Published recently in the Times, William Rees-Mogg’s contention (in a well-meaning if speciously argued piece on the Vatican’s continuing opposition to the ordination of self-confessed homosexuals) that the sexual proclivities of priests attracted to pre-pubertal children was ‘comparable to Oscar Wilde’s relations with London rent boys’ is typical of a fashionable misapprehension which confuses paedophila (as it is currently understood) with the neo-Socratean, hopelessly idealistic conception of paederastia into which Wilde and his associates threw themselves so energetically at the end of the 19th century. As Morris Kaplan so eloquently defines it in his slim but no less esoteric Sodom on the Thames, theirs was a love that combined ‘the passionate devotion and persistent fervour of one, with the forgiving tenderness and self-sacrifice of another’.
Not that this view of ‘the faerie realm of boyhood’ sits any more easily with the far more protectionistically inclined collective consciousness of contemporary society, but neither is this book a paedophile’s charter.
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