Those goddamn hippies have done it again. First, they gave us jam bands and never-ending guitar solos that when combined with psilocybin mushrooms, could transport you to another dimension where personal hygiene and brain cell regeneration were afterthoughts. Then their ‘burn your bras and fuck your neighbor’ campaign triggered Regan’s ‘War On Drugs’; which still packs our penitentiaries with anyone who has the audacity to carry more than a dime bag of marijuana on their person. Now, it turns out that they are also responsible for the ‘priests who want to fuck children’ epidemic that swept through the early stages of the 21st Century, leaving Catholics across the globe on their knees begging for…okay, bad analogy…strike that.
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| Peace man. Go with God Bro! |
A recent study conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice concluded, and no I am not making this up, that the rampant sexual abuse perpetrated by priests was not a result of homosexuality or a by-product of the all-male, celibate nature of the priesthood. The real culprit was that “priests who were poorly prepared or monitored, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and 70s.” So after the 1.8 million dollars that was spent on the study, we are left to believe that the reason some priests molest children is because they went to Woodstock and had a really good time there.
I naturally found this hard to swallow and upon reading such a preposterous claim, I understandably shat myself. After putting on a clean pair of pantaloons, I continued reading the study’s findings to find that apparently the Catholic Church has been employing this rationale for the last decade.
How fascinating. And as much as I have enjoyed mocking the various tenants of the hippie way of life, I think it harshly unjustified to hold them responsible for priests’ inability to keep their cassocks on and their hands off the altar boys. Having poor taste in clothes and obliviously dragging innocents into never-ending philosophical discussions devoid of anything resembling a point hardly warrant linking these creatures to child molestation.
Bong hits and hemp clothing do not lead to pedophilia, do they? I have pulled many a tube in my life (that’s Hippese for bong smoking). I have partaken in the reefer, imbibed the ganja, danced with Mary Jane and puffed the Magic Dragon yet I have never done what, according to the John Jay Report of 2002, 4% of the world’s priests have done to children under the age of eighteen.
Furthermore, the recent study claimed that the priests that were found guilty of abusing boys were not doing so because they were homosexuals. It also concluded that few of the guilty priests exhibited behavior typical of pedophiles or possessed any particular psychological patterns or disorders. That being said, one could feasibly deduce that celibacy turns 4% of its practitioners, regardless of sexual orientation or psychiatric history, into pedophiles. Will I too start assaulting children if I abstain from sex or eat too many unleavened wafers? Should I be worried?
So who is really to blame here? Could it be, and this is just a fucking stab in the dark, the Catholic Church itself? Could an archaic culture of diametric morality that is hell-bent (nice word choice, eh?!) on celibacy and keeping its followers on their knees, crippled with guilt for even briefly indulging in sexual fantasies, somehow be enabling if not cultivating this trend? There is a kink in the Catholic machinery and it sure as shit ain’t a pair of bell-bottoms.
If you stick a bunch of men in a monastery without a woman in site, wrap a suffocating Roman Collar around their throat and guilt every semblance of a healthy sexuality out of them…guess what. They are going to explode. And who do these holy powder kegs have access to? Children. Boys.
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| Pope Benedict XVI at Woodstock in 1969 |
So what are we to do? Perhaps the Vatican should mandate weekly trips to Hooters for all clergymen. Or Pope Benedict could encourage priests to watch pornography and masturbate at least once a day; perhaps less frequently for the older ones. Maybe the priesthood should finally go co-ed and while they're at it, Catholicism as a whole could come to terms with the fact that having sex will probably not secure one’s place in hell on the off chance that there actually is one. Apparently the real solution to this problem is just to keep priests from attending Phish concerts. Who knew.
