It's reminiscent of what Luther found when he first visited Rome as a young monk in 1510. Luther was so appalled at the flagrant sexual licentiousness of the priests and bishops that he (or someone close to him) commented that they (the clerics) think they're being virtuous if they limit their debaucheries to sex with women. Luther afterwards would occasionally recite the Italian proverb, "If there is a hell Rome is built on top of it."
The ensuing Protestant Reformation precipitated a corresponding reformation in the Catholic Church that restored a measure of piety and virtue to the clergy, at least in some parts of Europe and North America. Now, however, it appears that another reformation is badly needed.
Rahe says that pederasty, the sexual exploitation of adolescent boys by grown men, is so rampant among priests and higher ups that unless Pope Francis resigns and the Vatican bishops clean house there'll be an ecclesiastical "civil war" in the Roman Catholic Church.
Meanwhile, the scandal is giving the Church not merely a black eye but a serious concussion, and I suspect that a lot of church officials find themselves too paralyzed by political correctness to insist that the offenders be purged.
Since the problem seems bound up inextricably with the so-called Lavender Mafia that permeates the higher echelons of the church's seminaries and other institutions, and which uses its power to block the advancement of young clerics who don't see human sexuality quite the way they do, an attempt to rid the church of its homosexual subculture would surely initiate a worldwide media firestorm.
Indeed, an attempted purge could tear the church apart since according to one authority cited by Rahe, somewhere between 20% and 60% of the church's prelates are homosexual. Even at the low end of that range it's one in five, despite the incidence of homosexuality in the general population hovering somewhere around 3%.
Defenders of the cultural normalization of homosexuality will offer the argument that just because one is a homosexual it doesn't follow that one is also a pederast, any more than one's heterosexuality makes one a heterosexual pedophile, so how is the church to separate the gay sheep from the pederastic goats?
Of course, if one starts from the assumption that homosexuality is in some sense normative then that's a tough argument to rebut. What would be needed for rebuttal would be statistics that support the intuition that pederasty is significantly more tolerated, approved and practiced among homosexuals than opposite sex abuse of minors is tolerated, approved and practiced by heterosexuals.
Nevertheless, whether that intuition is correct or not, any Catholic cleric who has any sort of sexual encounter, whether homo- or heterosexual, whether with a minor or consenting adult, is betraying both his calling and his vow of celibacy and should be sanctioned for that if for nothing else.
And regardless of one's position on homosexuality, everyone can, and should, agree that pederasts, and those who've covered up for them, should be defrocked and prosecuted.
It will be interesting to see how the Catholic Church survives this, especially if the scandal extends, as Rahe alleges, all the way to Il Papa himself. Too bad there's no modern Dante Alighieri around to craft a literary portrayal of the destiny of such as employ their power and influence over adolescent boys to sate their own selfish, depraved appetites by sexually abusing and often traumatizing those boys for the rest of their lives.
