Solicitatio

The most-readable poster at Patheos debunks the trope of fundamental xes'abuse in the Latin Church. To Philip Jenkins, I'd ask why there Isn't A Story.

Now: just because Jenkins is the best of a bad batch doesn't make Jenkins all good. Jenkins calls the reformist Damien nasty names and compares him to QAnon. I say this reflects better on QAnon than it does on Jenkins. Still - Jenkins has a point that Damien is an outlier. "Solicitatio" as they called it tended at adult women, not at nonadult boys.

I've read or at least seen the telly series of three books perhaps-relevant to peccadilli of the Religious: Peter Jennings' Raptor, Kenneth Follett's Pillars of the Earth, and Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose. These three did their research, at least. These agree that the Religious were misfits. Misfits may well include predators; they certainly include the odd Countryman Of Lot. Follett thought the Church should be solicitous of such; Jennings disagreed, casting his net against all the Latin Church. Eco had his own, different problems with said Church. Jenkins would likely dislike Jennings. But - back to misfits.

I suspect the pool of misfits from which the Church could draw for its Religious was rather large in the medial age. The Closet-Cases were swamped by third-sons of villagers and barons, with lame and/or nearsighted people no good for the army (hey - another Jennings book!), with highly intelligent semi-autists. Some monasteries (and convents) might end up dens of Sin but at least those would be monasteries, not interfacing with the villages. The people interfacing with the villages would have been... people a lot more like the villagers.

And when they sinned, they'd be sinning with the villagers like any other villager would be tempted to do, that is with the women.

Not that we're condoning any of that over here in this blog, either. But hey - just resign the frock, sign up as a merchant's secretary, and maybe stick around to be a deacon if you really can't keep those robes shuttered.

I suspect that in a modern age of wide literacy where almost all the middle class is employed at an office, the Closet-Cases actually are too-high a proportion of the true misfits, and the leftover misfits are barely functional enough to resist the McCarricks. This is a recent phenomenon, not seen (nearly as much) in Late Antiquity.