Are gay priests to blame?

Are gay priests to blame?
David France, who wrote the definitive investigation of the Catholic Church’s sex scandal, argues that the Vatican’s homophobia drove many gay priests to abuse youths
By Bruce C. Steele
An abridged version of this interview appeared in The Advocate, April 13, 2004

It’s easy to dismiss the child abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church as having little to do with gay people because pedophiles and mature gay men are not the same thing. Right?

David France, the openly gay author of the just-published Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal (Broadway Books), says it’s not that easy. In his exhaustively reported and intensely emotional narrative, France reveals that many of the accused priests—numbering 4,392 since 1950, according to an independent report released in February—are clearly gay men.

True, he notes, a shocking number of the abusers are villains without a clear sexual orientation, like the giggling pedophile Father John Geoghan. But many are fallen heroes, like Father George “Spags” Spagnolia, a social activist who briefly left the priesthood to run a guesthouse on Cape Cod, Mass., with his male partner, or Father John Shanley, a groundbreaking gay activist priest whom France suggests may not be as black a villain as he’s been painted.

The Advocate spoke to France just days before Showtime announced that it would make a cable-TV movie based on Our Fathers. That will be the second Showtime film inspired by France’s reporting; the award-winning Soldier’s Girl began as a New York Times Magazine article that France wrote.

After The Advocate ran a news brief on our Web site about the murder of convicted pedophile priest John Geoghan—who was killed in prison by a serial murderer of gay men—a reader wrote to caution us against buying into the negative stereotype that links pedophilia to gay men. How would you have responded to that?
I would respond by overstating the thesis that this is all about sexuality—every aspect of the crisis has been about homosexuality. John Geoghan was killed [because his killer believed] he was gay. He was a pedophile, and pedophilia and homosexuality are not at all related—we know statistically that gay men are less likely to be pedophiles than straight men—but the sex crisis in the church hasn’t been about pedophilia. It has been about priests attacking older kids. John Geoghan also attacked older kids—

He was a free-form pedophile: He had molested children of very young age as well as teenagers. Yes, certainly he’s unique in all the cases that I followed in that he was able to move from pedophilia to this other kind of teenage transfixion—

Sexual attraction to adolescents—what you call ephebophilia?
Ephebophilia—some 85 to 90% of all the cases of priests and abuse had to do with teenagers, mostly teenage boys.

So we’re talking between 13 and 17.
And 18 and 19, yes. What we find typically is that the priests would begin with a kid of 14 or 15 and then keep molesting him for years until the kids got old enough either to say no in a forceful way or to leave. A lot of these cases we’ve heard about are young men who weren’t able to stop their priests attentions until they left for college, moved out of town, or became such alcoholics or hooligans that even the priests wouldn’t go anywhere near them.

Your answer about Geoghan is the same answer I gave the reader: Whatever you think about Geoghan, he never seemed to even qualify as having a sexual orientation other than “pedophile.” But it’s clear he was killed by somebody who had a violent aversion to gay men, and that was why we covered his murder in the first place. Geoghan may have been set up to be confronted by this homicidal homophobe, which speaks to exactly what the reader was telling us: Whoever had something against Geoghan was conflating pedophilia and homosexuality. Someone may have figured if he was molesting boys and he was gay, this other guy would take care of him.
I think my knee-jerk reaction to the crisis has been the same [as the reader’s]: This has nothing to do with homosexuals. But we now know from talking to these priests [who molested teenagers]: They are gay, and the right wing knows it, and if we don’t own up to those among them who are gay and who did this, then nobody is going to buy our argument that the pedophiles [are not gay]. They’re going to see all [these priests] as the same ball of wax, they’re going to roll us in with them, and that’s doing us a disservice. They know we’re not making sense of this. We have to figure out if indeed 85% to 90% of these abusive priests—and there were thousands from this generation of priests—were gay men assaulting kids against the kids’ will, having nonconsensual sex with teenage boys. We should ask ourselves why that was happening, who these guys are, what created that, and what circumstances led them into that kind of behavior. We know it’s behavior they regret. But we also know it’s distorted behavior.What caused it?

I’m still not really clear on why we as gay people shouldn’t continue to make a distinction between gay priests who are having sex with minor boys—whatever their ages—and gay priests who limit themselves to consentual behavior with people above the age of 18. Why is it a bad thing to make that distinction?
Because what we’re saying is that they’re not gay [if they’re having sex with minor boys]. And that’s just wrong. You can say that about the pedophiles [who are having sex with prepubescent children]. Even within the priesthood, even within this festival of abuse from this period of time, we can say that molestation of prepubescent children was carried out by men who fall into the ordinary category of pedophile. That is, they’re neither heterosexual nor homosexual in their sexual interests—they move back and forth between the cherubic girl and the cherubic boy without discernment. What happened with the ephebophile category of priests is something altogether different and something we can learn a lot from.

