The problem we have is that our sources from the era aren’t typically from the hoi polloi.
nevermind
My father had an unexplained dislike of Roman Catholics, although he was not in the least religious. When I was a teenager in the 1950s, I recall him routinely describing Catholic priests as “kiddy fiddlers”.
This was said in the same casual way as you might describe all politicians as out for themselves or Estate Agents as outright liars.
Missing from the discussion so far is any acknowledgment that our visceral horror of sexual contact with children is very modern. Not that it was regarded as wholly acceptable in the past, by any means, but it wasn’t seen as uniquely depraved and, of course, there was little or no understanding of the long-term consequences for the children concerned. In most places the age of legal consent was much lower than it is today, and sex with children below even that age was seen as a relatively minor offence. London, New York and other major cities had enormous child prostitution industries, which can’t have been sustained without a large customer base, and which the civic authorities didn’t act vigorously against. Notwithstanding the relative sexual liberation of our age compared to, say, the Victorian era, this is one area in which our social and legal attitudes are are much, much more restrictive.
When you put the phenomenon of clerical sexual abuse in this context, it will be seen that, for a lot of people, the aggravating factor was that the clerics were violating their vows and abusing their position, but these aggravating factors offended the church more than the child, and therefore it was reasonable to see this as a problem that the church should deal with as it saw best. Same went for child sexual abuse in other institutional settings (e.g. schools) which, yes, was fairly common.
Yes, we get it-other groups do it, too.
- Nobody is saying that other groups don’t do it.
- This thread seems to be focusing in on problems in the Catholic Church.
- “Bullying by other children” is not the same as sexual molestation by authority figures.
Not young boys, but the 5th wife of Henry VIII was Catherine Howard. She was raised in the house of her rich grandma, where apparently a number of such girls lived in one dormer attic room and the boys in the other wing. During her trial, she related how at an early age (11 or 12) her music teacher molested her.
Catherine’s music teacher, Henry Manox, taught her the virginal and the flute and also tried to seduce his young pupil. As she later would confess: “at the flattering and fair persuasions of Manox being but a young girl I suffered him at sundry times to handle and touch the secret parts of my body which neither became me with honesty to permit nor him to require”." Catherine’s sexual education continued with Francis Dereham, a gentleman in the service of the duchess. At night Dereham would creep up to share Catherine’s bed in the girls’ dormitory. A maid who shared the room refused to sleep nearby because of all the “puffing and blowing” that came from Catherine’s bed.
So child abuse was not unknown, it just wasn’t part of the national news that everyone heard about. It was sufficiently shameful that few wanted to talk about it. When it came out that Catherine was engaged n an affair, Dereham and a later paramour (Culpepper) were executed for adultery for fornicating with Catherine, as was Catherine herself for adultery - but apparently Manox was let go because he did not actually rape her.
The lives of the rich and famous…
Also -
it was common knowledge that some clergy of the middle ages were not necessarily taking their vows seriously, including celibacy, hence part of the impetus for the Reformation. Should we or the people of the time be surprised if some of that misbehaviour did not involve adult women?
I’ve told this story before in other contexts …
One of my brother’s undergraduate degree was in Criminal Justice though he never subsequently worked in that field. He spent a summer as an intern at the local county prosecutor’s office. The county and the central city within had some 1 million residents. Shortly after the internship I asked him what he learned from his experience.
Ouch. Collectively we’re such nasty beasts.
I recall an article about gay life in Beijing in the 90’s, talking about what life was like in a repressive society. One person remarked that he would have his friend over for the night occasionally, despite that he lived with his parents. He said that because of crowded living conditions, of course they’d shared a bed and this was considered not unusual - it’s not like there was a “guest room” in the apartment. He said his parents had no clue what they were up, to because it was not something often discussed in their society.
Another point was a couple who had written to Dear Abby in the late 1970’s complaining that they’d discovered a local teenage boy who’d been their babysitter from time to time was molesting their young daughter. They complained that when they tried to warn other families in the neighbourhood - the boy babysat for a lot of families - they were shunned and disbelieved. Nobody wanted to consider that their own child might be a victim. They’d rather hide from the truth in denial.
