Week after week we all read about cases of priests, mostly Catholic who molest kids. Kids in there charge, the ones who attend there church and do extra activitys there are the usual victims. These storys are becoming more and more common. I grew up Catholic and never heard such stories as a little kid. I, like most good Catholics was taught that a priest is the ultimate authority outside of your parents and outside of God. That they were men who devoted there lives to truth, wisdom and what’s right. All that aside, how did so many come to do such horrible acts on children, and how did so many end up getting shipped away to get off from such a henious crime?
My theory/Answer. Because it’s a tradition.
Early Christianity in it’s begining was spread out quite a bit, The Greek world was the one to first accept it and embrace it in a large part of there culture. Abandoning the multipule Gods they worshiped and turning to the teachings of Christ. At the time, Greece and Rome were into Gnostic teachings, Christianity gave a new/different approach and was picked up by a large part of influential people in that society. This was a society that at that time had a large homosexual influence. Young men and woman from wealthy families were trained by older members of the same sex as they were in all aspects of knowledge. Areas that included acidemics, Sports, Language, warfare, and love. At a young age, boys and girls were taught how to pleasure a lover for future use. It was as common then as a sports coach training us and our kids in a sport at school now.
Many will claim that early Roman and Greek society was not homo/bisexual, (Homosexuality of course does not equate a person with child molesting, but ones who are molested as children, do tend to have a pattern of repeating what was done to them later on in life) but documented cases of it in plays, poems, novels and texts by many writers and philosophers of the time show that it was. These same writings are the ones the Catholic church later tried to destroy. And would have it it wasn’t for a few monks in key areas smuggling and hiding the writings from such a fate. Why the Catholic church tried to erase these text’s? Who knows for sure, many different reasons have been giving, but one reason beyond heresy, debasement, sinful, pagan writings is not giving.
Many and ones that were destroyed could have held proof that the early church did partake in the ‘training’ of young boys and girls in the area of sexual pleasure. As far as historians now know it did continue up till 400AD in Greece and Rome.
The Catholic church was the first major power in Europe, a power that extended in conquests and future colonizations of other cultures, nations and lands. Like all major religions, it is rooted in tradition, traditions that go back thousands of years still practised by many in our day and age. Any group that holds such traditions and practises have unwritten codes that only a few who reach a certan level in such groups end up knowing, and practising. Since the roots of Roman Catholicism comes from a time where ‘training’ children how to love was the norm, would it be a big surprise that they adapted the practise into there own teachings?
All and all, I am not trying to shoot down anyone who may be Catholic, or say every last priest is child molester. I am basing this on historical facts that many choose to not believe or ignore and the fact that no other group of people in any profession has as many members in it who molest children as much as Catholic priests do. There has to be a reason who so many men of faith end up doing such damage to children then any other group on a whole does. Given the fact that the early church comes from a place where such practises were the norm, why would it be such a surprise that they continued to practise what was tradition from where the roots of modern Catholicism comes from in an underground fashion? The forbidden fruit does taste the sweetest, and it was the Catholics who first decreed such things as masterbation, homosexuality, sex before marrage and sex with a child a sin before God. Maybe they included these such things to save some only for themselves?
Peace