I went to St. Norbert College in the early 80s. One of my buddies who was from Green Bay, said that if you were ever in the abbey, walk with your ass against the wall. (as opposed to being in The Abbey, a bar across the street from the campus)
Yeah, at that time, gay priests were an open secret, and pedophile priests were frequently rumored.
I’m old enough to barely remember the days when black-clad elderly widows went to mass every morning, and most mothers wanted one of their sones to be a priest. It was my impression that the attraction, too, was based on those whose sensibilities were such that they did not share in the raunchy “locker room talk” and topics of other adolescents naively assumed they might be destined to the priesthood and celibacy, so it was logical that the priesthood could attract those who were gay more than those who were not, and did not attract those adolescents keenly interested in the opposite sex.
By the time I was in high school, the 60’s revolution was morphing into the 70’s. There was no longer a significant stigma about leaving the priesthood (just as the stigma about divorce was lesser, too). In fact, one of my teachers in high school was an ex-priest married to an ex-nun. I dated a girl whose father spent a few years in the seminary before dropping out to get married. (She had 5 siblings) Many of the clergy who taught at the school dropped out of the priesthood strongly disillusioned or feeling an alternate calling.
When i was in university I recall there was a minor to-do in the Catholic community about some ex-priest who wrote a book claiming that most priests had stopped believing in God after a few years in the priesthood, and the only reason so many stayed was because they had no idea what to do if they left the orders.
While I didn’t spend a lot of time involved in Catholic community, I did go to a catholic school. I remember I remarked at a reunion that I had never personally seen any evidence of inappropriate behaviour. One of my classmates mentioned the only instance he had was when he was helping set up the school library one year, and a older priest stuck his hand down into his pocket. He said “I got out of there pretty quick.” That was all.
i suppose the big problem is the size of the church, so the number of offenders. Add to that the ability to move them around, all over the map, even overseas, so as to keep things quiet. Even asking a priest to just leave the church might draw attention to the thing they wanted to bury I suppose this allowed them to more actively hide (i.e. spread) the problem - the most that other organizations could do, like school boards or the Boy Scouts, was to ask the person to leave or like Penn State, ignore the problem and hope it went away.
LOL
Prosecuting child abusers is not really what I would call a “dilemma”.
The only dilemma is if we should declare the whole church a criminal organisation or just everyone at bishop level and higher.
Sexual abuse of children (almost entirely by men) has been widespread in modern human societies. I think it’s safe to say that is extremely common, way more so than most people would like to believe. Like the sexual oppression of women, it is something embedded in our cultures so deeply that it’s mostly ‘invisible’.
Large bureaucracies who supposedly control the activities of the men in their employ, particularly those with a moral mandate, like the Holy Mother Church, have an intense need to protect their reputations at all costs. Hence the centuries of secretiveness and lying. This shit is not only in religious institutions, it is everywhere that bureaucracies which deal with children exist. Boy Scouts. Boarding schools. Etc.
There is a particular issue in the Catholic church about sex, of course. The vow of lifelong celibacy is something a large percentage of priests break, one way or another. Where homosexuality is forbidden and damned, the priesthood has been a time-honored cover. A friend of mine who was the mistress of a priest told me that the bishop of the diocese preferred gay men for the priesthood because the scandal of pregnancy was harder to cover up than that of homosexuality. Pedophilia might be something more men in the Catholic priesthood engage in because children are more easily silenced than adults. But, like the general populace, the majority of priests who break that vow seek adults, not children. And, as far as anyone can tell, the majority of priests do not break that vow. How large a majority that is, no one knows, of course.
And the basic problem, until about 1970, was that once a person chose that profession in the fervour of youth, the realized too late they were stuck with it. There was not a great acceptance of priests who left the orders until the last few decades. Particularly, I don’t know whether a an ex-priest could legitimately marry if they still kept the faith. I presume they need permission from a higher-up to be released from their vow of celibacy, which meant depending on the charitable inclination of the local church heirarchy - not a given.