I think that this attitude of naivete and denial probably had a lot to do with the problem persisting so long in many societies. Repressive Victorian attitudes probably did not help, but deviant behaviour was probably not a topic of conversation, even gay behaviour was considered off limits and shameful - children picked up on cues that nobody wanted to hear the truth or deal with the sordid facts. They also picked up on the cues that victims were somehow to blame in peoples’ minds too. Stories from molested girls are full of instances where the mother blames the child or claims she is making it up to cause trouble.
it’s only in the last 20 or 30 years that this sort of problem has become something that could be discussed openly and in the news. Presumably it’s been going on since the dawn of time.
Also note in my post about Henry VIII’s wife - Manox was released, because he had not had intercourse with Catherine. It seems there was no offense of fondling or inappropriate touching. Even when I was young, I recall news articles about the problem with sexual assault mentioning that the trial for rape often brought about a deep dive into evidence whether penetration had occurred. (Which is why the law was changed to sexual assault, where penetration or not was not an issue.)
In 1661, Bohuslav Balbín, a Czech Jesuit priest who was among the erudites of his time and who taught at Jesuit colleges, was forbidden form working with youth and put in isolation. One possible reason for this was that peophilic or homosexual tendencies were discovered in him.
In the famous Czech satirical novel by Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk, which was published between 1921 and 1923 and is set during World War I, the author, who was strongly against the church, makes an explicit reference to priests molesting children as if it were common knowledge.
And denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.
Jesus.
As I recall obvious puberty was seen as the point from where it went from something the civic authorities might want to crackdown on to where it was merely unseemly.
I recall reading a few items on child marriages, that generally those countries where children as young as 5 would be married off - that the marriage ceremony vows would be performed, etc. at a young age - but generally sexual activity waited until after puberty. In a lot of societies, marriages were arranged and had other meanings. They cemented relationships between families, unloaded the cost of maintaining another mouth to feed, etc.
As I mentioned above, even Henry VIII in a vengeful mood did not prosecute Katheryn Howard’s music teacher for fondling her when she was a child although both admitted it happened, implying such activity was not forbidden or inappropriate to the point of being punishable.
(Brings to mind the marriage of Samuel Pepys. He married his wife when she was fifteen but held of consummating the marriage for several months. One implied reason was that she may not have begun menstruating yet when they were first married.)
Of course, the fact that we know such terms had to be spelled out in the formal arrangements suggests that things like this happened often enough to be noticed.
I don’t recall it being mentioned as spelled out being a condition of marriage - more so that most people (most men) were not interested in sex with children, and social mores and general attitudes simply understood that marriage with someone of a young age did not mean immediate consummation. (Obviously so when it was a marriage ceremony between two children, as is also something that happened in some societies.)
From Airplane II (1982)
James Clavells 1975 novel Shogun also has numerous mentions that the Japanese of the 1500s didn’t trust Catholic Priests because they would secretly pay to have sex with young boys while in Japan but hide it from their superiors.
An interesting question would be whether that bit of the “historical” novel was based on real research into real historical 1500s Japan or was simply a 1975 US-ism tucked into the novel.
I’m reminded of the joke applied to various blue-nose sects of US Christianity:
Q: How do you keep a [sect member] from drinking all your beer on a fishing trip?
A: Invite two of them.
Some of the coverup was that the newspapers of the country wouldn’t publish stories about Priests
Here’s an article from 1915 that mentions that the Boston court case was not reported in Massachusets newspapers, or in Columbus Ohio where the troublesom priest had been moved to .
Here he is , in the history of the Millford catholic parish … Another Catholic Parish | Saint Mary of the Assumption | Milford, MA … “tranferred in 1913”… yeah thats what they did when they had a complaint , they transferred them !
Here he is, held as a fine priest at Columbus to this day .
A paper documenting how the system worked to keep everything quiet.
file:///D:/leon/Documents/child-sex-abuse-and-the-catholic-church.pdf
So I suspect the answer is no, the general public were not being told how little they should trust church hierarchies at keeping the church safe… The Australian cases covered up were all revealed starting 1990 …