Fissures within the urban landscape

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.