According to Benedict XVI, this is the reason why priests rape children

(AFP) Pedophilia scandals are the result of the badual revolution of the 1960s and the collapse of faith in the West, Pope Benedict XVI said in an badysis released Thursday.

In this long text published in "Klerusblatt", the monthly Bavarian clergy, the pope, who resigned six years ago, comes out of his silence while the Church is at the center of criticism for the revelation of sordid scandals. in United States, Chile, Australia and Europe.

Some theologians reacted on social media on Thursday as "boring" the badysis of the 91-year-old pope emeritus living in a small monastery in the Vatican City.

Benedict XVI explains that the 1968 revolution called for a "Sexual freedom" without "rules", which makes pedophilia something "permissible and appropriate".

"I have always wondered how young people could go to the priesthood in this situation," he said, referring to the "vast collapse" of the priestly vocation that occurred in the following years.

From the examples of his native Germany, he tells how "the unprecedented radicalism of the 1960s" has affected the training of future priests in seminaries.

"Homobadual gangs have developed at different seminars, acting more or less openly," he recalls. And a bishop decided to show the seminarians badgraphic films "with the idea of ​​making them more resistant to behavior contrary to faith".

The eminent pope notes with bitterness a "Western society where God has disappeared from public space" and where the Church is perceived as "a kind of political apparatus".

"Why pedophilia has taken such proportions?" In the end, this is explained by the absence of God "converted into a" private business of a minority "of believers, he writes.

In the second half of the 1980s, the issue of pederasty became a current issue for the Church, especially in the United States, and gradually led to a re-examination of the criminal law of canon law and to the application of sentences to the clergy after trials.

The Church understood that the crimes of its members "harm the faith" that it is appropriate to protect, after having too well guaranteed the sole protection of the accused, hardly objectionable, stresses the German pope.

His reflections are part of the effects of the ecclesiastical summit organized in February by Pope Francis on the badual abuse of minors by the clergy.