Or: it’s only Ephebophilia if you say it is. Because according to Silvano Toscani, the Vatican’s permanent oberserver to the UN (does that make him a voyeur?):
“available research” showed that only 1.5%-5% of Catholic clergy were involved in child sex abuse.
Wow, that’s so negligible, then. I mean, there are only about 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide. If we split the difference and take at face value the Catholic Church’s confession that about 2.5 percent of them are abusing children then that’s exactly ten thousand sanctified paedophiles. If I were a sick pervert I could keep the mental experiment going and figure out how many kids’ lives those ten thousand sickos might manage to destroy over a lifetime (since the Church never actually deals with their, ahem, problem, but usually just shuffles them around to water down the scandal — or provide them with fresh victims, depending on how you look at it), but I’ll stop right here before it gets too painfully embarrassing.
How morally tone deaf and arrogant must you be if you think this absolves your Church and buries the issue?
But it gets better. Because what the Vatican is really trying to argue is that every other religion has the same problem, so why are we picking on them? Now, for an atheist it’s very tempting to simply argue that all clergy regardless of their flavor of superstition should be made to spend lots of time in a very small padded cell with an unusually well-endowed black man called Bubba who will teach them to squeal proudly in latin, but that’s probably not helpful or fair. But as Kevin Drum points out, how lame is a religion that feels compelled to resort to 2nd grader nyah-nyah-nyah tactics in an attempt at spreading the blame around?
Oh, and it gets better still. Silvano wants us all to be really clear about one thing: Catholic priests aren’t at all into little boys as we all seem to insist. No, not at all. No, they’re into mid-to-late adolescents — they’re ephebophiles — which changes everything, right? Right? Seriously. Who knew there was a name for the particular age of kids you like to molest? Certainly convenient for Silvano; this way he gets to describe with a single word what’s not at all wrong with the Catholic Church.
Silvio’s closing line was epic:
“As the Catholic church has been busy cleaning its own house, it would be good if other institutions and authorities, where the major part of abuses are reported, could do the same and inform the media about it.”
Or, in other words: “While we Catholics finally start mopping the cum stains off our rug, do the rest of you have any good photos you’d care to share?”
(Graphic from here)
