Benedict XVI spoke for the first time of sexual abuse in the Church: "The reason is the absence of God"

The Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI on Thursday released an badysis of the scandal of Sexual abuse in the Catholic Churchin which he blames the badual revolution of the 1960s and the ecclesiastical laws that protect priests. The trial provoked an immediate reaction, apparently interfering and even going so far as to contradict Pope Francis' efforts to face one of the most serious problems facing the church.

Church badysts in the United States say that the test, published in the German monthly "Klerusblatt", fails in its content and is problematic at the level of the universal church, exacerbating the existing divisions between Francisco's supporters and the nostalgic of Benedict XVI's doctrinal papacy.

A church historian has defined the papal essay as "Catastrophically irresponsible" because it interferes with the efforts of his successor, Pope Francisco, to take the church out of the crisis. The theologian Mbadimo Faggioli of the University of Villanova on the contrary criticized the essay, saying that he was weak in his badysis when he attributes the scandal to the badual revolution. He added that Ratzinger had omitted important cases, such as the pedophilia of the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, which had begun much earlier.

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Benedict XVI said that the Vatican Secretary of State and Francisco had authorized him to publish the test. In this letter, Benedict XVI attributes the beginning of the crisis of badual abuse in the church to the badual revolution of the 1960s and cites the emergence of bad-based films in his native Bavaria (Germany). The crisis is also attributed to the failure of moral theology at that time, as well as to church laws that granted undue protection to accused priests.

Benedict XVI wrote that during the 1980s and 1990s, "the right of defense (of priests) was so wide that it rendered a verdict of guilt almost impossible." To be cardinal, as prefect of the Holy Office, Joseph Ratzinger reformed these laws in 2001 to facilitate the expulsion of the priesthood from child molesters. and adopted a harsh stance against the badual abuse of the clergy as the leader of the Vatican doctrine and, as pope, removed from the priesthood hundreds of priests accused of raping children.

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"Why has pedophilia reached such proportions? The reason is the absence of God," he wrote. "A society in which God is absent (…) is a society in which the criterion and the measure of the human are always lost," he explains. He therefore returns "directly to the evidence of what is evil and destroys man". This is the case of pedophilia, writes that it was "theorized it was not so long ago" and that "it has spread more and more". "And now, shaken and scandalized, we recognize that our children and youth are doing things that are likely to destroy them." Benedict warns that this could be extended in the Church and among the priests "should shake us up and surprise us in a particular way".

"Among the freedoms that the 1968 revolution wanted to conquer, there was also complete badual freedom, which no longer tolerated any standard," said the pope emeritus, who speaks of "spiritual collapse". And "the fact that pedophilia was diagnosed as permissible and convenient is also part of the face of the 1968 revolution." Thus, "regardless of this development," says Benedict XVI, there was "a collapse of Catholic moral theology that left the Church helpless before these processes in society". It is the post-conciliar era, but it is "in the late 80's and 90's that, according to Ratzinger," the crisis of the foundations and presentation of Catholic morality took dramatic forms ".

S.D.