Speculating on Pedophilia Benefits No One, by Enzo Bianchi, Vatican Insider, December 23, 2011

Speculating on Pedophilia Benefits No One

By Enzo Bianchi
Vatican Insider
December 23, 2011

http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/homepage/inquiries-and-interviews/detail/articolo/pedofilia-paedophilia-chiesa-church-iglesia-11085/

Anti pedophilia

Periodically the tragic plight of child abuse the spotlight, almost always tied to people's behavior - returns to priests, religious, teachers with responsibilities inside the Catholic Church. This despite figures that confirm each time that the percentage of such crimes committed inside Catholic institutions does not differ from those for any type of institution that takes care of children, especially if it foresees educators and children living together on a daily basis. This disease generally spreads in society regardless of whether or not in a particular country there is aprevalence of Catholic culture, traditions andinstitutions.

This now morbid attention to the misdeeds of many Catholic educators, leaves a deep sadness when one realizes that the media prefers scandals and ignores or plays down facts or initiatives that attempt to remedy and heal this horrible scourge. Almost never, for example, are there questions about what institutions other than the CatholicChurch did - or did not do – to adequately compensate victims not only economically, to prevent such acts from recurring, to analyze in a documented way and interpret the phenomenon, to take care of the guilty as well, who often are victims themselves of similar abuse during their childhood. Sometimes the issues of «pedophile scandal» are coupled with problems of a more or less questionable nature: from the meaning of ecclesiastical celibacy to the influence of the Council on the Catholic Church. And this often with preconceived thesis that use the figures only if and when they confirm the pinion that hasalready been made of the situation or image to be conveyed of a specific ecclesial reality.

In this sense I think that it is emblematic the way they handled the recent publication of the results of a survey conducted in the Netherlands by an independent commission on the abuse of minors by Catholic institutions of the Church. One does not claim that the undersigned must read the entire dossier drawn up in Dutch, but sticking with the dozen or so pages of the four press releases in English would be sufficient to avoid real distortions and misrepresentations. First of all, it would have been highlighted that the independent panel was commissioned by the Dutch Catholic Church itself - dioceses and religious congregations – in order to take an objective andcritical look not only at the behavior ofpedophile priests but also the ways in whichbishops and religious superiors have and have not dealt with the tragic situation in over sixty years.

Furthermore, a better assessment could have been made of the socio-cultural context in Holland, so different, for example, from Ireland and profoundly changed since the early forties to the present: in the Netherlands the Catholic Church is a heavy minority, it is public opinion that there are also public political movements that advocate the legalization of sex with minors - also defended by some of our commentators who are now very severe with our Church – like other Southern European countries, there is a lesser tendency to maintain silence with regards to certain behavior and accusations.