So what do you think caused it?
What I argue is that these guys represent homosexuality in pure and total repression. This is what successful repression looks like, and it isn’t very pretty.

Right.
It looks like men who are so alienated from their own sense of self, from their own knowledge of self, that their sexual expression comes out in these explosive ways. I quoted a series of gay priests who were unable to come out until they were in their late 60s as describing what their lives were like when they were still in the closet…I’ve got it right here, page 385.

I think it was Larry Kramer who once said that homosexuals are the only minority born into the enemy camp, and then you’re left there to discern who you are. And what you first realize is that you’re told that you are wrong and everybody else is right. I think this has happened to all of us who have come out: We’ve realized that everybody else is wrong and we’re right. It takes such fortitude of character to get there. I don’t think we really know what it takes or how we do it. I was reading a story about the Del Martin and Phylis Lyon’s marriage in today’s Los Angeles Times. Phylis Lyon said, “Sometimes I wonder how we ever came out at all, how we ever figured any of this out. But we did.” It never occurred to me that not all of us did, that maybe there are those of us who aren’t brave enough or creative enough or strong enough to know who we are, to say finally that they’re wrong and we’re right. That’s how these priests are: They are those of us who didn’t get away, who didn’t see who they were.

One priest I was talking to, Father John Whipple from Cocoa Beach, Fla., spent his career in a boys school as an educator, [which] he described without being very specific. It was so pivotal to me when he said, “Homosexuality, even if you don’t know you’re a homosexual, has a way of coming out sideways. Because you’re not dealing with it straight on, you deal with it in weird and strange ways.” He said, “It can be in the form of wrestling with boys, immature behavior, touching.” So I asked him, “Did you touch?” And he said he didn’t want to talk about it. But then if I did an honest reassessment of my own childhood, I would realize that I was trying to come out in those ways before it was conscious; it was subconscious.

I just came back from Nigeria—I spent a month there in the fall doing a story about women under [Islamic] law in northern Nigeria—and in the papers there were stories every day of men being convicted of sodomy, which is a capital offense in Nigeria. I tried to get somebody in the human rights community to say something about it, like, “Why aren’t they talking about this?” and they said, “Look at the ages of the boys these men are having sex with. They’re 13 to 15 years old, and that’s illegal—they can’t be doing that.” And I think the repression there is equally uniform and solid and limiting to people [as it was in the Catholic Church], so they can’t even imagine a future in which they’ve acknowledged their homosexuality. So it “pops out” in those ways.

Now, why teenagers? Because you can get away with it. Because you can manipulate a teenager. Because they are weaker than you are. Most priests that I talked to who had abused kids described the abuse as though it came upon them with the same kind of sudden surprise that it came upon their victims. One priest, Father Neil Conway, described waking up—that’s the way he described it—in the middle of sexually fondling these kids. He really believed that he was the victim somehow, even though you have to see honestly that he created the circumstances [that led to the abuse], that he courted these kids, that he flirted with them, that he really behaved as a predator. But he couldn’t see it; he was so fractured in his psyche. He was as horrified as the child was. That’s repression in its purest form.

You talk about this as being specific to a generation of gay priests. Your book starts in the late 1950s and early 1960s when a lot of these priests were in seminary. It was before Stonewall. But the abuse happened for the most part in the ’70s and ’80s. Did it stop in the ’90s?
I believe that it has stopped. I believe that it stopped more or less in the mid ’80s because there’s a sharp bell curve from the early ’60s to the mid ’80s—one generation of priests. I think it stopped because this was a particularly disordered generation of priests. By the mid ’80s they were entering the end of their sexual peak, so I think we had wilting testosterone to thank for the tapering off of their behavior.

But the Roman Catholic Church realized it had a problem with this generation of priests early on, in 1962 or 1963. They didn’t know what to do with it. They commissioned large-scale psychological examinations of priests in the United States and Denmark and other places. They were trying to understand what the hell was going on. They knew that their priests were markedly immature, less developed in psychosexual ways than any other population ever put under a magnifying glass. They just didn’t know what to do with it. It wasn’t until the ’70s and early ’80s that they started realizing how many gay men they had in the priesthood. It was something they knew but didn’t want to address; they didn’t know how to address it. At least since the late ’60s homosexuality has been a target of grave concern by Rome. The Vatican began [imposing] newer and tighter restrictions on homosexual behavior and homosexual identity in the late ’60s for the first time in 400 years. It had been a subject that lay untouched for that period of time. In 1985 they decided that it was important to talk to priests specifically about their struggles with sexual outbursts and their efforts to maintain their vows of celibacy. They also finally promulgated a rule in 1985 that said that [an orientation toward] homosexuality itself was not a sin, so that’s when they made their original distinction between the sin and the sinner—that a homosexual was a naturally created human being but the sexual activity was a reflection of evil and a mortal sin. So for the first time they allowed the homosexual priest to accept who he was—and in doing that it really took a little bit of steam off the top of that pressure cooker, and it eliminated the problem.

