Jan 8, 2019--The Portuguese Bishop, whose comments in a recent interview to secular media seemingly contradicted the Dogma of the Perpetual Virginity of Our Lady, now insinuates that the current Sex Abuse crisis is a “phenomenon primarily of Anglo-Saxon countries”. Bishop Manuel Linda of Oporto, Portugal made his remarks during an interview with Public Radio “Renanscença”, published only a few weeks after international uproar over his explicit comments on the Perpetual Virginity of our Blessed Mother forced him to backtrack and reaffirm Catholic Dogma.
Bishop Linda, who was installed as Bishop in 2013 over one of Portugal’s largest sees by Pope Francis, has also made waves in recent months for his comments on the validity of the unions of divorced and "remarried" couples . In his radio interview, the Bishop seemed to turn a blind eye to the ongoing sex abuse scandals in Chile , Honduras, Italy, India —and as news reports this week revealed—Argentina, as he placed blame on “Anglo-Saxons”.
“This (pattern of sex abuse) was a phenomenon primarily of Anglo-Saxon countries. In Europe it has happened in some places-- it happened in Germany-- but it did not happen with the same scale as in the United States and in Australia.” For some, the Bishop’s seemingly racist comments come as a shock, but for others--such as Dr. Taylor Marshall-- the narratives being whispered in the Vatican echo the sentiment that the scandal in the US reflects a certain sexual prudery, or “scrupulosity about sexuality”.
The Bishop of Oporto continued to explain that psychology, instructed during the 1960’s and 1970’s in these “Anglo-Saxon” countries, pushed for normalizing intimacy between older men and younger. Namely, that this type of psychology was the causation for pedophilia amongst the clergy.
Continuing, Bishop Linda proposed that this new form of psychology, combined with the chaos in the years that followed Vatican II, made the environment too much for some priests to endure perverse sexual proclivity. "It is likely some priests were victims of this…psychology. And, fundamentally, during the time of instability that followed the Second Vatican Council, some of them no longer found solid footing on the foundation stones (of Faith). There was a certain change of perspective of the Church and some lost their minds…”
The Portuguese Bishop would conclude, however, that “the vast majority of those who committed abuses were no longer in the active priesthood. They were people who left the priesthood, sometimes they left with a lot of noise.”
When confronted with two major cases of sex abuse by Portuguese clergy, the Bishop Linda surmised “Those two cases - that of Madeira, with the famous priest Frederico, and recently the case of Guarda - all suggest that they did not have that dimension of gravity that we are used to hearing about when we talk about pedophilia. Maybe there was some intimacy, but not an intimacy of the most shocking. "