Anti-Climacus

Avoid for a moment the blame-shifting in the earlier part of the paragraph I'm about to quote, and focus instead on the factual inaccuracy at the end:

The crisis of priestly life that was made unmistakably clear in the past decade’s revelations of sexually abusive clergy had many causes, not the least of which was a toxic ambient culture to which the Church and its ordained ministers proved all too vulnerable. But if we look inside the Church’s self-understanding for reasons why priests betrayed their unique ministry in such an awful way, what we find, if we look hard enough, is a changed understanding of the very nature of the priesthood. When seminarians, 30 or 40 years ago, spoke of learning “priestcraft,” something was, it now seems clear, deeply awry. For the Catholic Church has never understood the ordained priesthood as essentially a matter of functions, nor has it understood ordination as a kind of licensing ceremony that authorizes a man to conduct certain kinds of ecclesiastical business. But that was the misunderstanding of priesthood that swept through too much of the Church around the world, and the relationship between that desperately deficient theology and the abuse crisis should now be beyond serious dispute.

One might instead point out that the Catholic priesthood is explicitly and intentionally a matter of functions, and has been since the 4th century.