The World Over | Bill Donohue of The Catholic League with Raymond Arroyo.
Ignatius Press: “This work unpacks the history and root causes of the clergy sex abuse scandals in the United States. Building on decades of data and research, author Bill Donohue, who holds a doctorate in sociology, tells the story from a fresh angle and calls us to rethink our assumptions about the Church’s handling of these horrific abuses.
The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse challenges many myths about the scandals, demonstrating that the abuse of minors is a problem that haunts virtually every institution—religious and secular—where adults interact with young people. The work also provides compelling evidence of the great progress that the Church has made in preventing abuse, contrary to public perceptions. Indeed, the media, Hollywood, and activist lawyers have poisoned the public mind with tales of old cases, giving the impression that nothing has changed.
Donohue investigates at length the central role that homosexuality played in the scandal. While homosexuality does not cause sexual abuse, the prevalence of emotional and sexual immaturity among homosexual clergy explains why they committed most of the molestation. Indeed, all of the educational institutions of the Catholic Church, including the seminaries, have been affected by the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s, and this book explores the pernicious effects of dissent from Catholic sexual morality. — more at Amazon.com
The new book, Ignatius Press
— John Allen, Crux News: the actual evidence exonerates Cardinal Ratzinger (BXVI) regarding cases of sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising between 1945 and 2019 and whether the officials of the Catholic Church handled them properly.
“Don’t look for scapegoats… It cannot be forgotten that as pope, Benedict XVI “promulgated very harsh norms against clerical abusers, special laws to combat pedophilia,” Tornielli said.”
George Weigel: What are we to make of John Paul II and the sordid case of Father Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a man whom the late pope supported and who turned out to have been a pathological personality?
As I wrote in The End and the Beginning, John Paul II was clearly deceived by Maciel, who was a master deceiver. The relevant questions here, in terms of John Paul II’s beatification and its judgment that he lived a life of heroic virtue, are whether John Paul II’s failure to see through Maciel’s deceptions was willful (i.e., he knew about Maciel’s perfidies and did nothing about the situation), or venal (i.e., he was “bought” by Maciel), or malicious (i.e., he knew that Maciel was a sociopathic fraud and didn’t care). There isn’t a shred of evidence that would sustain a positive answer to any of those questions. To even think that such could be the case is to utterly miss the character of the late pope.
To focus so much attention on Maciel at the time of John Paul II’s beatification, as if his case offered a privileged window into a 26-year pontificate that changed the history of the Church and the world, is rather like obsessing on the disastrous raid on Dieppe and the bombing of Dresden at Winston Churchill’s funeral. It’s grotesquely disproportionate, from any serious historical point of view.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. His two-volume biography of John Paul II comprises Witness to Hope (Harper Collins, 1999) and The End and the Beginning (Doubleday, 2010).
The entire article on the beatification process of John Paul II was originally published on National Review Online
A Time of Reckoning. The Sex Abuse Scandal Is Not Yet Behind Us. By Pieter Vree, New Oxford Review.
“…Fatigue isn’t confined to followers of mainstream media; it can even set in among consumers of Catholic news. The Catholic media has been known to exhaust topics as well. Think of some of the much-discussed recent stories: the Pachamama scandal, the eucharistic “incoherence” of pro-abortion Catholic politicians, the endless parade of synods, or anything to do with Fr. James Martin…”
Catholic Critique 