The sex abuse crisis has flared up more than ever with the
Pennsylvania grand jury, the Cardinal McCarrick
case, calls for bishops to resign, and allegations against Vatican officials
including the last three popes. Clearly there is no easy fix--if any fix at all. But any fix must answer three major questions.
Current
investigations focus first on (1) What has happened? and it will be
urgent to follow with (2) How can it be stopped? But any
solutions depend on good answers to (3) Why did it happen? beacause if we
misunderstand why this crisis could arise we may apply false solutions that fix
nothing--or make matters worse.
The
problem comes in two parts: priestly abuse itself and the hierarchical cover-up. In my last blog (CrossCurrents #471) I argued that the cover-up was largely the result
of the Church’s culture of clericalism - - and even my most chronic critic, in his
comment on the blog, agreed that “clericalism is pernicious insofar as
facilitates cover-ups.”
But
he then goes on to claim that I ignored the “rainbow-hued elephant in the room”
responsible for the crisis itself--namely, “distorted liberalism and rampant
and homosexuality in the clergy.” He claims that, to put out the flames of
scandal, we must “identify and name the arsonists responsible.” I agree with
the general idea, but I believe he has named the wrong “arsonists.” Indeed, I
have concluded that, while clericalism is the clear cause of cover-ups, the
causes of the abuse itself are much more complex than a single set of villains. And if we get this wrong any solutions will
be false solutions.
Let
me survey what I believe are the main factors contributing to the horrific
assaults of too many priests and even bishops on children.
First,
I must warn that these factors are generally not of recent vintage. The Pennsylvania cases go back 70 years, and
I am personally familiar with cases from the 1940s. And data on child abuse indicates many abusers
were themselves abused as children, which pushes the crisis back into the early
20th century or further. For
all we know, given the secrecy attending clerical cover-ups, priestly sex abuse
of children goes back centuries. Any simpleminded targeting of the “distorted liberalism”
of the last 50 years is much too recent to explain priests committing abuse
before, say, Pearl Harbor.
And
scapegoating homosexuality is a similar dead end. As Benedict XVI pronounced in 2008, the abuse
of children and homosexuality “are different things,” not to be confused. Homosexuals are attracted to same sex
partners, while pedophiles are not attracted to adults of either sex. The Pennsylvania cases included both male and
female victims. What they have in common
was not their gender but their age: they were minors, children.
So
to really understand why this happened we must begin with the basic fact: for
generations, some priests have been attracted to sexually assaulting
children. Clericalism allowed them to
get away with it, but that does not explain what caused it.
So
we face the question: “How could such horror occur in the first place?”
For
me, the answer is a complex “perfect storm” of interlocking factors.
I
begin with original sin. We’re all
morally frail, unable to do the good consistently. And since the 5th century Catholic tradition
has included the Augustinian notion of “concupiscence”--the idea that we are
particularly vulnerable to our sexual impulses.
Thus everyone struggles with desire, and social structures and mores
have often been designed to help people control these desires. Sometimes these were rigid or even cruel,
such as the stigma on premarital pregnancy that aimed to limit premarital sex
but ended by traumatizing millions of young women with shame, scandal, secrecy,
and even imprisonment.
Of
course, in any population, people’s desires vary. If our desires conform to cultural norms,
controlling behavior becomes relatively easy: millions of young Catholic men
and women, for example, dealt with their desires by getting married.
But
in any population, some have more difficulty, since their desires did not fit
them norm. This includes both those with
same-sex attraction and those attracted to children of either or both sexes. These are not the same category of people,
but both groups face the same challenge: what to do with my desire?
For
some, of course, marriage was a tempting solution simply because it conformed. But this often backfired: in the case of
pedophiles, law enforcement officials report that a high percentage of child
abuse is incestuous. In these cases, pedophiles
did not avoid children; they simply produced their own victims.
But
for Catholic males, the Church offered both groups another, near-perfect refuge:
the celibate priesthood. Priestly celibacy offered a socially acceptable form
of sexual nonconformity. One’s out-of-the-norm
attractions did not really matter if one practiced celibacy.
Today
the Catholic Church teaches it is not wrong to be homosexual, but that
homosexuals must live celibate lives.
Ask yourself: where in our culture is that possible? To this day I
recall the priest who confided that he rejected a theatrical career in New York
for fear of his own desires. For him,
priesthood and celibacy was much the safer option. And for many gay young Catholics, seminary
brought an end to all the family peer pressure to “find a good Catholic girl”
and settle down.
