ABSTRACT
The cultural winds of promiscuity that hit the larger society in the 1960s and 1970s came smashing through the windows of the Catholic Church. Incidence of child sexual abuse has declined in both the Catholic Church and in society generally. There is too much evidence to plausibly conclude that there is no relationship between the overrepresentation of active homosexuals in the priesthood and their overrepresentation in the sexual abuse scandal. Virtually all sexual expression was seen in non-judgmental terms: contraception, cohabitation, homosexuality, swinging, adultery—even bestiality—were treated as morally neutral acts. A priest from the Archdiocese of Boston explained one of the ways in which homosexuals resolved their cognitive dissonance. The clinical data shows that young boys of a homosexual orientation are far more likely to have been abused than their heterosexual cohorts. This alone suggests that homosexual adults are much more likely to abuse minors than heterosexuals.
