Benedict XVI and the 1960s - Martin Scicluna

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI retired in 2013 overwhelmed by the clerical sex abuse scandals besetting his papacy. In a 6,000-word essay published just before Holy Week, Benedict blamed the sexual revolution of the 1960s for the Catholic Church’s clerical sex abuse, which is directly at odds with Pope Francis’s view that the scandal is the result of an abuse of clerical power. 

“In the 1960s an egregious event occurred on a scale unprecedented in history,” former Pope Benedict has written in a German magazine titled Klerusblatt. Aiming to explain child abuse by priests, he lays the blame on society in an extraordinary apologia: “It could be said that in the 20 years from 1960 to 1980, the hitherto binding standards regarding sexuality collapsed entirely…”

He cites as evidence the introduction of sex education, with German and Austrian governments in the 1960s showing schoolchildren a film of sexual intercourse. This, in turn, he asserts, led to pornographic films becoming more common in society. On Good Friday 1970, he claims he saw billboards of naked people embracing.

“Closely linked” to this, in his opinion, is violence. He claims that sex films were not allowed on aeroplanes...