BBC NEWS | Europe | Two sexes ‘sin in different ways’
Countless other studies had already put statistics to this conclusion, but the Catholic Church apparently felt the need to weigh in. It is refreshing, perhaps, that the Church is finally applying statistics and (seemingly) modern surveying methods to compare quantitatively the transgressions of the sexes. It will be very interesting to see if such studies will have any impact on the severity and the frequency of punishments that the Church metes out for sinners.
Until then, the next statistical revelation from the Church will probably be that teenage (Catholic, of course) boys masturbate about a hundredfold more frequently than girls. Will the Church have the courage, however, to compare statistically how these masturbatory obsessions are distributed? Will it dare to investigate, at the risk of confirming, whether boys and girls enrolled in Catholic school are more or less sexually active, more or less sexually obsessed and more or less sexually dysfunctional than their peers in public schools?
Will the Church become supremely pragmatic and dispatch priests and bishops variously skilled in mitigating particular transgressions to geographic regions statistically more marred by such transgressions than others? Too many masturbators in Boston. Send Bishop Onan there. An epidemic of adultery in Atlanta. Send in Father Kennedy. Too much greed in Los Angeles. Send in Father Pinochet. A pride pandemic in Texas? Send in Archbishop Bush.
Will the Church ever be bold enough to investigate its population of priests and bishops for sexual peccadillos? That would be interesting.
Pedophilia incidents in Minneapolis? Next problem, please.
[ad]