Washington D.C., Jul 22, 2010 / 16:59 pm
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, spoke out in an article on the Washington Post's website on Thursday, defending his assertion that the widespread perception of a “pedophilia crisis in the Catholic Church” is not supported by data and research. The more significant problem, Donohue argued, is the incidence of homosexuality among priests.
Citing a number of medical journals in the field of human sexuality research, Donohue explained in his submission to the Washington Post's “On Faith” section that “homosexuals are disproportionately represented among child molesters.” Statistically, he said, the evidence for a “link between homosexuality and the sexual abuse of minors” in the general population is “overwhelming.”
This link is borne out in the majority of sex offenses committed by priests, according to Donohue. “As I have said many times, most gay priests are not molesters, but most of the molesters have been gay.”
In applying this correlation to the sex abuse crisis within the Church, he reiterated the findings of Roderick MacLeish Jr., who examined the full archives of the Archdiocese of Boston during his lawsuit against the Church. MacLeish represented nearly 400 victims of abuse in court, 90 percent of whom were male, and three-quarters post-pubescent.