If there is someone who is leading the cultural change in the Church regarding pedophilia, it is Cardinal Seán Patrick O’Malley, archbishop of Boston and president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. This week, in the presentation of the first annual report on the protection of minors, he made it clear that “celibacy is not the cause of pedophilia. “I have never seen any serious study that has indicated that celibacy and sexual abuse are related.” He also recognized, with evident logic based on an accurate analysis of reality, that “there are many people who are aware of the incredible damage that pedophilia has done to the credibility of the Church and our ability to have a prophetic voice in society.” . With that categoricality, Cardinal O’Malley closes any possibility of pedophilia being used in the Church as an added argument for those who want to end the discipline of ecclesiastical celibacy. The Report on the protection of minors includes a series of interesting recommendations that the Spanish Episcopal Conference has already largely complied with. The insistence on the need for a simplified process, where justified, for the resignation or removal of a Church leader points high. When the conclusions talk about the need for “damage and compensation policies that promote rigorous management of reparations,” I was thinking about what I heard from the Catholic author, Fabrice Hadjhad, last weekend in Madrid. This intellectual, of Jewish origin, and a convert, said that compensation is not enough to save the victims. The payments of money are mandatory solutions at the civil level, with guarantees, that do not complete the spiritual conversion necessary for those who have suffered abuse to be cured. Facing sexual abuse only from sociology, politics, even economics, and not from Sacred Scripture and the Tradition of the Church, carries its risks. Saint Augustine distinguished between veritas luzens and veritas red arguens; that is, the truth that illuminates and the truth that accuses.
#José #Francisco #Serrano #Oceja #Celibacy #pedophiles
