Over the weekend, a mob of angry Polish men in the town of Bytom nearly lynched four foreigners suspected of sexually harassing local children in a municipal swimming pool. According to press reports, police received calls from people at the pool to come investigate a quartet of males, from Georgia, who were allegedly behaving aggressively and strangely with children at the pool. By the time police arrived, they had to protect the four from a mob of furious Polish men, who wanted to tear them from limb to limb.
There is video. Watch:
I’m grateful that the police arrived to save the suspects from the mob. Vigilante justice is not something we should want to see. The rule of law must prevail, period.
But if I’m honest, I was thrilled to see men acting like men are supposed to act when children are threatened, or believed to be threatened, by pedophiles. It’s far too rare these days.
One thinks of how the British—especially British men—reacted to the rape gangs, which were run by Pakistani immigrants. Years ago there were reports about Pakistani men loitering around schools in Rotherham, harassing girls. As Ed West recalls, eventually this led to the exposure of a massive organized effort to rape English girls and force them into sex slavery.
As shocking as this was, the greater outrage was the reaction of British institutions to the crimes. Very few people cared. As Charlie Peters revealed in his blockbuster GB News documentary earlier this year, the reaction of officialdom was to shrug.
Why? It could be that these girls—white English girls—were from lower class backgrounds, and police and civic authorities didn’t care about them for that reason. It is surely the case that because the pimps and sex slavers were of Pakistani origin, British officials preferred to ignore it rather than challenge the liberal narrative about race and ethnicity.
There are few limits to what liberals and progressives are willing to accept to prevent conservatives from feeling vindication. In the United States twenty years ago, I was working as an opinion columnist for a major newspaper, and discovered shocking evidence of Islamic radicalism in our city. The newsroom preferred to look the other way, though I was able to report it in my column, thanks to the separation of the editorial section from the news pages in U.S. newsrooms, and because of the courage of my editor, who stood by me.
The point is this: the liberals who ran the paper considered it a greater threat to the common good that some rednecks might have their prejudices against Muslims confirmed, than that Islamists were busy trying to radicalize local Muslims.
This kind of cowardice is all too common. In the summer of 2001, I began reporting on the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests. I was a Catholic at the time. For one of my early reports, I talked to Father Tom Doyle, a heroic Catholic priest who destroyed his own clerical career by speaking up for victims, especially in court trials. After our interview, Father Doyle told me, “I can tell that you are a serious Catholic. I should warn you that if you keep up this investigation, you are going to go to places darker than you can imagine.”
I thanked him for the warning, but told him that as a journalist, as a Catholic, and as the father of a small boy, I felt it was my duty to keep investigating, and keep writing. Father Doyle encouraged me, and said he would help me in any way he could. But, he added, you need to be spiritually prepared for the evil you are going to find.
He was right—and, in time, I discovered that I wasn’t spiritually prepared. After four years of staring into the abyss of sexual corruption in the Catholic clergy, I lost my ability to believe as a Catholic. I always thought that if one had the arguments for the Catholic faith straight in one’s head, that one’s faith would be invincible. It wasn’t true, as I so painfully learned.
For me, the fact that some priests sexually abused children and minors was not the worst thing. The worst thing was that so many bishops, and other priests, knew what was happening, and did not act to stop it. The 2002 Boston trial of serial molester Father John Geoghan revealed that the cardinal archbishops of that city repeatedly reassigned Geoghan from parish to parish, despite knowing exactly what he was. When they finally forced him into retirement, Cardinal Bernard Law, then the city’s archbishop, wrote the dirty old priest a letter praising his “effective life of ministry.”
The Geoghan trial and the investigations by the Boston Globe newspaper sparked similar investigations around the United States. The U.S. Catholic hierarchy has still not recovered from its loss of authority. These were men who were not afflicted with the evil desires for sex with children and minors—but they lacked the normal human instinct, especially the normal male instinct, to defend children by aggressively punishing those who would sexually exploit them.
Why did so very few ordinary Catholic men stand up to these creeps? I never understood this. True, molesters often chose boys who had no fathers in the home, but these kids surely had uncles, don’t you think? Beyond that, the Church is full of laymen who are fathers, brothers, and uncles to children. One of the things that eventually destroyed my Catholic faith was knowing that if one of my children had been molested by a priest, that the bishop almost certainly would have treated me and my family as the enemy, and almost no Catholic laymen would have stood with us against this evil.
Why? The answer is because humans will tolerate a lot of evil to protect the framework that allows them to make sense of the world. Over and over I spoke to Catholic families of victims, and they all told me how alone and vulnerable they felt, because they knew that most lay Catholics did not want to know what had been done to children by priests. To know is to be responsible. Most preferred to live with a comforting lie rather than have to face the ugly truth—and do something about it.
(In all fairness, it’s interesting to contemplate why Polish men who displayed proper rage at foreign creeps preying on children did not get equally angry at molester Polish priests in their midst.)
