Benedict XVI and the silence
of society's pedophilia enablers
by Vittorio Messori
Translated from
April 19, 2010
No one expects the minister in charge of the state's boarding schools to meet with those who have been abused by a teacher of or a staff member to express his 'sorrow and shame'.
Nor does one expect that of ship captains, where the fate of minors taken on as crew is well known. Nor of officials responsible for youthful sports, where showers and dressing rooms attract, as everyone knows, a quite predictable fauna of preying adults.
Pedophilia (or pederasty - age limits are uncertain and varied according to tastes and cultures) has always been present, wherever there are men and women, children and adults. Often present even in non-clandestine ways, or even praised openly and highly recommended by philosophers and intellectuals as they did in ancient Greece, and by the generation of 1968 in Europe and the United States.
The leader of the Green Parties in the European Parliament, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, he once charismatic head of the 1968 student protests, has boasted that he not only recommended but practised sex with minors when he was a teacher.
Mario Mieli, ideolog and initiator of the homosexual movement in Italy, in what has become a cult book published by the otherwise austere Einaudi publishing house, said that sex between an adult and a minor (the younger the better) was a 'redemptive act' for both participants.
Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Foucault and Jack Lang (who would become Jacques Chirac's Culture Minister), were among the intellectuals who signed a famous manifesto which, in the name of 'sexual liberation', demanded the decriminalization of sezual relations with minors, including children.
All of them were simply reviving a long European tradition. The philosopher venerated by the French Jacobins, starting with Robespierre, and by most of the revolutionary elite. was not the blasphemous Voltaire, but the edifying Jean Jacques Rousseau, the apostle of infantile education - in all senses, that is, since he wrote smugly about having bought a ten-year-old girl in Venice who 'knew how to lift him out of depression'.
And yet, although the pulpits from which pontifications rain down on him are laughable; despite the impenetrable silence of those who represent circles actively and widely involved in the sexual abuse of minors; despite all this - Benedict XVI continues to show that the Church 'is different', to the point of humiliating himself.
In Malta, he repeated what he had done earlier in the United States and Australia: he met some of those who were victims, usually decades earlier, of the unwelcome attentions of religious 'educators'.
As he did in his dramatic and moving open letter to the Catholics of Ireland, he did not cite extenuating circumstances or point fingers elsewhere to remind the world, as he well could, that so many of his 'judges' would do much better to shut up.
The fact is that Papa Ratzinger is fully aware that the sins of Christ's priests do not only have canonical and penal consequences, but even metaphysical echoes.
From the Gospel viewpoint, the face of a child is God's face - and he who would scandalize their innocence would do better to have a millstone around his neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea (cfr Mt 16,8). Terrible words from the Gospel.
The Pope knows with how much trust parents - not just Catholics but those of other religions - put their children into the hands of ecclesiastical institutions inspired by evangelical ideals. Betrayal of that trust is intolerable for someone like him.
Thus he shows that the Church, even when it falters, is not a place like everywhere else. Yes, it is an environment like any other where sin is present. But the sin here would be considerably worse than elsewhere, because the ideal is the highest, the duties more urgent, and the Master the most demanding.
The sorrow and the shame that he speaks of come from true suffering and is not hypocritical melodrama. And yet, through the evangelical paradox, his humiliation does not diminish but increases his credibility as the leader and warranty of Christianity.