Catholic Reverend Blames 14-16 year old Boys For Seducing Catholic Priests

Is it not time for Vatican to take this on their chin – and stop blaming anyone? After all during the Middle Ages, the Vatican rule was termed as pornocracy.

Blaming boys in their teens as seducers takes the cake!

Across Europe and USA, hundreds of thousands of these sexual abuse have come to light in the last 50 years. What started as a trickle in the 60s, has now turned to a flood.

More than this, it is now getting replicated in non-Church NGOs also. In India, many of these NGO do-gooders have been implicated in sexual abuse cases. The Joe Paterno-Jerry Sandusky scandal in USA continues to haunt America. The suicide of Peter Roebuck was related to sexual advances he made to boys in his coaching camps.

A prominent Roman Catholic spiritual leader who has spent decades counseling wayward priests for the archdiocese provoked shock and outrage on Thursday as word spread of a recent interview he did with a Catholic newspaper during which he said that “youngsters” were often to blame when priests sexually abused them and that priests should not be jailed for such abuse on their first offense. The Rev. Benedict Groeschel, who made the remarks, is a beloved figure among many Catholics and a founder of Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, a conservative priestly order based in New York. He hosts a weekly show on the Eternal Word Television Network and has written 45 books.

The comments were published on Monday by The National Catholic Register, which is owned by EWTN, a religious broadcaster based in Alabama.

“Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him,” Father Groeschel, now 79, said in the interview. “A lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer.”

He added that he was “inclined to think” that priests who were first-time abusers should not be jailed because “their intention was not committing a crime.”

On Thursday, the comments were taken off the publication’s Web site after the controversy erupted, and the editors, Father Groeschel and his religious order apologized.

“I did not intend to blame the victim,” Father Groeschel wrote in a statement published on The Catholic Register’s site. “A priest (or anyone else) who abuses a minor is always wrong and is always responsible. My mind and my way of expressing myself are not as clear as they used to be.”

Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York, denounced the comments as “terribly wrong.” But he said the church was unlikely to discipline Father Groeschel, in part because as a member of a religious order, he was not officially a priest of the diocese.

via In Interview, the Rev. Benedict Groeschel Says Abuse Victims Can Be Seducers – NYTimes.com.

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