Two Notes Against Pedophelia

Last updated on: March 28, 2010 at 12:21 am by Timothy Dalrymple

Two Notes Against Pedophelia 2010-03-28T00:21:04-04:00 Timothy Dalrymple

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The two articles I want to mention are related only insofar as they concern the sexual abuse of children. The subject is much in the news, of course, given the breaking scandals in Ireland and Germany. Professional agitators such as Christopher Hitchens are calling for the Pope to step down or be arrested. I must confess that I do not know all the facts regarding decisions Pope Benedict made earlier in his clerical career regarding priests accused or shown guilty of abuse. But I find much more enlightening — and indeed encouraging for the future of the Catholic Church — this piece from a Jesuit priest (James Martin, author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything) on what the Catholic Church in America learned from its own clergy abuse scandal.

I must confess I was surprised to find something so soberly edifying at The Huffington Post, which, ever since it began its Religion feature, has become something of a breeding ground for anti-evangelical sentiment (I will post on this in the coming week). Apparently when it comes to other stripes of Christian faith, the material can be more enlightening. Martin makes no excuses, and is no-nonsense in his attitude toward criminal failures within the Church he serves, but he also notes that the 4% of priests from 1950-2000 accused of sexual abuse of children is only slightly higher than the figure for schoolteachers (he might also have noted that there has long been a similar pass-the-abuser-around tendency in public school systems, where it is also difficult to remove abusers from their positions without great expense and is often easier to let the teacher move on to other districts), and that the media were wrong to paint all clergy as sexually unhinged predators.

Obviously the sexual abuse of children is the gravest of problems, a horrific sin, and the Catholic Church as well as other churches must confront it directly and honestly. But I appreciate — and often find it maddeningly difficult to find — sober and balanced treatments of the issues.

On another note, researchers are proposing that online pedophiles could be identified by the manner of their typing. One might develop a typing fingerprint, as it were, taking note of all the particular ways in which a person types and using this as a way of hunting and catching child predators online. Let’s hope this develops quickly.

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