by Matthew A. C. Newsome ©2003

The following editorial was submitted to the Asheville (NC) Citizen-Times newspaper after a string of anti-Catholic letters were published.

For many, the Catholic Church makes an easy target.  After all, much of what she has to teach us runs counter to what our modern culture values – contraception, abortion, homosexuality, pornography, greed, divorce – and, above all, obedience to a power greater than ourselves.  Our modern world is all about me, me, me.

So I shouldn’t be surprised to find anti-Catholic rhetoric in the pages of our local paper.  Nor should I passively sit back and let readers believe in this skewed vision of the Church.

For an example of what I am talking about, look at the letter, “History full of violence towards pagans” (AC-T, Mar. 9).  The author claims the past 2000 years of history have been full of Christian violence towards pagans.  He cites the Inquisition, the witch trials, and the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs.

However, the Inquisitions (plural), bloody though they were, were not aimed at pagans.  They were aimed mostly at heretical Christians.  Often when people find out I am Catholic, they feel the need to tell me that they don’t like the Catholic Church because of “the Inquisition.”  When I ask them what they think the Inquisitions were, they can’t tell me.  Anyone who thinks they targeted pagans likewise is ignorant.

Nor were the witch trials aimed at pagans. They, too, were aimed at Christian people allegedly in league with the devil (only one “witch” was ever accused of worshiping a pagan deity, the goddess Diana).  And it is interesting to note that most “witches” were not accused by the Church but by their neighbors.  Most “witches” were tried and condemned in local, secular courts.  The Church hesitated to get involved, and when ecclesial courts did try these cases, the accused was more often than not acquitted.  While Catholics and Protestants alike participated in these trials, prominent Catholics and Protestants also spoke out against them.

As for the Aztec conquest, the author fails to mention that the Aztec people “worshiped” their gods with mass human sacrifice.  Aztec law required a thousand sacrifices in every town each year.  There were 371 towns subject to the Aztec empire.  Do the math.  The early Mexican historian Ixtlilxochitl estimated that one out of every five children in Mexico was sacrificed. (A number almost as horrifying as the one out of three children in America that are killed by abortion each year).  A major motive of the Spanish conquistadors was to put an end to the slaughter that they witnessed.

It is ironic that the author uses these examples to illustrate how “fundamentalist” Christianity (his label) is inherently violent.  The Fundamentalist movement only began in late nineteenth century America, as a reaction against liberal trends in mainline Protestantism.  This makes fundamentalism about as old as the “pagan” religion of Wicca, which grew out of late nineteenth century occultism and only really began to gel in the 1950s.  The continuity that modern pagans profess to have with the witches from the “Burning Times” and the pre-Christian pagans is only a myth. (And I would certainly hope that modern pagans would not claim any association to the Aztec priests who sacrificed 80,000 victims over the course of four days in 1487 at the dedication of the temple in Mexico City to the god Huitzilopochtli).

It’s amazing what you realize when you learn the whole story.

But those who wish to defame the Catholic Church don’t want you to see the whole story, or they are blind to it themselves.  Such is the case with the letter writer who tells us that “forced chastity” is the cause of pedophilia among priests (AC-T, Mar. 6).

This is a time of great sorrow for the Catholic Church.  That the very men charged with shepherding the faithful should be the ones to abuse the most innocent among them, the children, is a crime and a tragedy.  To use this scandal as the means to advance a personal vendetta against priestly celibacy is sickening.

Simply put, celibacy has nothing to do at all with pedophilia.  No serious sexual therapist or psychologist has ever made that claim.

The first thing to note here is that celibacy is not forced.  Men enter into the vow of celibacy of their own free will.  The Catholic Church does not require celibacy among her Latin priests because sex is “impure” as the letter writer states, but because of her teaching that sex is indeed pure and holy, and thus should be honored and respected.  This means celibacy outside of marriage and chastity within.  (And the harshest of condemnation for those who pervert the sex act to such as extreme as the molestation of children).

The notion that prolonged periods of celibacy would turn otherwise normal heterosexual men into monsters who have a sexual desire for young boys and a willingness to satisfy that lust with innocent victims is utterly without merit.  One has nothing to do with the other.  If that were true, you would find it rampant in the priesthood and almost non-existent elsewhere.  And this is not the case.  Most people can go through Catholic school systems from first grade up to graduation and not even hear one credible rumor about a priest abusing children.  You read of just as many, if not more, cases of child sexual abuse in the public school system than in the Catholic Church.  Yet no one blames the school system for the problem.  They realize that the problem lies with the individual.

If you really want to find the cause of this horrible disorder, examine the facts.  According to an NPR interview with Father Stephen Rossetti, a psychologist and consultant to the US Council of Bishops on the subject of child molestation, two thirds of those priests who abuse children were themselves sexually abused as children.  I suspect that you would find similar numbers among the non-clergy child molesters, as well as the Protestant clergy who abuse children.

In other words, this is a horrible crime that results in the perpetuation of more horrible crimes.  This is an issue that affects the whole spectrum of society, not just the Catholic Church.  Yet those with an agenda against the Church are among the first to point the finger and say, “This wouldn’t happen if . . .!”

Those who want to see women ordained claim this wouldn’t happen if women were let into the priesthood.  Those who want to see a married clergy say this wouldn’t happen if priests could marry.  Those who promote the homosexual lifestyle say this wouldn’t happen if the Church ordained openly gay priests.  Those who stand against the Church’s teaching on contraception or abortion even find ways to use this scandal to their advantage.  And those anti-Catholics who see the Church as the vehicle for the anti-Christ just say this is one more sign of the evil of the “papists.”  They make a lot of noise without ever addressing the problem.

If a good man gets cancer, you don’t blame him.  You don’t accuse him of being an evil person.  You do all you can to root out the cancer, aggressively if necessary.  Pedophile priests are a cancer in the Catholic Church.  The problem needs to be rooted out.  But let’s not malign the patient.

Can you blame the teachings of the Catholic Church for this?  Absolutely not.  It is the morality of the Church that tells us how horribly sinful these acts are.

Those who malign the Church over past deeds may simply not have a full understanding of the history involved.  But those who would take advantage of this tragedy to malign the Church for her own disciplines and teachings have a thinly veiled prejudice.  As I said before, the Church is an easy target.  There will always be those who will cast stones.  She has lived through worse times over the past 2000 years.  She’ll make it through this just fine.

I want only to encourage anyone interested in actually learning about the Catholic Church to do themselves a favor.  Go talk to a priest.  Go to mass.  Read the Catechism.  Take an adult education class at the local parish.  Learn from the source.  Just, for goodness’ sake, don’t rely solely on the opinion pages.