Having recently seen the movie Spotlight, I was surprised to come across the following in Goebbels
A few days later, however, Hitler told him on the telephone that he now wanted “to take action against the Vatican.” He proposed to reopen on a grand scale the pedophile abuse cases that had been put on ice in summer 1936. They should start with a raft of charges already filed with the public prosecutor in Koblenz. Hitler envisaged as a “prelude” the “horrifying sexual murder of a boy in a Belgian monastery”; Goebbels immediately dispatched a “special rapporteur” to Brussels.26 Shortly afterward, Hitler ordered the judicial authorities to reopen the trials.27 There was no lack of suitable ammunition, as Goebbels wrote some days later: “We’ve still got 400 unresolved cases.”28 The series of trials in Koblenz began at the end of April. Goebbels was displeased by what he considered the inadequate reaction of the media, and he summoned a special press conference at which the papers were commanded to launch “a large-scale propaganda campaign against the Catholic Church.” The results were so impressive that Goebbels was moved to express his appreciation of the journalists at the press conference the next day.
On May 28 Goebbels gave a speech in the Berlin Deutschlandhalle condemning “the sex offenders and those behind them.” The key sentences of this speech (which is generally regarded as the high point of the regime’s campaign against the churches in 1937) were not his own, however, as the diary reveals: “Führer with me, dictating my declaration of war against the clergy today regarding the sexual abuse trials. Very stinging and drastic. I would not have gone that far.”
In his speech Goebbels made clear that the cases of sexual abuse by the clergy that had for some time been filling the courts of the National Socialist state were not “regrettable isolated incidents”; it was, rather, a matter of “general moral decay.
Even an older person like myself could wish that times would actually change…
Phil, do you mean that child sex abuse did not occur in churches or that it were not used as a political weapon against particular chrches? To my mind, this seems like far more cases per capita than the more recent scandals. Of course one case is too many, but I had thought the actual reporting of child sex abuse was far more common now than in the past, and this seems to contradict that impression.
The rate of sexual abuse by priests is no higher (or lower) than that of any other group of males who work with teens – somewhere in the vicinity of 4%.
http://www.newsweek.com/priests-commit-no-more-abuse-other-males-70625
So the number of priests who are sex abusers is a simple mathematical function of the number of priests (sexual abuse by female teachers is not unknown either so getting rid of all male teachers wouldn’t fix the problem). “The heart wants what it wants” regardless of laws against it and what some men want is youthful mates – some want boys and some want girls. The priesthood tends (because of celibacy rules) to attract repressed gay men, so they tend to go more for males. In rare instances, they want prepubescents but most abuse involves teens. Modern society tends to put teens off limits (at least to other adults) but throughout history the age of consent was much lower. Mohammed consummated his marriage to Aisha when she was nine. So when we criminalize this conduct you are guarantying that a certain % of the population will offend. Maybe it is right and proper that we consider such conduct criminal (although apparently we turn a blind eye when teens do it with each other) but just as with alcohol prohibition you are never going to actually get rid of it just by declaring it illegal.
Peter: I wish that times would change such that children were never abused anywhere!
The Marquis de Sade wrote about clergy abusing children in 1785 – not in a journalistic/historical sense but the idea must’ve come from somewhere.
In Hitler’s case it seems to have been used as ammunition for a power grab.