ROME — Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin has denied a correlation between homosexuality and clerical sex abuse, calling it a “serious and scientifically untenable association.”
“Homosexual orientation cannot be considered as either cause or aspect typical of the abuser, even more so when it is decoupled from the general arrangement of the person,” Cardinal Parolin wrote in the forward to a new book on sex abuse.
Bill Donohue, a sociologist and president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, has noted that regardless of his intentions, Cardinal Parolin is factually mistaken. The most extensive study ever undertaken of clerical sex abuse, conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, found that a full 81 percent of victims of sexual abuse by priests were males.
This means that over the period 1950 to 2010 more that four out of every five cases of clerical sex abuse were homosexual in nature, Donohue points out.
Donohue, author of the meticulously researched book The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and the Causes (2021), observes that there is an undeniable link between a homosexual orientation and the sexual abuse of minors, adding that homosexuals are significantly “overrepresented in committing these crimes.”
This evidently does not mean that every man with a homosexual orientation will be an abuser, but statistically speaking, “homosexuals are more likely to abuse minors than heterosexuals, in and out of the priesthood,” Donohue states.
Many of the perpetrators of the homosexual clerical abuse of minors do not identify as “gay,” Donohue acknowledges, but this is irrelevant to the nature of the crime committed.
Donohue also points out that Pope Francis has reiterated the Church’s discipline of barring men with “deeply seated homosexual tendencies” from the priesthood.
“In the consecrated life and in the priestly life, there is no place for that kind of affection,” the pope has declared.
Donohue concludes that we “will never cure this curse in the Catholic Church unless we come to grips with the disastrous role that immature homosexual priests have played in generating the scandal.”