Does the Catholic church have a long history of child abuse, or is it something that started in our time?

Question

There has been a debate on the causes of clerical child abuse is a major aspect of the academic literature surrounding Catholic sex abuse cases. However, I wonder what is the history of child abuse in the Catholic Church.

Some Catholics, such as correspondent John Daniel Davidson, have claimed that the sexual revolution and a rise in moral relativism contributed to the problem of child abuse.

Others have argued that child abuse in the Catholic church predates these changes. A report done as part of the Australian government's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found that "the most notorious cases of sexual abuse in the Australian church occurred in institutional settings in the 1940s–60s by men (and sometimes women) who were thoroughly trained in the strict morality and rigorous piety of the pre-Vatican II church," noting that "the ranks of abusers cuts right across the lines of conservatives and liberals, with both sides having their fair share of abusive clergy."

Philip Jenkins claims that the Roman Catholic Church is being unfairly singled out by secular media which he claims fails to highlight similar sexual accusations in other religious groups, such as the Anglican Communion, Islam and Judaism, and various Protestant church communities. Jenkins later authored the book The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice in 2003, touching on some of the same issues. Other organisations which have seen comparable large-scale sexual abuse scandals include the Boy Scouts of America and the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Writing in The Washington Post in 2010, David Gibson calls the idea of an anti-Catholic media bias a "myth", saying "The annual survey of religion in the news conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showed that in 2008 ─ the year Benedict traveled to Washington and New York ─ coverage of the pope and of the Catholic Church accounted for more than half of all news stories about religion, and the majority were positive or explanatory."

Answer 1

The Catholic Church has been the so-called guardian of orphans and yet, there are horror stories about abuse, tortures, death, and even mass graves on unwed women's homes and orphanages.

The idea of children's rights is quite modern. If the last 100 years are full of known incidents of child abuse and scandal. I can only assume that older times (BC - AC) were even worse.

See this scholarly journal reference:

• Rashid F, and I Barron. 2018. "The Roman Catholic Church: A Centuries Old History of Awareness of Clerical Child Sexual Abuse (from the First to the 19th Century)". Journal of Child Sexual Abuse. 27 (7): 778-792.

Answer 2

There isn't much evidence either way. However, the claims that it's a result of such aspects of the modern world as "the sexual revolution and the rise of moral relativism" seem to have a logical problem:

If that were the case, why would the hierarchy of the church react so consistently to the known cases, by keeping them quiet and transferring the offending priests to different jobs? It seems very surprising that recent social changes should have such uniform effects across bishops of different ages and from different cultures.

Indeed, it seems more plausible, on the face of it, that there has been a tradition of responding this way for generations. Under this hypothesis, the reason it's now coming to light is that in the modern day, the victims are less willing to keep quiet.

It certainly does seem to be the case that once the moral authority of the church had been damaged, more and more victims came forward.