The New York Archdiocese today blasted comments by a Catholic friar who expressed sympathy for Jerry Sandusky and said youths in child sex abuse scandals are often “the seducer.”
Father Benedict Groeschel, 79, told the National Catholic Register that the public doesn’t understand sex abuse cases.
“People have this picture in their minds of … a psychopath. That’s not the case,” he said. “Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him.”
“A lot of the cases, the youngster – 14, 15, 18 – is the seducer,” he added.
A spokesman for the New York Archdiocese, Joseph Zwilling, called the comments “simply wrong.”
“The sexual abuse of a minor is a crime, and whoever commits that crime deserves to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” he said. “The harm that was done by these remarks was compounded by the assertion that the victim is responsible for the abuse, or somehow caused the abuse to occur.”
“This is not only terribly wrong, it is also extremely painful for the victims,” he added.
Groeschel, who is based in Westchester, is not a priest in the Archdiocese but has had several positions in it in the past and taught at its seminary as recently as the last academic year.
In his interview Groeschel, a member of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, said Sandusky, the former Penn State football coach convicted of years of child sex abuse, was “this poor guy.”