Edit: Few people writing about Catholic issues in the press like commenting about the effect of introducing modern psychological perspectives into Catholic institutions in the 50s and 60s. The attempt to liberate a Catholic nunnery in California by Doctor Coulson who introduced the nuns to "encounter groups" where the notions of evil and any judgements at all were dispensed with, opening the door, it was hoped to a Utopian dream. But things weren't that simple as Maslow observed:
"But we didn't have a doctrine of evil. (Abraham) Maslow saw that we failed to understand the reality of evil in the human life. When we implied to people that they could trust their impulses, they also understood us to mean that they could trust their evil impulses, that they weren't really evil. But they were evil."
"Humanistic psychology, the kind that has virtually taken over the Church in America, and dominates so many forms of aberrant education like sex education, and drug education, holds that the most important source of authority is within you, that you must listen to yourself."
"Maslow believed in evil, and we didn't. Maslow said there was danger in our thinking and acting as if there were no paranoids or psychopaths or SOB's to mess things up. We created a miniature utopian society, the encounter group."
The result exposing the nuns to this psychological outlook and the spirit of the world was devastating. Fortunately, no one could accuse the nuns of being sexual deviants, but this approach destroyed their lives and their community as Coulson later admitted.
What about the introduction of these methods into Catholic circles where children were involved? The result was predictably disastrous.
I defy anyone to find any major institution in the West that didn't handle sexual abuse according to this pattern. The going orthodoxy with respect to sexuality was non-judgement, guiltlessness and diversity. It was not out of the norm that sexual predators were not judged so much as coddled, and the effort to see the Catholic Church as somehow exclusively problematic in this regard is disingenuous. Those who come along for the ride in scapegoating the Catholic Church for accomodating a spirit which was really alien to it out of a sense of aggiornamento then popular, really need to reassess the bigger picture and take stock.
The Catholic Church embraced a viper to itself when it accommodated psychological theoriesn [Usually predicated on by erroneous behaviorist, occult or humanist perspectives] about human nature alien to its own notions.
To be more direct, I don't think anyone will confuse the moribund and infirm Cardinal Bevilacqua, who is now being singled out with those under him of being paragons of orthodoxy or fervent advocates of sexual continence. Indeed, those guilty of the sexual abuse of minors aren't God fearing men and women, they're more likely to be conniving manipulators and moral relativists themselves. It's convenient to such people that there's no God, or no objective morality and modern psychological approaches offer a kind of benediction for them to do and justify what they want.
To put it more brusquely, the Catholic Church was attacked, and is still attacked today, for its positions on sexuality and forgiveness and if some of its ministers. Shame and guilt were supposed to be bad unhealthy things, and criminals, even sexual ones, were believed to be reformable if they could only be understood. Now, people aren't so sure. Could it be that the Church's original, and orthodox , anthropology which was the basis for its disciplinary outlook was actually right all along?
Now that those approaches have proven to be unsuccessful, ministers in the Church like +Bevilacqua, who tried to accommodate the modern West's emphasis on the reformability of human beings and the elimination of shame and guilt from sexual aberrations, are being attacked again for attempting to alter the Church's previous disciplinary features with respect to sexual crimes by entering a spirit of good old late 20th century liberality and the legal profession is eager to take advantage of this momentary double standard.
Priest uses Nurenburg Defence- I was only obeying the Cardinal's orders
The Associated Press: Monsignor: Cardinal wanted accusers kept in dark:
"A Roman Catholic church official conceded that a 1994 list he compiled of 35 priests suspected of sexually abusing children in the Philadelphia archdiocese included some "pretty sick individuals."
Monsignor William Lynn took the stand in his own defense Wednesday in a groundbreaking child-endangerment and conspiracy case. Prosecutors blame Lynn for helping keep those priests and many more in ministry, where they were had access to countless other children.
Lynn testified that the head of the archdiocese forbade staff from telling accusers their alleged abuser had other victims."
Link to Cathcon...
