#475:Sex Abuse—From Denial to Action

In various ways, people are in denial of what it will take to finally solve the sex abuse crisis.

The Vatican Summit on Sex Abuse

Everyone wants to end the Catholic Church’s sex abuse crisis once and for all.  We want abusers found and punished, we want officials who cover up held accountable, and we want concrete actions to prevent future of abuse.

But reactions to the recent Vatican summit have shown that many people are still in denial of the true nature, scope, complexity, and depth of the problem.  These denials take several forms, but they all have one thing in common: they erect barriers to action, and impede the end of the crisis.

So it becomes important to name and denounce each of these denials, for until they end the crisis will persist.

Denial #1: “We don’t have this problem.” From the start, the main focus of the Vatican summit was announced to be, not problem solving, but education.  Why?  Because many bishops remain in denial that there is a problem at all.  Especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, bishops have typically thought of—and dismissed-- sex abuse as “an American problem” or “a Western problem.” The summit aimed to correct this by informing the bishops of the cases emerging in their own regions and by the testimony of victims. 

We can only hope that bishops went home persuaded that they can no longer avoid addressing the problem in their own dioceses.

Denial #2. This is no time for Education, only Action.  The second denial comes from those who saw the summit wasting time and not proposing concrete solutions.  It’s easy to understand their disappointment, especially among the victims, who understand the problem best because they experienced it first-hand.  But they may overlook the global nature of the institution that must address this problem.

Clergy abuse has occurred on five continents and in many forms: child abuse, abuse of seminarians, abuse of young adults, abuse of women, and (especially in Africa) abuse of women religious.  Abuse will not end with one simple plan--both the problem and the church are too complex for that.  It does not help to persist in denying that many of those Bishops are themselves in denial and must first of all be persuaded to pay attention. Getting the world’s bishops on board is a real action, a first step. 

Denial #3: The Gays are to blame. A third, related denial involves denying the need for multiple solutions.  Since abuse takes different forms in different locations, “one size fits all” will not work.  Seeking one quick fix can actually hinder real solutions—and lead to false fixes that leave real problems untouched.

For example, when an observer like George Weigel claims that “In the so called developed world, the plague seem to have largely involve the sexual abuse or exploitation of young men,” he is not just wrong: he also displays a denial of the real facts. In the US crisis, the main body of victims has, in fact, been minors-- children!- -who are most vulnerable to priestly abuse of power.  Denying this reality focuses our attention on secondary issues that will lead us to false fixes.

Specifically, Weigel and those who think like him want to pin the crisis on gay priests, and argue that the simple solution is better screening and more strictly practiced celibacy. They portray the crisis as an ethical breach by gay men wrongly admitted to the priesthood. 

But this denies two central facts.  First, pedophiles are generally disordered individuals attracted to children, not homosexuals attracted other man.  These are mostly two different populations. I know many good celibate priests who are gay, and scapegoating or stigmatizing them will solve nothing.

Second, gay priests who fail to maintain a celibate life break a church rule, just like heterosexual priests who have secret mistresses. Officials who prey on students or subordinates also commit an ethical breach by abusing their authority.  But pedophiles who prey on minors of either sex commit a crime.  Thus, while in other locations clergy sex abuse may be about violating church rules and moral teachings, in the U.S. has it has been especially about violating the law. 

And bishops who enabled this may also have violated the law (just this week, French Cardinal Philippe Barbarin was given a six-month suspended prison sentence for not going to authorities about the alleged abuse of minors by a priest).

Denying that the Church in the US and elsewhere has a problem with criminals in the clergy will only block real solutions.

Denial #4: This is mainly a problem of sexual immorality. The horrible history of bishops recycling abusers to new parishes – and thus enabling them to rape more kids– was caused precisely by bishops thinking this was about sin – a moral problem that confession, repentance, and penance would solve.  But no, that never worked, because the real problem was (1) an abuse of power by (2) pathologically disordered people.  The only solution was to strip such men of their priestly power, and (if and when treatment failed) isolate them from potential victims.

To deny this, and talk as if the abusers’ evil was about sexual immorality, prevents us from tackling the twin dangers of pathology and power.  This is not primarily about sinners who must repent; it is about criminals who must be stopped.

Denial #5:  The Pope can fix this right now.  The failure to discipline bishops who cover up abuse or simply mismanaged controlling the abusers has of course worsened the scandal.  And in some ways a cover-up is worse than the original abuses.  But both canon law and church structure give bishops a high degree of autonomy, even in relationship to the pope.  Many decry the slow speed of action from the top, and Pope Francis has probably deserved some criticism for being too slow to believe and to act on allegations against bishops.

