Pope Benedict Says Blame the ’60s for Priests’ Abuse
Benedict, the pope emeritus, weighed in on the Catholic Church’s abuse crisis. What was once opaque becomes clearer, and even stranger.
VATICAN CITY—Popes are supposed to be infallible. They communicate through carefully worded speeches, apostolic letters, or encyclicals that are often the fruit of slow collaboration with doctrinal experts inside the Vatican. So what are we to make of the strange text that Benedict XVI, the pope emeritus, unleashed on the world this week, in which he effectively blamed the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church on the freewheeling sexual revolution of 1968?
Before we get into —which is informal, not Church doctrine—let us pause for a moment to consider the utter weirdness of the situation. In 2013, Benedict, who turns