But given the additional inclination of orders of nuns to cover up the abuse and child-theft from unwed mothers in the “Homes for Unwed Mothers” (scandals in multiple countries), sweeping nastiness and embarassing facts under the rug is a human urge, not just a male one. Just that in patriarchal organizations and societies, it would be the men making the ultimate decisions.
The only ex-priest was a disgraced, defrocked priest, who presumably left the Church entirely and was free to do whatever he wished. The vow was unto death. Nowadays it’s a bit different but I don’t know how different. There’s a significant migration of Catholic priests into the Anglican/Episcopal church, which allows priests to marry. The liturgy and beliefs are similar, minus the Pope.
The Catholic Church distinguishes between ordination (the sacrament that makes you a priest and confers the sacramental powers of priesthood on you) and the clerical state (being a member of the clergy of the Catholic Church). The former has an “indelible character”: It can never be undone if the initial ordination was valid. The latter, however, can be undone; clerics can be removed from the clerical state (“laicized”). By default, this means they’re still subject to the obligation of celibacy, but the Pope can dispense them from celibacy (this is all regulated in canon 290). Since the voluntary resignation of a priest from the clerical state requires a rescript of the Holy See anyway, I’d imagine that it’s not uncommon in such situations to also get a dispensation from celibacy together with the laicization, but I don’t have statistics on this.
Note also that it’s possible for a Catholic priest to be legitimately and validly married while still being legitimately and validly clerical. First of all, there are multiple Rites (sub-sects) within the Roman Catholic Church, and only one of them (the Latin Rite) requires priestly celibacy (it’s just that that one rite has over 90% of the entire Church’s population). Second, even within the Latin Rite, a priest who’s ordained in the Apostolic Succession (this includes some Protestants) and who’s married under the rules of his original sect can convert to Catholicism, in which case both the ordination and marriage remain valid.
This is in contrast with the requirement that priests be male, which the Church currently considers to be absolutely non-negotiable.
I was born in 1971 and my family was Catholic, so I was sent to Catholic schools (this is in Ontario, where Catholic schools are publicly funded.) However, we didn’t go to church regularly, as sleeping in on Sunday was more fun. So I wasn’t an altar boy or anything and spent very little time around clergy.
MY recollection is that this stuff basically started to blow up in the 1980s. I am sure people close to the church knew of this or that Father Untrustworthy, but the “everyone knows” state where it goes beyond whispers and stay away from that guy was an 80s thing. The scandals began to burst onto the front page in the late 80s and in the early 90s it was the subject of movies and whatnot; it went from “nasty secret nobody talks about openly” to the subject of commonly understood dark humor in ten years. Just like that.
There were two priests who taught at the Catholic high school that I attended who left the priesthood after I graduated. My understanding is that, while it wasn’t necessarily simple for them to be released, it also wasn’t arduous.
One was a Norbertine, who had entered the priesthood as a young man, because his devout mother deeply wanted one of her sons to become a priest (also, he was a high school classmate of my father’s). He apparently was not ever particularly happy as a priest, and shortly after his mother passed, he left the order, when he was in his 60s. The biggest issue he ran into was that he effectively had no retirement savings, because it had been assumed that the order would take care of him in old age; he wound up having to continue to work well into his 70s (he became a teacher at the local prison).
The other wasn’t a Norbertine, and left the priesthood shortly after I graduated, in part because he had fallen in love with a woman, and wanted to get married. I looked him up on Google last night, and found him: he’s still alive, still married to the same woman, and serving as a lay leader at the Catholic church I attended as a kid.
Just for a slightly different viewpoint on this. From the POV of us slightly younger members of the board, this has “always” been known. Because by the time I was old enough to follow such things (Jewish, so never had the avoid XYZ priest warnings, although I’m sure there are people in any religion who take advantage of their power and position) it was the cited late 80s/90s timeframe!
I went from 6 to 16 in the 80s, so it was something of a dark, but increasingly open “secret” by the time I was an early teen, although in my particular community the local buzz was about a certain priest who was handy with just nubile girls, not that it’s better in any way.
There were quite a few cases of this in the UK when the CofE started to allow female bishops. Some married clergy didn’t agree with it and converted to Catholicism, including my parents local vicar. I remember it well as his wife left him about 6 months later. Rumour was that his refusal to serve under a female bishop was based more on misogyny than scripture and his wife finally realised that.