But Andrew J. Bacevich offers another angle. Bacevich is Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, and  a retired US Army Colonel. He is also a life-long Catholic, and he recently observed that a realistic view of church structures suggests that its pace, while not up to many expectations, is nonetheless reasonable:  

Not without cause, critics have lambasted the Catholic Church (to which I belong) for being slow to address the epidemic of clergy sex abuse. Yet when it comes to acknowledging institutional failure and initiating remedial action, Rome moves with gazelle-like swiftness in comparison with the Pentagon. Pope Francis knows that he has a serious problem on his hands. In Washington, the defense secretary and the Joint Chiefs of Staff either haven’t noticed or don’t care that the military…has achieved a less than stellar record.

Thinking Francis can end the crisis by papal fiat only obscures the need for a systematic reform of procedures and policies that can be led by Francis but must be supported by the world’s bishops-- procedures and policies that will probably vary by region depending on the shape of abuse there and local legal systems.

Denial #6: Band-aids will do.  Thinking such reforms will prevent future trouble is yet another barrier to enabling ending the crisis, because it denies the underlying causes.  Dealing with those requires solid answers to two questions: (1) how did this horror happen in the first place?  And (2) why did it continue on unreported and unsolved for so long?

 Francis himself has suggested the answer to number (2) by saying that there will be no solution to this crisis as long as clericalism exists: “To say "no" to abuse is to say an emphatic "no" to all forms of clericalism.” (see CrossCurrents #471 “Ending Clericalism, Our ‘Original Sin’”).

And I have argued that answering number (1) requires us to examine an entire range of dysfunctions within the Church: 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 (see CrossCurrents #472 “How Could This Horror Happen?”).

Failure to acknowledge these two underlying issues and failure to address them will leave our Church vulnerable to future abuses of pathology and power. This crisis is not something that simply emerged in the last generation or two; the potential for this crisis has been baked into church structures for a century or more.  Unless we get to the bottom of that, we will not be finally clear of the crisis.

It is all too easy to fall into denying just how complex and profound this crisis is.  But we must fight against all such denials, for each denial blocks our path to get the Church right again.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 201

#474: What Would King Say?

      Had he lived, Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 90 this past week.  As the nation celebrates his birthday, it is easy to honor King as a champion of civil rights, perhaps even easy to note that in 2019 America risks losing some of the gains he championed. 

But it is much harder for us to actually honor him as our national prophet--as America’s conscience--because that means honoring all the causes he stood for.  And those causes taken together, have not merely lost ground; they have nearly disappeared from our public discourse. 

Let me survey what King called the “three great evils,” and ask two questions: What would King say now?  And: Who in our public life still speaks for King? 

Racial Injustice.  Most celebrations honoring King focus on him as leader of the civil rights movement.  And surely a key message in his mission was that people be judged not “by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” By 1968 King had witnessed many gains, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  And since then, African-Americans have continued many gains. 

Still, were King alive today he might well say that too often people continue to be judged by the color of their skin, whether in efforts to suppress black votes, or in cases of police shooting unarmed Blacks, or in the rollback of the Voting Rights Act itself. 

And more recently the challenge of accepting people of color has increasingly focused, not only on the descendants of slaves, but also on immigrants and their children (indeed, our first Black president was the son of an immigrant, not the descendant of slaves).  And while King did not face the same issues over immigration that we face now, it’s easy to know what he might say--in fact he already actually said it:

“We may all have come from different ships, but we're in the same boat now."

Indeed, by the end of his career King would be increasingly clear that the evil of racism was not just a problem for U.S. blacks, but for all those oppressed by others:

“In one sense the civil rights movement in the United States is a special American phenomenon which must be understood in the light of American history and dealt with in terms of the American situation. But on another and more important level, what is happening in the United States today is a relatively small part of a world development.”

Looking around today, King might well say we remain far from fulfilling the goal of racial justice for all.

Inequality.  In later years King spoke more and more about economic inequality.  He often called it “poverty,” since up to 1968 the middle class was still gaining in wages and benefits, so it made sense to focus on those below the poverty line.  But since King’s death, the U.S. has seen nearly 50 years of steadily declining real wages even for the middle class, and we now see a wealth gap worse than any time since the great depression of the 1930s.  So when King spoke of poverty, he said:

“Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.’ When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.”

This question of a “broader distribution of wealth” has changed since his death, with fewer below the poverty line but more struggling to make ends meet as wealth has been even more concentrated.  This makes King’s view not less, but even more timely.  Today he would surely repeat these words:

“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children... God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty.”

