse, his predecessor has emerged from retirement to make an unexpected intervention. Benedict, the pope emeritus who turns 92 next week, has blamed a surge of criminal acts against children by clerics on the sexual revolution of the 1960s.Klerusblatt
Sexual and pornographic movies became a common occurrence...I still remember seeing, as I was walking through the city of Regensburg one day, crowds of people lining up in front of a large cinema, something we had previously only seen in times of war...I also remember arriving in the city on Good Friday in 1970 and seeing all the billboards plastered with a large poster of two completely naked people in a close embrace.
Benedict writes that the child-abuse scandal was a reflection of collapsing ethical norms which in turn flowed from a collapse of private and public faith in God. “Why did pedophilia reach such proportions? Ultimately, the reason is the absence of God...After the upheaval of the second world war, we in Germany had still expressly placed our constitution under the [principle] of responsibility to God.
Benedict’s argument does contain serious points which would be worth deliberating in a different context, for example a cultural-studies debate. It is perfectly true that in the 1960s and 1970s, public opinion in the Western world was far too inclined to turn a blind eye to the sexual manipulation of children.
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