We Must Ask Ourselves What Was Wrong, And Answer: The 1970s

The sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak has called upon his flock to ask "what we can do to repair as much as possible the injustice that has occurred" when certain people including a certain Joseph Ratzinger did everything in their considerable power to cover up sexual abuse in the church. "We must ask ourselves what was wrong in our proclamation, in our whole way of living the Christian life," the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak proclaimed. What was wrong is that, as happens so often these days, the times were out of step with the church: "We cannot remain silent about the context of these times in which these events have come to light," the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak said; the context of the institution in which the events occurred being a mere mote in comparison with the fact of their being found out.

With his usual inspiring mix of good sense and moral force, the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak compared the present state of the church to a thirteenth-century hallucination of a beautiful but bedraggled woman and said that "in the 1970s, paedophilia was seen as a natural thing for men and children". He does not appear to have cited his sources for this latter gem, which he seems to have intended as an example of the moral relativism that tempted all those believers in moral absolutism to commit child abuse, although I have heard hints that in Jesus' own time one could be sold into marriage at the age of twelve. Anyway, as an example of the forlorn state of his realm and his own Christian humility, the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak made mention of his recent speech at Westminster Hall, given in front of a number of thieves and hypocrites as well as a handful of war criminals, who no doubt bear the scars of his stinging rebukes on their conscience to this day.