War. King lost many supporters and became an even more controversial figure when he campaigned against the Vietnam War.  Even other civil rights leaders felt this was not his role.  But they did not realize that, for King, this was the inevitable result of his own growing vision. 

Once he decided that nonviolence was the key to fighting racism, and once he incorporated the theories of Gandhian nonviolence into his own Christian theology, that naturally altered his views on war, as he moved from a “just war” perspective to pacifism.  He called this his “pilgrimage to nonviolence”:

“I felt that while war could never be a positive good, it could serve as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force. War, horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system. But now I believe that the potential destructiveness of modern weapons totally rules out the possibility of war ever again achieving a negative good.”

Indeed, King seemed to know that without a concerted anti-war strategy, the threat of mass destruction would spread.  Today’s worries about North Korea, Iran, and the U.S. abandoning the INF treaty all echo King’s warning:

“Nations are not reducing but rather increasing their arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. The best brains in the highly developed nations of the world are devoted to military technology. The proliferation of nuclear weapons has not been halted…On the contrary, the detonation of an atomic device by the first nonwhite, non-Western, and so-called underdeveloped power, namely the Chinese People’s Republic, opens new vistas of exposure of vast multitudes, the whole of humanity, to insidious terrorization by the ever-present threat of annihilation.”

When accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King made his rejection of militarism clear:

“I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of nuclear annihilation... I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow... I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed.”

I have no doubt that he would say matters now have only become worse.  Since 9/11 the U.S. has engaged in multiple, seemingly endless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere. And unlike the Vietnam era, these wars are not even especially controversial.  In the 1960s a band of public leaders loudly opposed U.S. war policy: King, Robert F. Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and many others.  In 2019, who are the public leaders opposing our warlike foreign policy? 

Yet our troop deployments and arms sales (not to mention defense pending) far outstrip all other nations.  It is as if Americana have accepted that war is inevitable and peace is impossible. King would disagree:

“World peace through non-violent means is neither absurd nor unattainable. All other methods have failed. Thus we must begin anew. Non-violence is a good starting point.”

For Catholics today, King’s views are important for three reasons. 

First, his views on race, economic inequality, and peace fit almost exactly with Catholic Social Teaching of the last 50 years--especially with the teachings of the last four popes.  You can look it up! 

Second, King agrees with the Church that these three issues are linked:

“We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together…you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others…the whole structure of American life must be changed.”

Third, King’s vision of the contemporary world exactly matches the Catholic vision emerging from Vatican Council II (1962-1965).  The Council saw technological progress as the hallmark of modern life, and praised such progress but offered this caution: technological progress confers new power, but the good use of that power requires a matching progress in wisdom and goodness. 

Here is how King saw the same “moral lag”:

“Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this.”

For King, as for Vatican II, this “moral lag” is at the root of what he calls the world’s three great evils:

“This problem of spiritual and moral lag, which constitutes modern man’s chief dilemma, expresses itself in three larger problems which grow out of man’s ethical infantilism. Each of these problems, while appearing to be separate and isolated, is inextricably bound to the other. I refer to racial injustice, poverty, and war.”

And for King, as for Vatican II, the challenge lies in our moral progress catching up to our technological progress:

“Mankind’s survival is dependent upon man’s ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and war; the solution of these problems is in turn dependent upon man squaring his moral progress with his scientific progress, and learning the practical art of living in harmony”

Based on his own words, then, King’s voice still speaks to our time, much the way Catholic Social Teaching does.  Taken together, they represent our brightest wisdom and our clearest hope--but who will champion of such vision? 

On a day when many seek to fence in King’s legacy to narrow questions of race, we should rededicate ourselves to his broader cause of waging nonviolent combat against racism, inequality, and militarism. 

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2019

#473: Bogus Blaming—or Credible Allegations?

The President calls it “bomb” stuff, Facebook posters on both left and right claim it was all a CIA/FBI /Democratic hoax to boost Democratic candidates in the upcoming election.  Even after the NYPD and the FBI director announced these were “live devices” and “not hoax bombs,” people still disbelieved.  This crisis reflects a pattern that cuts across much of our cultural and religious life. 

It’s now a cliché to say we live in divided times.  Whether in our church are in our culture, too often we face three unhappy choices: we can talk only with those who agree with us, we can ridicule those who disagree with us, or we cannot talk at all.

This is not merely because people are at odds about what values to follow.  It is more basic than that: people are even at odds about the facts-what is true or false, what is real or not.

