Peering Into the Moral Abyss

Since I’m in that minority that still gets the print edition of the New York Times, I saw this exercise in grotesquely immoral self-refutation from Bill Donahue. A couple all-too-representative samples:

A common belief, fostered by the media, is that there is a widespread sexual abuse problem in the Catholic Church today. The evidence is to the contrary: In 2004, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice issued its landmark study and found that most of the abuse occurred during the heyday of the sexual revolution, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s.

[…]

The refrain that child rape is a reality in the Church is twice wrong: let’s get it straight—they weren’t children and they weren’t raped. We know from the John Jay study that most of the victims have been adolescents, and that the most common abuse has been inappropriate touching (inexcusable though this is, it is not rape). [Is he getting his schtick from Meade or vice versa? –ed.] The Boston Globe correctly said of the John Jay report that “more than three-quarters of the victims were post pubescent, meaning the abuse did not meet the clinical definition of pedophilia.” In other words, the issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia.

It goes on like that. It would be nice to think that this would permanently end this hateful crackpot representing “Catholics” on my teevee, but it’s nothing he hasn’t always been willing to say in public, so…