Thank you and I agree with your assessment for the most part except I believe anyone over 18 having sex with anyone under 18 is committing pedophilia except under very exclusive circumstances such as childhood sweethearts with one being a year or two older but were together when they were both underage.
Maybe the law describes it different but kids can’t think right with their still developing brains. In truth I don’t believe most kids are truly adults mentally until around the age of 25. Boys just want to hump and girls are all emotional and mixed up. Well, so are the boys I guess, but boys generally think about 2 things; food and sex. If you offer him a sammich and he declines; you know what is on his mind.
Back to the RC; it will survive this. Damaged, hurt, bruised, and maybe even crippled; but it will survive. I wonder if the priests in Europe are the same way. I’ve been to Vatican. A truly wondrous place with a lot of power which is probably why certain factions want to take it down a notch. They may have even played the long game making the homo/pedo thing flourish and mature until there would be no way the church could deny it.
These days I put nothing past the evil ones behind the scenes. Nothing. They want pure global control. Not just as back seat drivers, movers, and shakers; but likely a more public look at some point. Conspiracy theories abound but in my experience there’s usually some truth to the more plausible ones.
Kind Boomer, the terminology is not a matter of personal opinion or belief. Pedophilia is a clinical and legal term denoting sex with chidren who are not yet pubescent. The media has blurred this term and tends to use it for sex with any minor; but that is incorrect. The term for sex with minors (adolescents) who have achieved puberty is ephebophilia. It's an awkward spelling and few people use it. But the distinction is very important to this discussion.
The studies that have been done, both the John Jay study from 2002 and this recent grand jury document in Pennsylvania, indentified the great majority of sex abuse by priests agains minors was in fact against adolescents and young adult seminarians, with only a small percentage against small children—which supports the argument that the abuse is most correctly understood to be homosexuality, not pedophilia. And it indicates that the problem may be reduced or largely eliminated by denying the priesthood to unrepentant homosexuals.
There is a reason why God's Word warns against homosexuality. The Church must not weaken and cave in to the progressive culture about this condition; and the situation in the seminaries, with unmarried men living together, can only be chaste if the men have a true vocation and fitness to serve God instead of self.