Over
40 years I have observed the result: the percentage of gay men among priests is
higher than in the general population.
Nearly all of these men have been good priests leading celibate lives--just
as the Church teaches they should.
Indeed, given that teaching, I am forced to ask: where else in the Church do they belong, if not in the celibate
priesthood?
But
gay priests are not “the arsonists” here.
Abuse
expert Jason Berry has studied the crisis for more than 30 years, and he identifies
the problem in another group: “psycho-sexually immature” men who find the
seminary and the priesthood a “safe” refuge from ordinary norms, only to enter
parishes and schools that give them not only contact with children but almost
absolute power over them.
We may
indeed ask if seminaries were incubators of abuse, since many seminary classes
had unusually high numbers of such disordered man. In Boston it appears that nearly 10% percent
of priests committed child abuse 1950-2000—that is more than TWICE the
percentage of pedophiles in the male population in general (believed to be less
than 5%). In other words, it’s possible
that a sexually repressed culture, combined with the refuge of celibacy, funneled
high concentrations of these distorted individuals into seminaries.
Until
we have good data on the history of such seminaries, we do not know the impact
of concentrating so many disordered men under one roof for long years of study,
often isolated from outside normal family life. No doubt the rule of celibacy
provided a protective cover, while traditional teachings on sex as a sacred/taboo
subject drove any dysfunctions deeper under cover.
What
we do know, from the data available, is that the population of priests entering
parish work at least from the 1940s
was a disproportionately disordered population, and that a well-established
culture of clericalism placed these men in positions of respect, authority, and
power with no effective oversight.
Laypeople were taught to obey priests at all costs, were taught that
priests were better than the rest of us, and indeed were taught-- another
consequence of our sex-as-taboo tradition--that priests were nonsexual beings,
above the struggle of desire and self control.
I still recall how shocked I was, perhaps at 12, to learn that priests
actually went to confession!
Now
we know that the widespread presumption of priestly “purity” combined with real
power to create a recipe for disaster.
In hindsight, we see a highly concentrated population of disordered men who
could commit atrocities with impunity.
The
case history shows that fear kept most children silent, that the myth of pure
priestly asexuality ensured that no one believed those who spoke up, and that
clericalism ensured the cover-up of the few cases where children were believed.
We
must add another factor: the Catholic moralization of all things sexual. This ensured that, when abusers were exposed, their superiors (usually
bishops) assumed the problem was simply sinful behavior. This meant the solution was equally simple:
confession and penance. And after
completing penance (sometimes including rehab), priests were routinely
reinstated on the assumption that they had repented their sins. The result was the notorious pattern of the
secret recycling of abusers that enabled them to rape more children.
One
may argue that those superiors were simply ignorant of the pathology that
rendered penance an empty remedy. But there were enough cases of abusers who
repeatedly abused for years, in multiple parishes, that one must ask: did such
superiors possess no common sense at all?
Did it not eventually occur to them that penance was not working---that a
disordered psyche was not the same as moral failure? Did they never realize that they were
enabling the rape of children?
It
is possible, of course, that there’s some overlapping in the categories of
priests I have described. It is
possible, for example, that some gay priests abused children, just as some
heterosexual priests may have abused children.
But there is no evidence that gay priests represent a statistical threat
to the well being of children. Do some
gay priests violate their celibacy?
Probably they do, just as there is a long history of heterosexual
priests who had mistresses. But when we try to analyze the cause of
disordered behavior, it makes sense to begin with disordered people. And screening out gay men from the priesthood,
as some alarmists demand, would do nothing to address the problem if such
screening still allows the “psycho-sexually immature” to enter seminary life.
If my
description of the factors contributing to the sex abuse crisis is at all
accurate, then we must acknowledge the painful truth: our entire system of Catholic life--our attitudes toward sexuality
in general, our treatment of people who violate sexual rules, our pressures on
people who do not fit the norms, our seminary cultures, our demand that all
priests must be celibate, our myth about the asexual “purity” of ordained men,
our acceptance of the clericalism, our moralization of all things sexual and our
blindness about pathological disorders--all these things combined in what I am
calling a perfect storm.
Thus
the idea that simply screening gay men out of the priesthood will solve the
problem is wrong-headed: typically gay men are not disordered by attraction to
children; they can make perfectly good priests as long as they obey the same
rules as heterosexual priests must obey.
It
is time we accept that in any population there will be other men--men who are
not capable of either normal married life or the life of the celibate
priest. And we must begin to think about
how such men will live in our communities without endangering our children. The
priesthood cannot be their refuge. So then what?
© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2018
