Child Sexual Abuse and The Role of the Church
Table of Contents
Introduction
Possible Explanatory Theories
Attitude to Child Sexual Abuse in the Middle Ages
Luther’s Interpretation of Child Sexual Abuse
Child Sexual Abuse in the Victorian Era
Conclusions
Bibliography
Introduction
The following paper seeks to analyze and identify the historicity of the Child Sexual Abuse and the role of Church in it. Recognizing the child sexual abuse as the terrible sin, it is necessary to prevent both the extrinsic danger coming from non-believers and the intrinsic danger that comes from the people who affiliate themselves to Christian Church or even from the priests.The Bible deeply condemns any kind of abuse to the children, including the sexual abuse as the forcible action of sexual relationship, being a sin by its nature, might cause children stumble driving them away from the Kingdom of God. The position of the Christian Church to the issues of the child sexual abuse is basically the same in all of the branches proclaiming that child sexual abuse cannot be justified and recognizes as a terrible crime should be severely punished, which envisages the implication of the eternal punishment to the sinner’s spirit.However, at the same time, the whole history of the Christian Church is overfilled with the cases of childhood sexual abuse by the clergy.
Some of the cases were admitted by the Catholic Church which asked for forgiveness for the incidents. With the increased abilities to spread the information as well with the diminishing influence of the so-called “culture of silence” associated with Christianity, the incidents of the child sexual abuse and the involvement of clergy the topic started drawing more and more public attention to the problems existing inside the Church and to the issues committed long time ago.Having analyzed the historicity of Child sexual abuse in the Christian community and the role of Church in it, it would be possible to find out some of the linkages that could be used to explain the existing decay of the morality and to highlight certain problems inherent to the Church.The paper has mostly descriptive character and aims to fully cover the issue raised and to trace the historicity of the role of Church in child sexual abuse. The paper will contain the theoretical part outlining the possible explanatory theories, dwell upon the actual cases of the child sexual abuse by clergy throughout the history, and develop and present a set of the non-biased conclusions to the topic, based on the analysis of the literature carried out by the author of the paper.At the same time, some limitations of the topic should be mentioned. As the credible secondary or preliminary sources are relevantly new, the paper will mostly focus on the history of the problem in the twentieth and twenty-first century due to the lack of information and data.
Possible Explanatory Theories
Ferder and Heagle summarized the most common theories used to explain the cases of child sexual abuse in the church settings. The most common theory lies in an attempt made by the Catholic Church representatives …
