What is at the root of the crisis which strikes so powerfully at the credibility of the Faith? We are all waiting for an answer to this question. And then a rare letter appears on our doorstep from an elderly bishop who once sat in Peter’s chair. Somehow hidden from our view, his voice is unmistakable. It is the voice of a father. Benedict XVI has written to us about the question we are asking.
His most fundamental answer is disarmingly simple: Man has turned away from God.
Yet Benedict attends to precisely how man has turned away from God in moral, sexual, and cultural detail. He focuses mainly on the period where the abuse cases peaked, in “the 20 years from 1960 to 1980,” since it was also during that most intensive period of abuse that “the hitherto binding standards regarding sexuality collapsed entirely, and a normlessness arose.”