Anglicans turning Catholic because they disagree with policies of the C of E seems to be major business model (if you allow the expression) for the Catholic Church in England. The Vatican has even set up a dedicated “personal ordinariate” (kind of like a diocese, but without a territorially defined jurisdiction) for such converted parishes. That way, they can let these communities join the Catholic Church while still allowing them to practice distinctly Anglican traditions that are not quite in line with the Roman church.
An interesting side note here. I watched the Menendezz Brothers documentary on Netflix (not the dramatization). I don’t want to rehash the case, but interestingly for a trial in 1993 - there was an interview with one of jurors in the first trial, where they were allowed to raise the child abuse defense. At the beginning of deliberations, they had a quick vote. She says all the women voted that they believed the brothers’ abuse allegations, and none of the men did.
I suppose it says something about the social attitude back then, that it seems men were inclined not to believe that married white middle-class (or better) socially prominent men would actually molest young boys. (Let alone their own children)
So perhaps that was part of the answer to the OP - men, especially men of authority, were disinclined to suspect men.
James Joyce wrote “The Sisters” in 1914. It was published publicly. It’s about a disgraced pedophile priest.
Reading recent comments I think there is a split in how people are thinking about “always known”.
Some people are thinking about it as if it’s not “known” if it’s only talked about in whispers and advice to stay away from certain priests, and only consider it to be “known” once it began to be discussed more publicly. Others see this level of knowledge as very much “known”.
FWIW my reading of the OP (and my opinion) is that the latter is the relevant point. From the OP:
Saying something wasn’t “known” because people only whispered about it while knowing it was going on seems both counterfactual and not what the OP was asking.
I think it’s more that society has gone from being fairly oblivious about child molestation in general - conidered something that happens rarely and is only whispered about applying only to weird people - to today, where people realize it’s a lot more widespread and it is the first thing people wonder about in any situation.
For example, a lot of the situations that are in the news from decades ago, the priest or scout leader or team coach or whatever would have kids sleeping over or camping trips or parties or similar grooming “opportunities” that today would raise serious red flags.
I think that if a scout leader holding a campout raises your red flags, you need to recalibrate your threat assessment.
Unless you mean with only one adult, or something? That’s just a terrible idea even aside from the possibility of misbehavior.
I don’t think its a matter of people thinking it wasn’t “known” because it was whispered about although I do think the “certain priests” might have something to do with it. The thing is that if it was whispered about among kids, that doesn’t mean it was known among the adults. There’s a big difference between one kid saying "stay away from father so and so " to his ( or her) friend while other kid’s parents allow them to attend sleepovers at the rectory from everyone giving funny looks to any adult in authority who invites kids to sleepovers. But the level of “known” that’s going to result in someone saying murder victims will be assumed to be child molesters is something else. It requires that people know it’s a fairly common issue, common enough that people restrict their children from situations where they are alone with any priest or teacher or Scout leader or baseball coach. No sleepovers at the rectory , no taking one kid camping. Not just one particular priest or one particular teacher - but that it’s common enough that it should change how a parent looks at all adults in those positions of authority. And it also requires knowledge that the bishops tended to transfer their problems rather than dealing with them - you can’t even assume that a priest hadn’t already been caught molesting kids in some other diocese. And that didn’t really happen until the 80s - until then , people would allow priests access to their sons that they never would have allowed for their daughters. And then all those books and articles were published…
Or more likely, with only one kid and one adult. . I remember reading in the 80s about cases where a scout leader took a particular interest in one kid ( almost always from a single parent family ) and took him on various activities including camping or a priest invited the kid to a sleepover with no other kids. I guess one way to put it is that in the past, behavior that would have raised red flags if it involved a girl didn’t raise those flags if it was a boy. Because in the 40s or 50s or 60s or 70s no parent was letting their daughter sleep at the rectory or go camping with a male scout leader.
But weren’t those adults once Catholic kids themselves, running around and whispering to each other about that generation’s creepy priest? They grew up and forgot all about the molesting priests like the kids in It forgot about Pennywise?