George Weigel Responds to the Critics of the John Jay Report Regarding Sexual Abuse Crisis

George Weigel has done a good job in answering the "usual suspects" who are apopletic over the release of the John Jay Report that connects the sexual abuse crisis in the Church with the sexual and secular cultural revolution that began in the 1960's. Here is an excerpt from the article which can be read at National Review Online.

The American narrative of the Catholic Church’s struggles with the clerical sexual abuse of the young has been dominated by several tropes firmly set in journalistic concrete: that this was and is a “pedophilia” crisis; that the sexual abuse of the young is an ongoing danger in the Church; that the Catholic Church was and remains a uniquely dangerous environment for young people; that a high percentage of priests were abusers; that abusive behavior is more likely from celibates, such that a change in the Church’s discipline of priestly celibacy would be important in protecting the young; that the Church’s bishops were, as a rule, willfully negligent in handling reports of abuse; that the Church really hasn’t learned any lessons from the revelations that began in the Long Lent of 2002.

But according to an independent, $1.8 million study conducted by New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and released on May 18, every one of these tropes is false.

Two: The “crisis” of clerical sexual abuse in the United States was time-specific. The incidence of abuse spiked in the late 1960s and began to recede dramatically in the mid-1980s. In 2010, seven credible cases of abuse were reported in a church that numbers over 65 million adherents. (Of course the sexual revolution continues, as do cases of sexual abuse, except they are even more rarely committed by priests now than before. Look at any offender today and undoubtedly you will find a computer full of pornography close by. But just try and get the Times to go after the porn industry.)