The 91-year-old pens an essay linking the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandals to the 1960s sexual revolution and church laws that protected the clergy.
Pope Benedict XVI has ventured out of retirement to publish an essay blaming the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal on the sexual revolution of the 1960s and church laws that protected priests.
Benedict traced the start of the crisis to the 60s, citing the appearance of sex in films in his native Bavaria and the formation of"homosexual cliques" in seminaries"which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the climate"."Perhaps it is worth mentioning that in not a few seminaries, students caught reading my books were considered unsuitable for the priesthood," the conservative theologian wrote.
During the 1980s and 1990s, he wrote,"the right to a defence was so broad as to make a conviction nearly impossible". As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict spearheaded reforms of those laws in 2001 to make it easier to remove priests who abused children.
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