This is most troublesome facing matters that require action, such as accusations of wrongdoing.  When someone accuses someone else of wrongdoing, there must be some response--but our actions will depend on the facts of the case.  If we cannot agree on those facts, the result can be paralysis--nothing happens. The risk: even real and serious wrongdoing goes unchecked.

Currently were being flooded with such allegations about wrongdoing: workplace sexual harassment, sex abuse and cover up by priests and bishops in Pennsylvania and other states, allegations of assault by Brett Kavanaugh, indictments of various public figures in the Mueller investigation, new cases of sex abuse against priests and bishops in Australia and France, allegations of murder aimed at the Saudi government, allegations of attempted bomb attacks against public figures, allegations that Elizabeth Warren  committed fraud about her family heritage, allegations that Pope Francis dropped sanctions against an abusive Cardinal.

Too often people fail to agree on the facts about such allegations because they impose their own preconceptions on the case.  People approach cases from opposite angles, disagree before they even view the facts, and end up unable to establish a common view of what the facts are.  And we get paralysis.

Let me suggest this: we need a fair and neutral way to respond to allegations--a set of standards we agree on an advance and apply to each case.  This is the only way to prevent contaminating each case with our own preconceptions.  Example: in Catholic sex abuse cases, disciplining action and punishment has been taken against “credibly accused” priests.  But what makes an accusation credible?  What does it take to justify punishing the accused?

Most people know that we already have such a clear standard in the U.S. criminal justice system: “innocent until proven guilty.”  And many of us know the standard for civil cases: “the preponderance of evidence.”

But these standards do not fit most of the allegations I listed above.  The Saudi murders and the bomb threats may come to criminal trial, but the others will not, and many allegations concerning priestly abuse and many “#MeToo” allegations are too old even for civil suits due to statutes of limitations.  Moreover, allegations of personal (especially sexual) assault may not produce either witnesses or physical evidence. 

In a word, many allegations cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, yet they still require a response.  So again this question: what is a “credible allegation,” one we believe is true even when we cannot prove it is true?

Clearly we cannot accept being caught between two extremes: either (1) the allegations are “proven” or (2) the result is nothing. We need more--and better--options. 

A practical example: many states list people of various professions (teachers, health workers, social workers, etc.) As “mandated reporters” who must notify the authorities of any allegation.  But then the authorities must somehow act, even if no witnesses or physical evidence exists. 

Common sense tells us what questions need to be asked about any such allegation:

--Who is making it? 

--Are they a reliable source? 

--Do they have any motive to accuse falsely? 

--Can they offer corroborating evidence or witnesses? 

In other words, the credible allegation begins when accusations are made by a credible person!  But that does not end the case, since there may be unanswered questions about witnesses and evidence: Who are the witnesses?  What is the evidence if any?  Does the accused have an alibi?  Are there contrary witnesses or evidence?  Is there a pattern of similar independent accusations against this person? 

I recall, for example, talking with someone skeptical of the priestly abuse allegations.  He simply did not believe it was happening.  But then I offered testimony I had received from several different people accusing the same priest of similar behavior even though these people did not even know each other and were from different parishes.  Clearly such independent accusations could not be simply false coincidences.

I suggest that, while not all allegations can lead to civil or criminal court, and while “presumed until innocent” cannot apply to all cases, still we can follow two clear standards.  First, is the accuser credible?  If not, the case may end there.  Second, if the accuser is credible, then the case has to be thoroughly investigated by the relevant authorities. 

There is room for disagreement about these points.  Was Dr. Blasey Ford a credible accuser?  Was the Kavanaugh investigation thorough? In priestly abuse cases, is the relevant authority the church, the state, or both?  In the Saudi murder, should we settle for the Saudi investigation? A Turkish investigation? A U.S. investigation? A NATO/U.N. investigation?  All of the above? 

But those disagreements are about the process to follow and the judgment we make about the accuser.  Can preconceptions color such process and judgment?  Yes indeed--but that is still better than jumping to conclusions before any examination of the accuser or any investigation of the facts. 

I’m afraid Americans today do not enjoy that kind of clarity about how to deal with such accusations. They call for “innocent until proven guilty” where it does not belong.  They dismiss accusers without even hearing the testimony—or accept their accusations without questioning them.  They ignore patterns that would help judge the credibility of allegations.  And they reach conclusions even before investigations are complete--or even without any investigation at all! 

If we want any chance of social solidarity, if we want any hope of resolving conflicts in a way that serves the common good, we will need to do better. 

We will need a willingness to suspend judgment, to respect credible testimony, and to insist on thorough investigations that we do not prejudge.

None of this is as easy as covering any case with preconceptions.  But we will all benefit by choosing the harder way--the right way.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2018

#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