There was a rather large elephant in the room at church on Sunday. Sullivan believes that child abusers are repressed gay men. I don't buy it and was rather surprised that a gay man wrote that. Child abusers are broken individuals, who were often abused themselves as children. But I have been following Sullivan's other posts on the church and largely agree with them.
The church made the mistake of mixing up sin and crime. Child abuse is a crime, not a sin. Give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. And perverts should be given up to Caesar. Crime is not an internal matter. The mistakes are piling up as the church hierarchy gets defensive and tries to rationalize past decisions.
Apt. 11d 
I’m finding the series of stories horrifying — the description of the deaf boys particularly so. I don’t blame it on “repressed gay men” or pedophilia stemming from suppressed sexual desire in celibates. I attribute it to the evil that some with too much power over the powerless will do. We’re talking about abuse by priests now, but the stories of the Indian boarding schools in Canada are just as horrifying.
It’s a toxic mix, and as society has taken on the role of protecting the powerless, I think we’ve discovered that you have to break the secrecy, isolation and hierarchy that allow it. The problem I think the Catholic church is facing is that some of those things are intrinsic to the church (i.e. the sanctity/secrecy of the confessional, the hierarchical relationships between priest and parishioner — though mind you as an outsider, I could be completely wrong about these things).
In secular society, we’ve tried to break the secrecy and hierarchical relationships that allow the abuse to continue, with, for example, mandatory reporting laws. The flaw I see with the church’s response is that they’re not officially stating how they’ll implement new structures that prevent abuse. And, I fear that the unwillingness is rooted in fundamental characteristics of the church.
Since I believe in separation of church and state, I find it difficult to sue the secular state to impose these requirements on the church, but if the church doesn’t impose them, I think the state should, and certainly it should in countries like England and Germany where the separation is not fundamental to the relationship between church and state.
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There was a very interesting hour-long special on NPR a few years ago that discussed the priest-abuse scandal. The theory they laid out is this:
Many/most of the abusers were baby-boomers or slighlty older. At the time they were coming into the priesthood it was common for large Catholic families to ‘push’ at least one son into the priesthood. But think about who they are going to push. You aren’t going to push your son the star athlete. You aren’t going to push your son the class president. Instead you are going to push your bookish, shy, socialy awkward son.
It was not uncommon pre-Vatican II for kids to go into seminary at a pretty young age. Seminaries were also pretty isolated from the rest of society. So the socially awkward, shy child is sent to these closed off communities and given little contact with the outside world during their formative years. Then they are ordained and thrust out into the world during the social upheaval of the 1960’s and they have to figure out how to cope.
It’s important to remember that the sexual misconduct was not just child abuse. That has gotten the most attention because it was so heinous, but there were also a lot of priests who had affairs with women in their parishes. On a less-problematic basis there were also a lot of priests (and nuns to a lesser degree) that left the priesthood to marry. I have a cousin who was ready to take her vows as a nun in 1966 and fell in love with a man in the seminary. They have been married for 40 years now. I also had several parish priests when I was growing up who are now ministers in faiths that allow them to marry.
Obviously the priesthood gave these men an enormous amount of power. Even today the parish is built around that one man. It was easy for them to use that power in inappopriate ways to deal with their inner turmoil. I think yes, some probably would have probably been openly gay men in another time. Others just how feelings of sexual desire and could not figure out how to express it. They probably convinced themselves that abusing children was less wrong than giving into their feelings towards an adult. At the end of the day though, the way the Church was structured contributed greatly to the abuse, not just in the cover-ups but in the way it gave the most socially awkward of men a tremendous amount of power. My understanding is that this structure still exists to some degree in Ireland, which is why we are still hearing that there is a lot of abuse left to uncover over there.
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It’s difficult even for me, a girl who grew up in the 60s and 70s and experienced first-hand the much different attitudes about protecting children, to remember how it used to be. Not just with priests but in general we as a country used to be significantly less concerned about sexual abuse and “incidents”. I used to come home from the playground or the pool and report stuff to my mother that, today, would be arrestable offenses. This happened quite a bit — both between children and adults and between older children (particularly older siblings) and younger children. I seem to remember 4-5 incidents that I knew of during grade school/junior high. And I wasn’t even talking to the boys; who knows what was going on with them.
These incidents were without fail either downplayed, handled privately (with someone’s dad speaking with the person in question), or blown off completely with a comment about how to get out of the situation without offending the grownup. (Maybe this was more common for girls, who knows.)
So to report these stories today, with our current sensibilities, we all hear it with total horror. But it’s my sense that this stuff was on a familiar continuum at the time; probably on the far end, but not off the charts. Much as we lament current kids’ lack of unstructured/unsupervised time, this is one of the reasons behind it. I think it’s a good change.
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An old-ish Salon article, “Confessions of a Former Celibate” is still the best thing I’ve read on the topic. Excerpts:
“How, then, do priests, forced to accept this condition [celibacy], live it? In our in-depth study of priests (The Catholic Priest: Psychological Investigations, United States Catholic Conference, 1972) we learned that well-developed men observed the celibacy requirement with great fidelity. Yet these, the most mature of priests, did not live it as this sweetly singing virtue, as much as they adjusted to it as a bland circumstance of their service to their people.
“How did they adjust to it? The only way that priests adjust well to celibate living is through a network of strong supportive human relationships. At that time, the culture of the priesthood provided such relationships in the high-spirited fraternity that characterized their life together in rectories. Additional research at the time revealed that almost all successful celibates also had close nonsexual relationships with women, often with one of their sisters but just as often with a member of the parish — a mother and wife, perhaps, who welcomed the priest into her family life.
“Priests who were less well-developed displayed a range of maladjustments, ranging from an isolated bachelorhood to severe psychological conflicts. Celibacy, however, did not so much cause these problems as it brought them out in people who brought into seminaries their long-standing serious internal difficulties.
“Celibacy, then, was clearly oversold as a virtue and underexamined as a manner of living. …”
“Celibacy is not the cause of priestly pedophilia. It is, however, a condition and requirement that needs what the pope refuses to allow, namely an in-depth examination of the real-time, real-life celibate existence. Unexamined and falsely and fragilely celebrated as a great virtue, it has become at least the partial source of an ongoing misunderstanding and misinterpretation of human personality in which flesh and spirit, soul and body, imagination and will, are made antagonists in a long unrelieved siege. …”
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When does a man decide to become a Catholic priest? He doesn’t. His family decide for him. He comes from a Catholic family who pray – a lot – right through childhood. Every night – the brainwashing goes on. Then he thinks HE decides, but the decision has already been made. A Catholic family gets great kudos from having a “Priest” in the family. He has never had a normal childhood, he has never had a normal teenage-hood. These boys are never allowed to grow up – and NEVER to have any relationship with a female. These boys turn into men, with the usual, driving force that drives all men -sexual desire – and then brainwashed into a distrust and fearfulness of females – the only ones they relate to are, in the main, underage boys – targets, powerless and told to shut up. But these children, get a double whammy, abused for years, and then the church covers it up. Celibacy is not a virtue – it is a scewing up of the male brain in the worst possible way.
This huge pedophile catastrophe will not go away until the Catholic church let these boys have normal relationships – and think that sex with women is NOT A SIN, females are not the enemy. But that will never happen – so more pedophiles will be produced by the very training of the Catholic Church.
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