In attempting to defend convicted child
sex abuser and former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky,
Father Benedict Groeschel has suggested that child victims of sexual
abuse initiate such encounters.
Groeschel, a prominent Franciscan
priest and the director of the Office for Spiritual Development for
the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, made the comments in an
interview published Monday in the National Catholic Register. The
publication has since removed the item and replaced it with an
apology.
“People have this picture in their
minds of a person planning to – a psychopath. But that's not the
case. Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a
youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster – 14,
16, 18 – is the seducer. … It's not so hard to see – a kid
looking for a father and didn't have his own – and they won't be
planning to get into heavy-duty sex, but almost romantic, embracing,
kissing, perhaps sleeping but not having intercourse or anything like
that.”
“It's an understandable thing …
there are the relatively rare cases where a priest is involved in a
homosexual way with a minor,” Groeschel said.
“Here's this poor guy – [Jerry]
Sandusky – it went on for years. Interesting: Why didn’t anyone
say anything? Apparently, a number of kids knew about it and didn't
break the ice. Well, you know, until recent years, people did not
register in their minds that it was a crime. It was a moral failure,
scandalous; but they didn't think of it in terms of legal things.”
He added that he does not believe
that a priest or “any responsible person in society” should go to
jail on their first conviction of child sexual abuse because “their
intention was not committing a crime.”
Groeschel, 79, is the author of The
Courage to be Chaste, which calls on gay men to honor God by
leading a life of celibacy, and a co-founder of the Catholic support
group Courage, which also claims gay people should lead chaste lives,
according to a report on Box
Turtle Bulletin.