Clerical pederasty is one of the biggest scandals in the Catholic Church in the last eighty years, which has destroyed the dignity and lives of tens of thousands of people. It is not about “only small cases”, as the secretary general of the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE), Luis Argüello, affirms, referring to the Spanish Catholic Church, but rather it is a structural problem that affects the entire institution, it is installed in the hierarchical-patriarchal organization itself and spreads to the entire ecclesial body.
Pederasts within the Catholic Church are located in the sphere of the sacred and in the different spaces of ecclesiastical power: cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, members of male religious congregations, parish priests, teachers of religious colleges, seminary trainers and novitiates. , spiritual fathers, confessors… All of them consider themselves representatives of God, and their behaviors, no matter how perverse they may be, are legitimized by “their” God. Clerical pederasty thus becomes the greatest perversion of the sacred and of divinity.
The hierarchical-patriarchal structure of the Catholic Church is based on the masculinity of God, which gives rise to the sacred masculinity of the clerics. This constitutes the basis of religious patriarchy which, in turn, legitimizes political, social, family patriarchy… “Patriarchy has God on its side,” says Kate Millet. The alliance and complicity between both patriarchies translates into the naturalization of the inferiority of women, girls, boys and people in situations of greater vulnerability, to the point of legitimizing violence against them.
Invested in sacred masculinity, the clerics hold power without any limit, even to commit crimes, without feeling guilty, and they exercise it over the souls, of which they consider themselves shepherds, the minds, which they seek to standardize, the consciences, which make up their image and likeness, and the bodies, which they turn into their property and object of colonization.
At this point, a pact of silence, concealment and concealment is established around clerical pederasty, and when proven cases appear, far from putting them in the hands of justice, there is a tendency to deny them, underestimate their seriousness, classify them as irrelevant exceptions compared to the exemplarity of the majority of the clergy and to focus on other sectors of society. When reports appear from the testimony of the victims, their objectivity is questioned and they are accused of lack of rigor. Result? Complicity in pederasty.
Anything but research. The secretary general of the CEE said it in his day: “We are not for the task of doing sociological or statistical research, but rather to know each victim with names and surnames.” It seems, however, that in recent days there has been a change of attitude in the Spanish Episcopal Conference, which has been willing to investigate. Is it really so? It would have to be nuanced. The change is due to the evidence of external investigations, to the vindication of the victims and to the fact that the Pope has demanded it, not to the conviction of criminality against children.
Even so, the investigation would be limited to creating offices in each diocese with the express refusal to set up an external and independent commission from the hierarchy to analyze in depth and objectively the facts, their causes and consequences with the obligation to repair. Victims have already expressed their skepticism and mistrust of such measures, since it may mean refusing to know the truth, or better yet, to acknowledge it. This refusal contravenes the message of Jesus of Nazareth: “The truth will set you free” (John 8:32).
The behavior of the ecclesiastical hierarchy shows, until now, insensitivity to the pain of the victims, lack of compassion by not taking their side, not healing their wounds, not contributing to alleviate their suffering and not accompanying the victims in the experience of “hidden ordeal” referred to in this newspaper by a woman who had been abused as a child by a priest.
Finally, what can we say about the attitude of the Prosecutor’s Office in cases of clerical pederasty? I have my doubts that in certain sectors of said institution there is still no complicity, connivance and even reverential fear towards the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which unduly overlap with the obligatory investigation of the commission of crimes, which is incumbent on it. What has to be clear is that there are not two justices, the religious and the civil, but only one, the civil, which is responsible for investigating crimes against the sexual indemnity of minors.
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