04/28/02 12:30pm

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Hoist In It's Own Peter. I have long had the same level of esteem for the Catholic Church as I have for any corporation in the business of marketing lies to the gullible, not to mention one that uses its considerable power to subvert women's rights in particular and human rights in general. Which is to say, not much. To my mind, the Church is simply one of the world's oldest, largest and most successful criminal organizations.

Cardinal Francis George

So while I was pleased to see the Church caught up in a rather delicious sex scandal, I hadn't really paid much attention to the details. Priests molesting children, priests seducing teenagers, it all seems grist for the mill - although the cover-up is more revealing than the crime. Move along, I thought, nothing much to see here.

But this morning on Meet The Press, Tim Russert played a clip in which Cardinal Francis George of the Archdiocese of Chicago said:

There is a difference between a moral monster like Geoghan who preys upon little children and does so in a serial fashion, and someone who, perhaps under the influence of alcohol, engages in an action with a seventeen or sixteen year old young woman, who returns his affection.

Tim Russert

Not so fast. Here is what Mr. Russert said to Cardinal George after playing the clip:

Is not a priest who preys upon a sixteen year old girl a moral monster?

Pope John Paul II

3) Even if the cases of true pedophilia on the part of priests and religious are few, all the participants recognized the gravity of the problem. In the meeting, the quantitative terms of the problem were discussed, since the statistics are not very clear in this regard. Attention was drawn to the fact that almost all the cases involved adolescents and therefore were not cases of true pedophilia.

If Mr. Russert wants to be as Catholic as the Pope he may benefit from reading Judith Levine's new book, "Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex". It may help him develop a somewhat more subtle and nuanced notion of sexuality, and perhaps even assist him in understanding just where the cardinals are coming from.