#472: How Could This Horror Happen?

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 20^th 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