For a long time now I have known what causes the imbalance of mind amongst clergy and mainly Catholic clergy at that, when they abuse young children, in the main young boys. My old friend, Tom Doyle, the Dominican priest who has been fighting clerical sexual abuse of children in America for the past 30 years and is renowned in the legal world as being the foremost expert on this subject all over the Christian realm, explained it to me some years ago.
When you take an 11 year old boy and lock him up in a junior seminary like St Bede’s in Manchester was in my time and give him little access to his family and the outside world and being surrounded by other boys of like persuasion and priests who more often than not were abused as children and learnt their grooming skills as boys themselves and at 18 send him to senior seminary with even less access to humanity and make him a priest at 24, that man is still emotionally an 11year old boy. He has not matured emotionally having had no proper contact with the outside world. Therefore as a mature man of 24 he considers himself on a par with 11 year old boys. It is therefore easy for him to consider abusing young boys who come into contact with him. His emotional development, that most of us take for granted, having gone through the long hard grind of puberty and youthfulness, does not take place. Most abusing priests do not think they do any harm, most of them in fact do not think they have committed a crime, they cannot comprehend the almost god-like idea a priest has in the minds of children until confronted in therapy.
Tom arrived at this idea after studying thousands of cases in America since the early 1980s, he even explained it to the Catholic Bishop’s Conference of America in the late 1980s but unfortunately he was preaching to the emotionally immature. Even now the conniving Archbishop Carlson of St Louis has stated recently in a clerical abuse case that when he was a young priest in the 1980s he was not sure that adults having sex with chilren was a crime. This was from an intelligent, well educated, man of God. He was not even sure when he was an Auxilliary Bishop of St Paul in Minneapolis in the late 1980s whether it was a crime for a priest to have sex with children. So even has you climb the ladder of success in the Church, this emotional immaturity does not improve. It is well worth watching the various film clips between Carlson and the advocate , Jeff Anderson, on Bishop Accountability website and those on Anderson Advocates website to show the absolute paucity of emotional maturity in these men.
So having understood the main and real causes that sets a man of God on the road to perfidiousness, I turned my attention to another branch of society who are up to their eyebrows in paedophilia. These men get sent to boarding schools at 11 years of age and then at 18 join strictly male dominated societies at good universities and on graduation do not always become employed in the outside world before entering the world of politics and then onto male dominated cabinet positions. Yes senior politicians of all parties are more often than not found at some stage to have dipped more than their feet into the murky depths of paedophilia and yes as well their emotional development has not matured. They will easily patronise women, easily tell lies to anybody who will listen, easily consider theirselves untouchable.
Yes, the politician and the clergyman are of one and the same ilk.