Over the past few years, a lot of stories have come out about Catholic priests sexually abusing minors – male minors, in every such story I have read or heard.
The explanation most often floated is this: A male of Catholic family, born with a homosexual orientation, lives in a religious community which condemns the gay lifestyle as sinful and unnatural, and in which men come under some pressure to get married and have children. Thus, he might gravitate towards the priesthood – a very respectable calling for a Catholic, and one where nobody will question the absence of women in his life. But he’s still gay on the inside . . . and now he’s in a position where he has a lot of personal influence and moral authority over altar boys and such . . . and some priests in that situation yield to temptation.
Sounds plausible. But what strikes me as strange is that every single such story I have heard is about priests in the United States (except for one or two instances in the UK). There are Catholics and Catholic churches and Catholic priests all over the globe. All Catholic priests are under the same vow of celibacy and have the same opportunities to break it. Why should American priests be more likely to do so than priests in other countries?
Then perhaps I just thought it was an American problem because the media here give American stories a lot more attention than stories in foreign countries . . . which says nothing good about our media.
Not only is this not a distinctively American problem, as others have pointed out, but it may also not be be a distinctively Catholic or even clerical problem.
A lot of attention has been focussed on the problem in the Catholic Church (and rightly so, lest I be misunderstood). And the “explanation most often floated” looks superficially plausible. But it needs scrutiny.
First, the unspoken assumption is that a homosexual orientation, when suppressed, and given the right circumstances as regards opportunity, etc, is relatively easily perverted into homosexual paedophile activity, whereas a suppressed heterosexual orientation is not so readily pervertede into heterosexual paedophile activity. Now, that <i>may</i> be so, but we await evidence. And assuming or accepting it without evidence might look, well, homophobic.
Secondly, if this has to do with the supression of adult sexual appetites, you would expect to find the problem confined to churches whose clergy are celibate. But, I have read, the incidence of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests doesn’t appear to be higher than for ministers of other religions, or for certain other occupations that afford access to children, and that involve no commitment to celibacy – teachers, sports coaches. Sorry, I have no cite for this. I’d welcome any cite to an authoritative source which either confirms or refutes the point.
The distinctively Catholic dimension to this problem, I think, has to do with how the institution itself dealt with the phenomenon. It seems, by and large, to have dealt with it appallingly, with a mixture of avoidance, denial and concealment which greatly compounded the problem, and the damage done by it. It’s that factor, I think, which has led to such attention being focussed on the church, and to the perception that this is a problem unique to the Catholic church.
This has been an ongoing problem in Canada for many years; Catholic priests have sexually molested more children than anyone cares to count. As in some American cases, it was often organized and covered up by Church authorities.
When I was in Ireland, about a year and a half ago, the newspapers were filled with stories about priests involved in sex scandals, of both a heterosexual AND a homosexual nature.
Nope, the problem is NOT unique to the United States.
Now, I’ve already offered my take on this. I believe that, as recently as the 1960’s and 1970’s, most parishes I knew of in New York City had 8 to 10 priests, and most of them were men who could easily have been successful doctors, lawyers or businessmen, if they’d chosen to go that route. And most were men I could easily picture with girlfriends, wives and children, if they had chosen to go that route. But that’s NOT the case among priests I see today. Normal, healthy, heterosexual males who might have considered the priesthood a generation ago do NOT consider it now. As a result, today, not only are there far fewer priests than there used to be, the ones I DO see are FAR more likely to be either stereotypically gay or just flat-out social misfits than ever before.
And, as I’ve noted before, it’s NOT the gay priests I’m most concerned about- it’s the social misfits.
BG: I’ll echo what others have said: Show us some data that this is a US problem and not a worldwide problem. Just because the elephant has fleas, doesn’t mean the mouse has none. The elephant just makes more noise.
I never said there was data, only that I, personally, have heard and seen a lot of news stories about this in the U.S. and very few about it in other countries. Based on posts in this thread, I infer this is because American news media have been selective in their coverage.
Why is that, I wonder? Do fewer Catholics today have that kind of devotion to the faith? Has the priesthood declined in status?
Just last month, the Supreme Court of Canada issued a decision holding one of the Roman Catholic dioceses in Newfoundland & Labrador directly liable for sexual abuse by one of its priests: John Doe v. Bennett. In doing so, the Court cited three of its own recent decisions dealing with similar abuse in other church-run facilities of other denominations elsewhere in Canada. So no, it’s not a U.S. thing, and it’s not confined to the Roman Catholic Church. The case was big news here, but not a blip for the American media.
