A Hundred Years of Pedophilia

OLAVO DE CARVALHO
O Globo, April 27, 2002

Translated by Assun��o Medeiros

In Greece and in the Roman Empire, the use of minors for the sexual satisfaction of adults was a tolerated and even prized costume. In China, castrating young boys to sell them to rich pederasts was legitimate commerce during millennia. In the Islamic world, the rigid morals that ordain the relationships between men and women was not rarely compensated by the tolerance with homosexual pedophilia. In some countries this lasted al least until the beginning of the 20th century, making Algeria, for example, a garden of delights for depraved travelers (read the memoirs of André Gide, “Si le grain ne meurt”).

In all the places where the practice of pedophilia receded, it was the influence of Christianism — practically alone — that freed the children from this awful rule.

But this had a price. It is as if an undercurrent of hate and resentment had gone through two millennia of history, waiting for the moment of revenge. This moment has arrived.

The movement for the induction to pedophilia starts when Sigmund Freud creates an erotic parody of the first years of human life, a version that is very easily absorbed by the culture of the century. Since then, family life appears more and more, in western imagining, as a pressure cooker of repressed desires. In movies and in literature, children seem to have nothing to do but to spy on the sexual life of their parents through the keyhole, or to engage themselves in the most amazing erotic games.

The politically explosive potential of the idea is soon put in use by Wilhelm Reich, communist psychiatrist who organizes in Germany a movement for the “sexual liberation of youth”, that was afterwards transferred to the US, where it will constitute what is maybe the main idea and power behind the student rebellions of the sixties.

Meanwhile, the Kinsey Report, which today we know was a fraud all down the line, demolishes the image of respectability of the parents, showing them to the new generations either as sexually diseased hypocrites or as feigning libertines.

The advent of the birth-control pill and of condoms, which governments start to distribute happily in schools, sounds like a call for total liberation of infant-juvenile eroticism. Since then, the eroticism of childhood and adolescence expands from academic and literary circles into the culture of middle and lower classes, through an infinitude of films, TV programs, “meeting groups”, courses on family guidance, ads, you name it . Sexual education in schools becomes a direct induction of children and youth to the practice of everything they saw on the movies and on TV.

But up to that point the legitimization of pedophilia appears only in innuendo, hidden among general demands that bring it along as implicit consequence.

In 1981, however, “Time” announces that arguments pro-pedophilia are becoming popular among sexual counselors. Larry Constantine, a family therapist, proclaims that children “have the right to express themselves sexually, what means they can or cannot have sexual contact with older people”. One of the authors of the Kinsey Report, Wardell Pomeroy, pontificates that incest “can sometimes be beneficial”.

On the pretext of fighting discrimination, representants of the gay movement are authorized to teach in schools the benefits of the homosexual practice. Whoever opposes them is stigmatized, persecuted, fired. In a book praised by J. Elders, ex-secretary of health of the US (the surgeon general — that same one who makes apocalyptic warnings against smoking), the journalist Judith Levine affirms that the pedophiles are harmless and that the sexual relation of a boy with a preacher can even be a beneficial thing. Really dangerous, says Levine, are the parents, who project “their fears and their own desire for infantile flesh on that mythical molester of children”.

Feminist organizations help to disarm children against pedophiles and to arm them against the family, divulging the monstrous theory of an Argentine psychiatrist according to which at least one in every four girls is raped by her own father.

The highest consecration of pedophilia comes in a 1998 edition of the “Psychological Bulletin”, organ of the American Psychological Association. The magazine affirms that sexual abuse in infancy “does not cause intense damage in a pervasive manner”, and besides that, recommends that the term pedophilia, “charged with negative connotations”, be changed to “intergenerational intimacy”.

It would be unthinkable that such a vast mental revolution, spreading throughout society, would spare miraculously a special part of the public: priests and seminarians. In their case, added to outside pressure, there was a very special stimulus, well calculated to act from inside. In a recent book, “Goodbye, good men”, the American reporter Michael S. Rose shows that, for three decades, the gay organizations in the US have been putting their people in the psychology departments of the Seminars to make the entrance of the vocationally gifted postulants more difficult and force the massive entrance of homosexuals in the clergy. In the most important Seminars, homosexual propaganda became ostensive and heterosexual students were forced by their superiors to submit to homosexual conduct.

Cornered and sabotaged, confounded and induced, it is fatal that sooner or later many priests and seminarians end up yielding to the general infant-juvenile orgy. And, when this happens, all the spokesmen of the “liberated” modern culture, all the “progressive” establishment, all the “forward looking” media, all the powers, therefore, that along a hundred years were stripping children of their protecting aura of Christianity to give them to the lust of perverse adults, suddenly rejoice, because they found an innocent on which to lay all their blame. A hundred years of pedophile culture are all of a sudden absolved, clean, paid for before the Almighty: the only one to blame for it is... clerical celibacy! Christendom will now pay for all the evil it stopped us from doing.

Do not doubt this: the Church is now accused and humiliated because it is innocent. Its detractors accuse it because they are themselves to blame. Never before has René Girard’s theory – of the persecution of the scapegoat as an expedient for the restoring of an illusory unity of a collectivity in a crisis – found such patent, such obvious, such universal and simultaneous confirmation.

Whoever does not realize this, at this time, is divorced from his own conscience. Has eyes, but does not see, has ears but does not listen.

But the Church itself, if it – instead of denouncing them – prefers to curve itself before its attackers in a grotesque contrition act, sacrificing pro forma a few pedophile priests so as not to have to face the forces that were injected inside it like a virus, will have made its most disastrous choice of the last two thousand years.