Sixteen years ago, reporters at The Boston Globe conducted an extensive investigation of the sexual abuse of minors by priests in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. Not long thereafter, reporters elsewhere detailed similar abuse in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and the like. The word used in the press to describe what had been going on was pedophilia, which is a misnomer deliberately employed to cover up what journalists then considered and still consider now an inconvenient aspect of the truth.
As a report commissioned by the National Review Board of the American Catholic bishops and issued in 2004revealed, something like 81 percent of the victims were boys, and very few of them were, in the strictest sense, children. They were nearly all what we euphemistically call young adults. They were male adolescents on the younger side – at the age when boys as they mature can briefly be downright pretty.
What was involved was what its advocates call man-boy love: a sexual relationship between a grown man who serves as a mentor and a boy who is under his care or simply admires or stand in awe of him. The ancient Greeks, who practiced this systematically in the classical period, called this phenomenon pederasty, and I wrote extensively about it 26 years ago in the first part of my hardback book Republics Ancient and Modern (the pertinent chapter can be found in the first volume of the paperback edition).