I wonder if his position that the Church needs to return to the good old days (one assumes, before the 1970s) doesn't play into that statement.

Looking into it further, it still looks like he was totally damn wrong, but for a whole other set of reasons. First, the speech was almost a year ago, so I have no idea why it's burbling to the surface just now. And second, he's not actually committing the grotesque sin of handwaving away pedophilia, he's committing the incredibly tiresome eyerolly sin of blaming free love and dirty fucking hippies and feminism and 70s pop psychology. Here's the full speech, relevant section starting with paragraph 11.

To be scrupulously fair to him, he isn't dismissing the seriousness of the violation of trust or the crimes against generations of children. That noted, it's still incredibly childish, whiny, and painfully ignorant of the details of Western European and American social history of the 1960s-80s (and, unsurprisingly, completely without specific citations), not to mention a spiteful takeback of what started out as a genuine-sounding apology, to say, "Sure, we let our pastors do incredibly shitty, cruel things to children and then we covered up for them and lied about it, but don't forget the context; we were all helpless beneath the Rasputiny mesmeric powers of those ... 70s pop psychologists!"

Still a dick move, but more a callous stupid-ass intellectually lazy dick move than an out-and-out victim-denying crime-erasing dick move.

Man, the Vatican should totally hire me as their number one PR flak!

eta: Or, you know, what Allyson and Ginger so eloquently said while I was bloviating.

I can't tell if he is truly worried more about the humiliation of the church, because such a heinous thing happened, or because it's just a huge PR mess

Yeah. My problem is that (a) he seems to be claiming that only now do we think child rape is a really bad thing, which I think is a way of minimizing the horror of what priests did for decades to the children in their care; and (b) he seems to be simultaneously claiming that society is now degraded and that's why we have child abuse and pornography.

Both of which operate to avoid accepting the Church's responsibility for the harm it has caused. I want the Church to accept that responsibility and change itself so that it never does such a thing again. The more the blame is cast on the demon of social change rather than the toxic way the Church protects its own and clings to moral authority, the more likely it is that this shit will just continue.

Or, you know, what everyone else said.

STOP PASSING THE BUCK, POPE.

I also think it could be read as part of the ongoing effort to discredit liberation theology.

ITA, Ginger.

I'm going back to Suri's Burn Book. It's the only thing that makes sense in the world right now.

Seriously, I'm stuck there. I'm on an important conference call, but Suri's got my attention.

I also think it could be read as part of the ongoing effort to discredit liberation theology.

Oh, yeah. t sigh

I will just point out that my great-uncle was sexually assaulted by a priest at a boarding school in the 1930s, and his parents took him out of school, because they knew nothing would happen to the priest. Per my grandmother.

Per my grandmother.

HIPPIE!