It’s not only religious believers, of course. In my reporting on the scandal, it quickly became clear that this was primarily a scandal not of true pedophilia (which is the sexual desire for pre-pubescent children), but rather what is called “ephebophilia”: the desire for sexually mature youth. And it was overwhelmingly a gay thing. In 2004, the official independent report on the scandal commissioned by the US bishops revealed that 81% of the victims were male, and only 22% were aged 10 and under. By far the greatest amount of abuse was not of true pedophiles going after children, but of gay men sexually exploiting post-pubescent males.
This glaring fact was downplayed by the American media, which was more interested in managing the narrative to keep anti-gay prejudice at a minimum than it was in understanding this horrific scandal. If you had said to me back then that within twenty years of this scandal, there would be a pope busily mainstreaming LGBT-positive themes in the Catholic Church (e.g., by appointing gay-friendly bishops, and boosting the work of the gay activist Jesuit Father James Martin), I wouldn’t have believed it. But here we are.
It is surely not the case that most gay men are molesters. But the unavoidable fact in the Catholic sex abuse scandal is that most molesters were gay men, or at least men who sexually pursued boys. This is important in part because as Father Doyle and the late sociologist Richard Sipe—both men of the Catholic Left—told me, the network of sexually active gay men in seminaries served as a factory to mint abusers.
In fact, in 2002 both men, despite being liberals, told me on the record that gays should not be ordained until the problems with seminaries have been cleaned up. As Father Doyle explained, it’s not that gay men can’t be good priests. It’s rather that if a young man with same-sex attraction enters seminary, he will face constant pressure to have sex. And if he falls just once, he will have been neutralized by the network, and will never be a threat to them to report on evils its members do—including having sex with children and minors.
I am certain neither Father Doyle nor Dr. Sipe were homophobes. They were, however, men who had the courage to look at the evidence and draw logical conclusions—and to do so with the goal of protecting children, not the institutional Church, or a liberal narrative about homosexuality.
We see this same lack of courage, and willful blindness, everywhere today. In Europe, it manifests often in the way people think and talk about immigrant crime. Twenty years ago, visiting the Netherlands, I learned that police had been closing down public pools because young Moroccan men were harassing Dutch women, calling them “whores” and worse. I asked Dutch people why they tolerated this—that is, why they didn’t expect the police to arrest these men and defend not only vulnerable women, but the right of all Dutch people to use public swimming pools without fear and abuse?
Nobody had an answer for me. I could tell that they hadn’t allowed themselves to ask the question. They had just assumed that this is what one does when migrants behave brutally. One averts one’s eyes. One withdraws.
In America today, LGBT activists and their leftist allies have so thoroughly captured educational institutions that we read new reports every day of schoolchildren, some as young as kindergarten age, being forced to grapple with gender ideology, schoolbooks (often with sexually explicit drawings) promoting sexually bizarre themes, and instances of teachers and headmasters collaborating with students to lie to their parents about the students’ own gender confusion.
There was a time not long ago that parents—especially fathers—would have stormed the school boards demanding to know why officials tolerate this disgusting exploitation of children. Not today. It doesn’t often happen.
Why? Have people become so demoralized that they assume that it is normal for their children to be sexually exploited? Is it the case that the public has been so thoroughly indoctrinated by the media about the untouchability of sacred victims (in this case, LGBT persons) that they suppress their own natural protective instincts?
This is almost certainly what happened in the UK, with the Rotherham sex slavers. This is also what happened in Germany, with the mass sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve, 2015-16, in public spaces, by migrants from North Africa and the Middle East. German police and media tried to suppress discussion of the crimes, because for the German people to have noticed what actually happened that night would have caused them to draw logical conclusions against the interests of the liberal German establishment.
In the immediate wake of that appalling controversy, a group of Polish volleyball fans protested against the German government’s pressure on Poland’s new conservative government. The Polish supporters unfurled a banner at the match that read, in English, “Protect Your Women, Not Our Democracy.”
It falls to sane ordinary people—like the Polish football supporters, and the Polish men at the swimming pool last weekend—to be outraged by the outrageous. Unlike other ‘more sophisticated’ Europeans, people like these Poles haven’t learned to hate themselves, their families, and their moral instincts, and to suppress their revulsion at the revolting.
Again, it is good that Polish police arrived in time to save the lives of the alleged pedophiles. Civilization requires, at minimum, the rule of law. But it is also the case that civilization requires the cultivation of healthy moral instincts—including above all instincts to protect women and children. In the case of the Catholic sex abuse scandal, most people may never openly protest, but their respect for the authority of normative institutions will fade. This hurts all of us.
More urgently, if in their decadence, the ruling-class elites in Europe, the UK, and the U.S. lose sight of this responsibility, the mob, filled with righteous anger, will sooner or later remind them. Mob justice is an ugly thing, but in some cases, it may be the lesser evil.
