Barry Duke, the Angry Atheist

Fr Joseph (Jack) Baker. Image via the Archdiocese of Detroit.

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WHEN I was editing the now all-but-defunct Freethinker I frequently received emails from angry Catholics, accusing me of trawling the media with the sole aim of discrediting the RCC by focusing on its world-wide paedophilia crisis.

These communications invariably made the point that the RCC was by no means the only church where youngsters were targeted—true—and that most abusive priests were homosexual hebophiles or ephebophiles, attracted to post-pubescent boys and older teenagers—patently false.

(More on the homosexual aspect further down the post).

So, to placate critics such Bill Dononhue, head of The Catholic League, in this report I shall refer to Father Joseph “Jack” Baker, 61, who raped a boy aged 11 in 2004, as a hebophile. At the time Baker was pastor at St Mary Catholic Parish in Michigan.

Image via YouTube

This is what Dononue, above, said last year:

Pedophiles are about three and a half percent [of Catholic clergy]. When a man has sex with a post-pubescent—an adolescent or above—man, that’s homosexuality. I am not saying that all homosexuals are molesters. That would be gay bashing.

What I’m saying is that gays, more so than heterosexuals, are more likely to abuse minors. And this is clearly the case in the Catholic Church.

Baker’s crime

Baker was sentenced to three to 15 years in prison at the beginning of March in Wayne County’s 3rd Circuit Court in Detroit after he was convicted last October of first-degree criminal conduct–sexual penetration with a person under age 13.

The charge dated back to 2004, when the victim was a second-grader at St. Mary Catholic School in Wayne, Michigan, and Baker was pastor of St. Mary Catholic Parish.

According to the victim’s account, he was sent to the church sacristy during an after-school religious program to retrieve a book. He said the priest put him over a table and raped him.

On June 20, 2019, the Archdiocese of Detroit announced that it had received the allegation against Baker and reported it “immediately” to the Michigan Attorney General’s office. The archdiocese restricted Baker, then 57 years old, from all public ministry and started a canonical process against him.

Homosexuality is not a risk factor in sexual abuse of children

In an America Magazine report last year, Thomas G Plante comprehensively debunked Donohue’s claim that homosexuality was at the core of clerical sexual abuse. He asked:

Why are so many of the clergy sexual abuse victims male? A study from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2011 informs us that most of the clergy sexual offenders were “situational generalists” or men who simply abused victims to whom they had access and with whom they had the opportunity to develop trust.

In the Catholic Church, these individuals tended to be boys. If Father wanted to have private time with an altar boy or perhaps take a boy off on a camping trip or to a baseball game back in the 20th century, no one would have thought much of it.

Boys were trusted with priests. But most of the clergy sex offenders during the last half of the 20th century, according to the John Jay Report, viewed themselves as more likely to be heterosexual than as homosexual.

He concluded:

Inappropriately blaming or victimizing homosexual men, within or outside of the church, does not keep children safe or solve clergy sexual abuse problems.

Regardless of sexual orientation or the vows of priestly celibacy or even marital vows, only a small percentage of people seek sexual activity with children and teens, and the vast majority of them are heterosexual, married and noncelibate laypersons who tend to exploit members of their own family.

The false and distracting focus on homosexuality is not relevant to keeping children safe within the Catholic Church.

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If you spot any typos in this post please alert me via email: freethinkered@aol.com