12/23/02
Here is an excerpt
from an article at
http://www.survivorsnetwork.org/International_Headlines/London_Pope_Warned.htm
revealing how
plaintiffs are building their legal case against the Pope and the Vatican:
Pope given priests ‘sex time bomb’ warning 30 years ago
by Roger Dobson and Maurice Chittenden in The Sunday Times, Dec. 22, 2002
THE present Pope was among several Catholic bishops warned in a secret report more than 30 years ago that the church faced a potential “psychosexual” time bomb in the priesthood.
The report, which foreshadows the scandals over sexual abuse of children which have erupted in the church in recent years, was prepared for a synod of bishops at the Vatican in 1971. Its authors estimated that a quarter of clerics had psychiatric difficulties and most were emotionally immature.
Those at the synod included John Paul II, then Archbishop of Cracow, and the late Cardinal John Heenan, then Archbishop of Westminster and Catholic primate of Britain.
Lawyers representing alleged victims of child abuse by priests in Britain and America are studying the unpublished report by Dr Conrad Baars, a Dutch-born Catholic psychiatrist from Minnesota, based on the records of 1,500 priests treated for mental problems. Baars reported that “psychosexual immaturity expressed in heterosexual or homosexual activity was encountered often. Virtually all of these priests were . . . suffering from a severe to moderate frustration neurosis”.
The report, The Role of the Church in the Causation, Treatment and Prevention of the Crisis in the Priesthood, estimated that less than 15% of all priests in western Europe and North America were emotionally fully developed. Of the rest, 20-25% had serious psychiatric difficulties that often showed themselves in alcoholism; 60-70% suffered from lesser degrees of emotional immaturity…”