pedophilia as a "psychological condition"

It may be tedious, but it needs to be called out...

The Archbishop of Durban, Wilfrid Fix Napier, has suggested that pedophilia, a Vatican-sponsored activity that has cost the Vatican millions, is a psychological "illness, not a criminal condition."

[Anyone who bridles at the assertion that the Vatican has been complicit for hundreds of years in the business of priests screwing small children needs to do a little homework among, for example, the selected Vatican documents that date back to 309 AD.]

In an interview with the BBC, the South African cardinal who most recently helped to elect Pope Francis referred to two priests who had themselves been abused as children:

Now don't tell me that those people are criminally responsible like somebody who chooses to do something like that. I don't think you can really take the position and say that person deserves to be punished. He was himself damaged.

The argument is as cunning and specious as it is self-serving. As a shrink friend of mine, an ex-Jesuit, once put it, "If a man punches you in the stomach, you don't ask if he lives in a rat-infested apartment."

Placing himself beneath an umbrella of apparent kindness and wider understanding, Napier is hardly new in his approach. His Catholic kith and kin have used the same argument in the past is they wriggled and squirmed on the hook that pedophilia has placed in their sides... wriggled and squirmed and tried to preserve the institution they credited ... the same institution that put bread and butter and prestige on their table.

Well, it won't wash.

Napier, like his kith and kin, neglects to mention that if these perpetrators are psychologically damaged goods, yes, they may need help ... but there are prisons for those adjudged criminally insane. He neglects to mention the victims who suffered at the hands of such damaged goods. He neglects to mention the wider society that finds screwing small children heinous and is willing to punish such actions ... irrespective of the rats in anyone's apartment. Is such judgment and such punishment too harsh? Is a request that people assume responsibility for their actions too extreme? Is it all too unkind and uncompassionate? Did "the devil make me do it?" Very well, there are hospital prisons for the criminally insane.

Napier's implicit allegation is that everyone is worthy of forgiveness. And, whether or not anyone is trying to defend a much-beloved institution, perhaps this is true. It's nice to be nice. It's nice to have a wider vision, even if it is just an end-run around culpability. But the social fact is that everyone has suffered a tragedy -- everyone has lived in a rat-infested apartment -- and, by the grace of god, perhaps, has learned to live with and take responsibility for it. I'm not suggesting this is always easy. I am suggesting that -- tough titty! -- that is the way life is. And if you want to claim a place at the social table, then it is best to deal with your own rats ... not lay them off on someone else.

The church of necessity claims a place at the social table. Without that place, the church would dissolve. But you can't have it both ways -- claiming a place at the social table while simultaneously claiming to be above that table.

It's horseshit ... which is not to say that horseshit is somehow in short supply at the social table.