In an effort, perhaps, to clarify recent statements by the Cardinal Bertone’s about homosexuality and sexual abuse, Jesuit Father Frederico Lombardi, director of the Vatican Press Office offered a communique which attempts to limit the scope of these statements. However, is this Vatican “clarification” only digging a deeper hole?
Vatican Notes Context of Abuse-Homosexuality Link: Cardinal Bertone’s Comments Clarified
From Zenit News Agency (www.zenit.org)
In a communiqué released Wednesday, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, clarified that the cardinal was referring to scientific studies that have been conducted within the context of the sexual abuse crisis in the Church, and not in society at large.
“The ecclesiastical authorities do not hold as their competence to make general affirmations of a specifically psychological or medical character, for which they naturally refer to studies of specialists and to research under way on the matter,” Father Lombardi noted.
The Vatican spokesman clarified that “in so far as the competence of the ecclesiastical authorities goes, in the area of the causes of the abuses of minors by priests addressed in recent years by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, it is simply the statistical fact referred to in the interview of Msgr. Charles Scicluna, in which mentioned was made of 10% of cases of pedophilia in the strict sense, and of 90% of cases to be described rather as ephebophilia (namely in confrontations of adolescents), of which close to 60% referred to individuals of the same sex and 30% were of a heterosexual character.”
Father Lombardi concluded by clarifying that “referred to here obviously is the problem of abuse by priests, and not in the population in general.”
These statements are backed by the report published in 2004 by John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, regarded as the most complete report on the sexual abuse crisis.