Oh! You Pretty Things: Spotlight on David Bowie and Catholic Sex Scandals

UNITED STATES
CosmosTheInLost

January 13, 2016 by Artur Rosman

Isn’t it a space oddity that David Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, landed on the same day as the latest round of Catholic sex scandals took off?

This coincidence, seen in the right light, appears as predestined as the plots of Kundera or Kieslowski. It also reveals something about the last acceptable prejudice and how little (what remains of) Western society really cares about the victims of sex abuse.

Let’s start with the Catholics, because in the public imagination they seem to have cornered the market on sex scandals. Catholic are under pressure because their guilt seems so obvious and culpable it could be represented in an elegant mathematical formula such as this one:

perverts + celibate priests + bad bishops + dumb laity = pedophile ~ Catholic

I’ve argued elsewhere that there is a necessary visibility to Catholicism that will not allow its past sins to disintegrate into (Ziggy) stardust. It also frequently leads to hasty generalizations like the equation above. But maybe this is for the good?

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