Evidentia

I have written several times here about the problem of pedophilia in North American and European educational and religious institutions. After reading one of my recent blogs, a friend asks why the Catholic Church is in such denial over the pedophilia crisis.

Every few days, a news story pops up indicating a link between top members of the hierarchy, if not the Pope himself, and decisions to block or smother accusations against pedophile priests. Obviously, the Catholic Church is being rocked by the current crisis, which involves irreparable harm done to innocent children, and also raises issues of the Church’s own credibility as an institution, and its share in responsibility for extremely serious criminal actions going back over a long period of time.

When the Catholic Church is placed in this situation, it is (unfortunately) only natural that it retaliate, by drawing attention away from the real problem.

1) For example, some Catholic commentators are suggesting that the problem is not the Church itself, but an explosion of homosexuality – a gay revolution that infiltrated the priesthood, starting in the 1960s.

2) Others suggest that the same proportion of Catholic priests have been pedophiles as in society as a whole, and that there is some confusion in people’s minds, since many victims were actually adolescents (supposedly eager to have sex in their mid-teens) rather than children (unwilling to be  abused).

3) Still others do what Pope John II did, blaming pedophilia on the sexual revolution itself – this Western (i.e. not Eastern European) social scourge  supposedly demoralized and corrupted unwilling priests, whose sexual outlet happened to be … young children.

How to distract attention from the real problem

I have known many Catholic priests over the years. Only one of these priests had what I would call a balanced view of sexuality, but then he was a widower. Many others had a distorted not to mention tortured view of sexuality, and no concept whatever of male-female relations. I have found relationship advice from priests not only unrealistic, but even harmful, since it reflected the dolorist view that pain is the only way to gain salvation.

Close to half of Catholic priests may be gay. It is impossible to make a precise estimate of how many are gay, given people’s right to confidentiality, social and religious taboos and the tortured positions of the Church itself on sexuality. One estimate, based on a random survey of 500 priests undertaken by a Franciscan friar in New Jersey, suggests that 45% of 398 respondents considered themselves gay. The true proportion may be a little lower than that. The homosexuality of so many priests goes some way towards explaining their lack of competence in terms of heterosexuality, but not much more than that.

Even if close to half of Catholic priests were gay, is there necessarily a link between homosexuality and pedophilia? Some homosexuals may also be pedophiles (I can think of one I had the misfortune to know), but a confidential relationship between consenting adults and an older man sexually abusing a child are two completely different situations.

What about the idea that the proportion of pedophiles in the priesthood (as high as 5%) is the same as in society at large? One in twenty (5%) is a lot. Why attempt to deny it, or draw attention away from the problem? Besides, I simply do not believe that 5% of men in society at large have been or are pedophiles.

I don’t believe pedophilia has anything to do with the sexual revolution. According to the controversial Jay report, 73% of US sex abuse victims between 1950 and 2002 were between 5 and 14. Was there any 1960s guru of sexual emancipation urging men to go out and rape young children, and then threaten them with violence or eternal hellfire, if they told anyone? Of course not!

As I mentioned in a post earlier today on the New York Times website, I have known a few pedophiles over the years (as an observer, not a victim), and would say they were self-hating individuals with total unsupervised power over children, who took a pathological pleasure in controlling and defiling children. “Defiling” is the key. But they were also ruthless about not getting caught, since they knew they were doing something terribly wrong. When pedophiles have happened to be priests, they have been able to control and defile children with immunity, while using their moral power (and other threats) to keep victims and their families silent. In the Wisconsin case, Father Lawrence Murphy may have hoped that the sexual abuse of deaf-mute children there made concealment even easier. He may have felt this was the perfect crime, since the victims could not communicate what had happened. And the 1962 edict, enjoining all victims, witnesses and alleged sexual abusers to keep the abuse quiet or face excommunication, added another layer of abuse, through the straight moral blackmail of excommunication.

The Catholic Church is a vertical command and control bureaucracy, which has offered its own priests a kind of immunity from prosecution. Anyone who believes that pedophile priests in Ireland, Austria, in residential (native) schools in northern Canada, in the US or anywhere else, somehow acted in isolation, fails to see the systemic nature of this abuse.

The real issue in this crisis is not whether new ways can be found to redefine the problem so it goes away, or to shield the Church from any harm or penalty. The real issue in this crisis is that tens of thousands of children have been raped and deserve some redress, decades after the fact.

St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that loving someone means wanting what is good for that person. Whatever happened to the Gospel of love?