A friend of mine is a facilitator for the VIRTUS program and sent me this letter to moderators for my opinion. Apparently there must be quite a few other people who are asking questions regarding the scandal and homosexual ephebophilia and how that is all being addressed Anyway, below is the letter and then my response.
Protecting God’s Children for Facilitators
Dealing with the Issue of Homosexuality in the Wake of the John Jay Study
Many of you have found that dealing with the issue of homosexuality and child sexual abuse is becoming more challenging in the wake of the John Jay study. Participants are having a hard time reconciling the myth about homosexuality with the statistics in the report, which indicate that 81 percent of the abuse committed by clergy was male-on-male abuse. This training bulletin will address some of the questions and comments you have raised about this issue so everyone has the tools they need to deal with the questions that continue to arise.Participants insist that because the John Jay study shows that 81 percent of these incidents were cases of male clergy abusing young boys, homosexuality is the problem.
The fact that 81 percent of the victims were male was startling for a lot of people, and our audience is a totally Catholic audience that is upset with the abusive priests and their bishops. In our awareness sessions, we use the figures, from the Trainers Manual, stating “one in eight males will be abused by the time he is an adult” and the “one in four females will be abused by the time she is an adult.” Our Catholic audience hears the one-in-eight males and one-in-four females statistics, and then reads in the John Jay study that 81 percent of the clergy-abused victims were boys, and our Catholic audience sees this as a glaring inconsistency. How can we handle these new numbers that show 81 percent of the clergy-abused victims were young boys?
It is true that some people believe that the myth about “homosexuality” is no longer a myth—because the majority of clergy-abused victims were boys between the ages of 11 and 14. Although this is not new information to most of us who have been working in this area for some time, it is new information for many among the Catholic faithful.
This presents us with a difficult issue because one of our primary jobs is dispelling myths—and, it is still a myth that most child molesters are homosexual. The point of dispelling myths is to broaden our view of the potential risk of harm to children.
The difficulty this presents in the wake of the new study is that, as one facilitator said, “A lot of Catholics are hypersensitive to clergy abuse. The Catholic Church is not in the media because of laity sexual abuse.” We are now dealing with a whole new dimension of hurt and anger in the Church.
Those who already believed that the problem is “homosexuality” now see the John Jay study as evidence to support their belief, and they want to dispute our contention regarding the myth about homosexuality. However, the study does not provide us with answers to many of the bigger societal issues surrounding child sexual abuse. It tells us what happened with priests over the last 50 years … nothing more, and nothing less.
Regardless of our hypersensitivity to the Catholic aspects of the issue, child sexual abuse is a societal problem and the John Jay study does nothing to dispel the long-standing statistics about the relatively small number of sex abuse cases perpetrated by homosexuals.
We have never said that homosexuals never commit child sexual abuse. In fact, our studies show that 21 percent of child molesters do identify themselves as homosexuals. However, if we focus our attention on the 21 percent of child sexual abuse perpetrated by homosexuals, and if we focus on homosexuals as the people who commit this crime, the other 79 percent of child molesters who do not consider themselves to be homosexual are basically free to do as they please.
As the John Jay study points out, we don’t even know whether the statistics about priests abusing young males tells us something about homosexuality in the priesthood or whether those statistics tell us that the majority of victims were young boys because they were more accessible than girls to the priests. Regardless of what the data tells us about priests who molest, the assumption that children are more at risk from homosexuals in society is not accurate. Concentrating on a specific group of offenders—or any other issue of its type—diverts attention away from the message of the program—PREVENTING CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE.
We must continue to stress to our participants that children are vulnerable, and that each one of us needs to know the warning signs that indicate that someone is a risk of harm to children.
Bottom Line:
As Thomas Paine said during an earlier crisis, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” That is certainly the case in the Church today. You are getting hit with questions, comments, and responses that you never expected—on issues that were not a part of your training. Please be assured that God will bless you abundantly for being on the front lines of this battle during these trying times. Know that those who are most grateful are the young people who will never be abused because you cared enough to fight this battle on their behalf.
It seems that the Virtus people want to say – “we are concerned about child sexual abuse period. We want to prevent it from happening, we want to prevent it from happening to our children at home, school, church, AND we want to be open to all the ways that this abuse happens particularly the most prevalent perpetrators which are heterosexual.”
That’s fine. If the Catholic Church in America decided one day to take this issue on and deal with it that would be admirable, great and certainly worth pursuing.
But the truth is the church didn’t decide this one day from divine revelation, and it didn’t decide to pursue this out of a sudden concern for child sexual abuse. This all came about in the wake of the terrible sex scandal that came to light in 2002.
Our reality in the Catholic Church in this country was NOT solely or even mostly pedophilia. It was homosexual ephebophilia!! This was not a MYTH. The statistics bear this out. The insistence by the author of calling this a myth in the Catholic situation is ludicrous and insulting!!
I also find the theory that boys were attacked more than girls because of an access issue to be a major red herring! (Ms. Albertone used that one too). The fact is that any priest in a parish with access to a school had access to boys and girls. Ms. Albertone completely ignored that point when I made it with her.
Lastly, I find this statement troublesome: Regardless of what the data tells us about priests who molest, the assumption that children are more at risk from homosexuals in society is not accurate.
O.K. fine. But are our children, particularly pubescent and post pubescent males still at risk from homosexual ephebophiles acting out in the church? Virtus does absolutely NOTHING to protect us from that and as far as I can tell on the Cleveland Web site, I see no action from the Diocese on how they are screening or dealing with homosexuals in our seminaries and in the priesthood.
My personal opinion is that the church, is doing a lot of busy work to take the focus off a problem they can’t or won’t deal with right now. VIRTUS apparently would like us to forget as well.
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