The instrument has yet to be invented that can measure my indifference* to the opinions of a retired Catholic priest, but this is ridiculous.  And criminal.

Pope Benedict XVI has broken his silence in a rare essay on the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, claiming that it was caused in part by the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the liberalization of the church’s moral teaching.

In the 11-page analysis published today in a German magazine for priests, Klerusblatt, the former Pope also reveals some of the behind-the-scenes struggles between the Vatican and American bishops in handling the crisis and admits that the Vatican was initially overwhelmed in dealing with it.

[…]

In the essay, Benedict asserts that the changes in traditional moral standards on sexuality both in society and within the Catholic Church laid the groundwork for the sex abuse crisis.

“Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ’68,” he writes, “was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.”

Benedict says that this mentality also affected bishops and Catholic seminaries and caused, “the extensive collapse of the next generation of priests.”

“There were — not only in the United States of America — individual bishops who rejected the Catholic tradition as a whole and sought to bring about a kind of new, modern Catholicity,” he writes.

“In various seminaries homosexual cliques were established,” he writes, “which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the climate in the seminaries.”

Benedict cites one bishop who showed seminarians pornographic films, “allegedly with the intention of thus making them resistant to behavior contrary to the faith.”

Nice try, you old fart.  There are records that detail abuse going much further back than the 1960’s and even more on how the church covered it up.  So STFU and go back to reading “Mein Kampf” in Latin.

*HT Hawkeye Pierce.