This week the Pope’s second in command, Secretary of State for the Vatican, Cardinal Tariscio Bertone, thought he was making things better on Monday when he said that celibacy was not the source of the problem of pedophile priests. It was all the fault of homosexuality. Bertone asserted that there were numerous studies proving a connection between homosexuality and pedophilia.

Well, no, actually, there aren’t.  In fact, the studies in question say just the opposite: Heterosexuals predominate among pedophiles just as girls predominate among their victims. As Ireland’s Ryan Report made abundantly and horrifically clear when it was released last year, abuse of girls was even more prevelant than abuse of boys in the Church sex scandal there.

What made the Ryan Report so important was the fact that in no other country is the social welfare system and the Church as inextricably tied. The Ryan Report was ten years in the making and in its 3,000+ pages details the most astonishing level of abuse of children and teens by priests. 

Irish journalist Mary Raftery wrote a play, No Escape, based on the Ryan Report, which debuts today, April 14, at the prestigious Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

In an interview with BBC’s Dan Damon this morning, Raftery addressed Bertone’s comments, noting that the Ryan Report proved without a shadow of a doubt that homosexuality had absolutely nothing to do with the ongoing abuse in Ireland perpetrated by the Church against Irish children and teens.

The Ryan Report is perhaps the most damning of all the documents to surface in recent weeks about the Church and its cover-up of the endemic–some would say pandemic–abuse of children by priests. Most disheartening is the fact that the so-called good priests and nuns did nothing to stop what they had to know was utterly wrong and debased behavior toward what the Ryan Report asserts were hundreds of thousands of Irish children.

The details that have come to light regarding Pope Benedict’s involvement in the cover-up have been significant. But one need only take a cursory glance at the Ryan Report to see how abuse of children became quotidian–it was a part of growing up Catholic in Ireland. If you were in a Catholic school or an orphanage or were a client of some other social service agency run by the Church, you could expect to be physically and sexually abused. Period. It would be easier to count the children such abuse didn’t  happen to, rather than those who were the victims. Almost no one escaped, according to the report.  Hence Raftery’s title.  

In her play, Raftery details the inventiveness of the abusers. Almost every implement since the Stone Age was used to abuse children. If that conjures harrowing images in one’s imagination, it should–because this happened to real children. No Escape is a play, but it is taken directly from testimony in the Ryan Report. Nothing is exaggerated–incidents in the play are taken directly from the report.

The impact of the scandal on Ireland has been so dramatic that the Abbey Theatre will have counselors on hand throughout the run of No Escape. Concern that some members of the audience might be former victims or the parents/family of victims led the theater to seek people who specialize in counseling rape and abuse victims to talk to any audience members stricken during a performance.

Imagine.

Bertone’s comments are just more in the obfuscation game the Vatican is continuing to play despite growing anger worldwide at the inability of any member of the Church hierarchy to address the victims, rather than merely protect themselves and the Church. Thus far the Pope himself has referred to responses to the scandal as “petty gossip,” another Cardinal in the Pope’s inner circle compared media attention to the scandal with Nazi propaganda against the Jews, yet another Cardinal called news reports part of a Zionist conspiracy. And now Bertone–blaming homosexuality. 

The tone-deafness of the Vatican is simply shocking. Five years ago Pope Benedict tried to pass the American pedophile priest scandal off as a problem with homosexuality. But then as now, there were countless female victims. 

 What’s more, nuns have not been involved in these scandals. Yet no doubt there are at least as many lesbian nuns as there are gay priests. So if homosexuality were indeed the issue–which it so clearly is not—then wouldn’t there be countless cases of nuns abusing the girls in their care? And yet there are none.

I spent nine years in a Catholic girl’s school and was taught by nuns. While corporal punishment was still in vogue then and I received my share (and possibly more) of cheek and arm pinching as well as knuckle rapping from various nuns, there was never a hint of sexual abuse at my school or any other school friends of mine attended at the hands of any nun.

Conversely, we all had tales of the priests who couldn’t help but rub your shoulders and back or touch your hair or “mistakenly” touch a thigh or a buttock or a pre-pubescent breast while one was studying in First Holy Communion or Confirmation classes. That our interaction with priests was so infrequent as opposed to our interaction with nuns, yet the “friendliness” of the priests was duly noted by all of us, young as we were, was indicative of how flagrant the priest abuse was. And also indicative of how it had nothing to do with homosexuality and everything to do with an abnormal attraction to children–pedophilia.

The priest sex abuse scandal isn’t going away. It isn’t going away because for every child who was “merely” fondled as some of us were, others were raped and sodomized and even impregnated. For every girl or boy who was the victim of an “overly friendly” priest, there were others who were traumatized for life by the events at retreats or individual classes or even confession (an 11 year old girl in Philadelphia was raped in the confesssional repeatedly by her parish priest–who later procured an abortion for her when she became pregnant. That priest was shuffled from parish to parish for 20 years, abusing who knows how many other child victims).

The Ryan Report puts the lie to Bertone’s vicious calumny. But it also serves as a document of horrors that represents one of the Church’s darkest periods. That children–the most innocent of all members of the Church flock–were treated as vessels to be passed from pedophile to pedophile and that the Church was most concerned about its own image and could not have cared less about the damage being done to these children is enough to shake one’s faith.

Bertone can pick up where Cardinal Ratzinger–now Pope Benedict–left off, but it means nothing. Catholics worldwide know the score–the Church has protected pedophiles for decades. The Church has turned its back on victims when it hasn’t outright blamed them for the crimes committed against them. One Spanish cardinal said last week that young girls often lure priests. He was talking about a five year old at the time.

That kind of talk smacks of the same kind of crazy that prompted the Spanish Inquisition when priests thought women could spirit their penises away in the night.

The reality is that only pedophiles think that children are sexual aggressors. Adults with normal sexuality–be it heterosexual or homosexual–want peer relationships, not rape and sodomy with children who can’t fight back and who must be threatened into silence.

The scandal won’t go away until the Church does what it should have done ages ago: confess its sins, beg for forgiveness and turn the perpetrators over to real law, not canon law. Pope Benedict and Cardinal Bertone should be the first in line to recant their lies and for once speak the truth about what really happened:  The Church created a playground for pedophiles and did everything concievable to protect those miscreants from paying for their crimes. And is still trying to do so. —VAB