CNSNews.com’s homophobic managing editor, Michael W. Chapman, is joining other right-wing Catholics to use the sexual abuse scandal among Catholic priests to attack the LGBT community. Chapman writes in a Jan. 8 blog post:
Contrary to the claim by some clergy that the sexual abuse problems in the Catholic Church stem from “clericalism” — excessive deference to priests and bishops — German Cardinal Walter Brandmuller said the fundamental problem is homosexuality in the priesthood. He stressed that 80% of the abuse cases over the decades involved gay priests abusing post-pubescent boys, i.e., young teen boys, ages 11 to 17. This is a “statistically proven” fact, he added.
Cardinal Brandmuller, the former president of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences at the Vatican, made his remarks in a Jan. 4 interview with the German news agency Deutsche Presse Agentur (DPA). His remarks were translated by several British and U.S. media, including Life Site News.
“80% of the abuse cases in the ecclesial environment involved male adolescents, not children,” said the cardinal, adding that this is “statistically proven.”
According to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice report on clergy sexual abuse in the United States between 1950 and 2002, “81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims.”
“The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7,” stated the report. There were 8,449 male victims and 2,004 female victims; 2 victims identified as transgender.
But as we’ve documented every time Bill Donohue or some other right-wing Catholic makes the claim at CNS, this is a deliberate misreading of the John Jay report. The researchers who conducted the report stated that no connection was found between homosexual identity and an increased likelihood of sexual abuse and argued that the idea of sexual identity should be separated from the problem of sexual abuse, since one does not have to have a homosexual identity to commit homosexual acts. The John Jay researchers also stated that the reason more than 80 percent of the victims of clergy sexual abuse were adolescent males is because that’s who the priests were around a lot of the time, making this in no small part a crime of opportunity rather than one of sexual orientation.
Neither Chapman nor Brandmuller — or LifeSiteNews, which reported Brandmuller’s comments — will mention this inconvenient fact, since this will get in the way of their anti-gay agenda.