BRITAIN
The Times
William Rees-Mogg
A Vatican ban on homosexuals would not prevent the abuse that has blighted the clergy
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC Church moves slowly, often too slowly. The Council of Trent, in the mid-16th century, reformed abuses that had been evident a hundred years before. The Second Vatican Council, in the early 1960s, corrected some of the doctrines of the Syllabus of Errors that had been published by Pope Pius IX in 1864. A century’s delay can be a steady trotting pace for a 2,000-year-old papacy.
When I was a child, in the England of the 1930s, or when my mother was a child in the New York of the 1890s, the Catholic clergy tended to be free of scandal. A few of them were too fond of a nip of whisky, but they did not make sexual advances to their choirboys or housekeepers. No doubt there were exceptions, but they must have been rare. The ritual of Confession, combined with the vow of chastity, helped to keep them in line. Otherwise there would have been gossip.
At some point, which may have arrived with the worldwide cult of sex in the late 1950s or early 1960s, these standards certainly ceased to be maintained. In the United States there have been allegations of sexual misconduct against about one priest in 50. Of the alleged victims of these assaults, about 10,000 were male, and about a thousand female. The cases occurred in a period going back to the early 1960s, but many of them were first reported in the 1980s or 1990s. There were similar cases in Britain, but probably on a smaller scale.