I would respectfully disagree with RickJay’s comment that molestation was “organised” by church officials. There was the Mt Cashel case, where essentially a ring of pædophile priests ran an orphanage, but other than that I don’t think I would say it was organised. The question of covering-up, under the guise of a misplaced faith in counselling and re-assigning the offender, is another question.
Remember when Sinéad O’Connor ripped that picture of the pope in half on Saturday Night Live? And she said “fight the real enemy?” She was protesting sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland, and how the church was protecting the priests. All those people wanted to punch her lights out, turns out she was right on the money.
And there are a number of people who are agitating to return to the “good old days” of seminary training for exactly that reason.
Of course, both those views tend to ignore the point that while the reporting of abuse is very high, today, the abuse reported is actually weighted in the other direction. The overwhelming number of abuse cases that have become public in the last couple of years have pointed toward priests who began abusing kids in the 1950s or early 1960s. We are not (yet) seeing wholesale reports of abuse by current priests, or even priests who went through the seminary after the 1960s. Certainly, there are younger priests who are being caught in abusing situations (and we may discover more current ones in future years), but the scandals that are rocking the church, today, generally had their origins prior to Vatican II. (Geoghan, for example, was ordained in early 1962.)
There was a famous chain of reformatory schools (or whatever you call them - jails for little boys) in Scotland, run by the Brothers Something or other.
Anyway stories of horrific (often positively infernal) abuses started coming out a little while back, and more and more people came forward. Two of the survivors actually go to our housegroup, which might go some way to demonstrating how widespread the experiences were.
One of them told us about it one night. Awful. He escaped and lived rough for several months - at 10 - rather than go back.
Sinead was protesting the whole thing really but at the time it was starting to hit the fan in Ireland. This was a very hot topic in Ireland and Sinead was just voicing her anger in a typically Sinead way. She’s a “priest” now BTW.
There have been too many cases to count now and I think proportionally Ireland is by far the country with the most cases, at least that’s what I’ve heard on programs about the subject. We’ve had a government fall over this and decades of sickening revelations of physical and sexual abuse.
Catholic priests also have systematically abused nuns. That happened both inside and outside of the US IIRC. The pope apologized for that one not too long ago.
I remember finding a site of an abuse victim descibing how she had become a nun at a young age, was shipped to a country that did not speak English and then repeatedly raped by priests because it was better they have sex with her than go to a prostitute and get AIDS. She told her tale of escaping and finally making her way back to America after years of abuse, and back to Christianity through a protestant church. She now goes around telling her tale to protestant groups about the abuses of the church and the glory that is Jesus.
When I first found that site, I asked a Catholic friend what he thought of her tale. He read it, and said “Well, I am sure she believes her story. Sad really.” He did not think that it had really happened to her. Then the pope apologizes.
One of the reasons that you hear more about the Catholic Church and their abusive priests than you do about protestants is that there are more independant protestant congregations. They don’t have the option of sending problem preachers away in many cases, and even if abuse is discovered, all it shows is this minister abused his position, not that whole denomination conspired to silence abusers and allow this abuse to continue, which is how the situation with the RCC looks. I am sure my friend did not have anything against that nun, women in general, or abuse victims, but given the choice of believing some branches of his church were involved in the systematic sexual abuse of anyone, and believing that anyone who came forth with such allegations is a crackpot, well he decided that she was a crackpot.
Even now, the RCC thinks that the policies removing priests after allegations or even proof of abuse is too harsh. At its core, the RCC believes in forgiveness and the pope is not about to endorse any policy that permit some kind of second chance.
I was raised Catholic. When we moved to Crown Point, IN, there was a priest there. He had his faults but didn’t seem like the perv type. Just last year he admitted having abused a very young child in the late 60s. So he had been carrying this secret for 12 or more years even before we knew him. He was defrocked. Sad stuff.
The percentages of priests that have been involved in these sex scandals are absolutely enormous. In fact, I really believe it’s time to liquidate the Catholic Church. thread
I wonder what your thoughts are on the following:
How much abuse was there before WWII? Before the 20th century? My guess is that this is not a new problem.
How many priests were basically gay before WWII? Before the 20th century? I am not implying that gay priests are more likely to be abusers. But I do think they were more likely to use the Church as a cover for their homosexuality, which was not socially acceptable. What isn’t good is hypocrisy: telling people not to have sex, not to use contraception, not to masturbate–then going and having sex with a man, which is no-no in the Church. Again, I doubt that this is a new thing.
My respect for my former religion, or at least the hierarchy: zero.
