Retired Pope Benedict XVI publishes an analysis on the Catholic Church's clergy sex abuse scandal, blaming it on the sexual revolution of the 1960s and church laws that protected priests.
FILE - This Oct. 19, 2014 file photo shows Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI arrives in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican to attend the beatification ceremony of Pope Paul VI, and a mass for the closing of a two-week synod on family issues, celebrated by Pope Francis.
Benedict traced the start of the crisis to the '60s, citing the appearance of sex in films in his native Bavaria and the formation of "homosexual cliques" in seminaries "which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the climate." He also attributed it to failures in moral theology in that era.
As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict spearheaded reforms of those laws in 2001 to make it easier to remove priests who abused children. Benedict took a hard line against clerical sex abuse as the Vatican's conservative doctrine chief, and later as pope, defrocking hundreds of priests accused of raping and molesting children.
Church historian Christopher Bellitto questioned if Benedict, who turns 92 next week, was being manipulated by others. He said the essay omitted the critical conclusions that arose from the pope's February sex abuse summit in Rome, including that "abusers were priests along the ideological spectrum, that the abuse predated the 1960s, that it is a global and not simply Western problem, that homosexuality is not the issue in pedophilia.
The essay was applauded by some on the right. Writing in The Catholic Herald, Chat Pecknold praised the intervention as a necessary word from "the voice of a father" that accurately identified an absence of God as the reason for the crisis. Villanova University theologian Massimo Faggioli said the essay was thin in its analysis, effectively attributing the scandal to the sexual revolution. He said it omitted key cases, such as the Legion of Christ founder's pedophilia, which began well before then and involved abuse in one of the most rigorously orthodox, conservative religious orders.
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