The motives or apologies change, but the attacks on the Catholic Church remain constant. It is no longer surprising that the permanent harassment always has the same origins, and ends up being aimed at Benedict XVI. He is the enemy to beat, because he represents a living denial of the alleged lack of intelligence and humanity that Catholics are accused of.

In this latest campaign - carefully prepared - they have resorted to an accusation that has certain real instructions and is loaded with morbidity. Although the subject matter is far from new. The secret sexual activity of priests and religious is a topic frequented by nineteenth-century anticlerical novels, with occasional results as brilliant as Clarín's La Regenta. The current addition makes the aggression point to something even more morbid: homosexuality exercised against minors.

This is the beginning of the paradoxes. Because sexual liberation and gender ideology is the central topic of the supposed Spanish progressives, who have renounced to social demands and cultural vanguard. Theirs is, now, the promotion of homosexuality, contempt for the family and the indoctrination of adolescents and children in the early internship of sex, with special emphasis on its less natural variants.

What -they claim- separates them from a disturbing closeness to what they now denounce, is the supposed freedom of those who are incited to exercise in sexual modalities considered by many as unethical. But the question immediately arises: are the children, from the age of eleven, who are subjected to "masturbation workshops", "clitoral exploration" and other experiences that are embarrassing to name, really free? And this is not something episodic or accidental. In some Autonomous Communities systematic eroticism is considered an obligatory chapter of the Education for Citizenship, at least in official centers. And the new abortion law includes in its own degree scroll the affective and sexual training forcibly carried out by pre-selected instructors in all schools and from an early age. Is this how the socialists understand freedom in subject so intimate and staff? We are facing a universal and systematic sexual abuse.

All of which, evidently, in no way excuses the clerics who took advantage of their religious position and professor for unjustifiable and odious activities. It is suspicious, however, that such scandals - which sometimes occurred several decades ago - are brought to light in a studied sequence, and that ecclesiastical authorities are denounced who, in some cases, had nothing to do directly with the outrages or their concealment.

More delicate for the sensibility of Catholics themselves is the permissiveness with which this problem has been approached in seminaries and educational centers. It has not been precisely the religious considered conservative who have opened their hands nor, perhaps, those who have concealed such painful irregularities. Rather, it has been those who consider themselves to be in line with a more open and progressive ethic. And, of course, Cardinal Ratzinger cannot be accused, either in Munich or in Rome, of any theoretical or pastoral inconsistency. It is well known that he was the first to denounce and put a stop to the disorders that were beginning to appear in the Church.

The cultural and sexual revolution that began in 1968 was inspired -along with more interesting ideas- by an ideology in which late versions of Freudo-Marxism, conventionally personalized in Herbert Marcuse, were intermingled. The revolution of 1968 did not fail, as some frivolously and voluntaristically claim. It penetrated into all social spheres, including religious environments, and contributed to the change of customs that has been intensifying ever since. It is really the only revolution that, with a Marxist structure, has triumphed in the 20th century. And it is here, and not in priestly celibacy, where the roots of these erratic behaviors that now afflict Catholics and are instrumentalized by the enemies of Christianity are to be found. To blame celibacy as the cause of such abuses is tantamount to disregarding data elementary psychology and ethics.

The Catholic Church is often reproached for an alleged rigidity in moral questions. If Christian-inspired ethics defends positions that are not always popular, it is not because of the application of an implacable code, but because of the defense of the untouchable dignity of the human person. This is why it has always promoted and practiced the virtues of chastity and modesty. This is something that manipulators now take advantage of to speak of hypocrisy. They unjustly offend many of us. And the manipulators should keep in mind that the accusation of hypocrisy is easily turned against those who launch it.