I think the problem was solved. They acknowledged openly that they had a large gay priesthood—at least a third of the priests were gay at the time, maybe as many as half—and they said, “Well, that’s fine, but these guys are not disordered in and of themselves. It’s not an intrinsic problem unless they do something about it.” It’s still splitting hairs, and to those of us on the outside it seems like a distinction without teeth, but for these guys, for the priests of this gay priesthood, it made all the difference in the world.

The notion of a sexual orientation that is homosexual is unique to this century and for the most part in public discussion after World War II. Before that and certainly within the Catholic Church there were homosexual acts, but there were not homosexuals—and obviously a lot of far-right religious people still believe that.
I take pains to say that in the 1950s the Catholic Church wasn’t especially out of step with the rest of society on the whole question of homosexuality. It was only as modern sexual ethics and morality began defining themselves in the ’60s that the church moved in the other direction—and in doing so it was really tearing at the psyche especially of the gay priests but also the heterosexual ones. Celibacy as a requirement has proved to be very dangerous and disastrous for the priesthood, especially in the West, but we see it throughout the Roman Catholic empire.

Why now? The Catholic Church has 2,000 years of history, and in the last few hundred years they’ve required celibacy of their priests. One has to assume there have always been homosexually inclined priests among them, so why the spike of homosexual acting out on teenagers in the ’60s and ’70s?
It has always happened, we know that, but not at the same incidence rate. There are periods in history when it happened more epidemically, similar to this period. I didn’t study those periods, and I know very little about them except the language that was being adopted in various canons in church law that seemed to be suggesting—at least from the year 400—that they would have periods every few hundred years where there was an explosion of priests who were assaulting young boys. There have to be cultural and psychological explanations for those incidents too. In this case, what I argue is that there are several forces. This is the last of the priests that entered seminary at 12 and 13 years old. They entered seminary in the ’50s, which was a time of great repression in American society. Seminaries were cloistered places. The seminarians weren’t allowed to talk to one another; they practiced something they called “grand silence,” meaning they existed in silence in prayer and in study for years—for [as long as] 15 years of seminary studies. They weren’t allowed off campus unless they had some pressing need to see a doctor or something, and then they couldn’t go alone. They had to go with another seminarian, and they had to clock out and clock back in. Everything was prescribed. They couldn’t visit other seminarians in their rooms; they couldn’t have what they called “particular friendships,” meaning they couldn’t bond with another kid. They couldn’t read newspapers or magazines or watch TV or listen to music or the radio. News digests were posted once a week on communal bulletin boards. It was a very strange place, and they came out in the ’60s as ordained priests having gone through what we now recognize as a period of great infantilizing of these guys. Then they’re popped out into a culture in great transition—sex, drugs, and rock and roll; the dawn of gay liberation—and it’s a very confusing time for them.

The next thing that happened was a huge exodus of guys from the priesthood—a third of the priests left, almost all of them straight, almost all of them marrying some nun or organist from their church within the first year. They left behind an unacknowledged gay priesthood. But [the church] didn’t talk about it, and they didn’t know what to make of it. The priests didn’t know what to make of it, and they had no language for conversing among themselves. It was really these eight or 10 or 15 things that had to happen, I argue, for this kind of massive dissociation. Some really disastrous things were done to these priests. Maybe there are similar powerful epicenters like that throughout time.

So for gay priests before World War II who may have been in the same seminary environment, because the environment in which they emerged was still sufficiently repressive, they had more capability of controlling their outbursts of sexual behavior?
The final part is this is that Rome came up with a series of proclamations on the description of human sexuality beginning in 1973 in which they redefine the battle of the Roman Catholic Church against the incursion of homosexuality. So it’s not just theology. These are marching orders for priests; they’re telling this increasingly gay priesthood that they are to battle [against] human sexuality, particularly this disordered and sinful—mortally sinful—and evil expression of human sexuality, homosexual sex. So they’re really making an army of antigay gay priests, requiring them to turn on their own psyches and then requiring them to turn on their own community. Just as people are just starting to pop out of the closet in the ’60 and ’70s, just as the gay lib movement was taking hold, the Vatican is trying to build a wall against that in the United States—but the wall itself was largely gay.

One of the interesting things that you described, although it happened a couple years ago, was when the Vatican issued a proclamation involving homosexuality and required all priests to read it from the pulpit—including, of course, all of the unacknowledged gay priests. And they had no choice.
They’re doing that now about gay marriage. The bishops have decided that the way to regain the moral high hand in the United States today after this sexual abuse crisis in the church is to stake all they’ve got on the fight against gay marriage. And they’re putting the Knights of Columbus guards in the back [of each church] to make sure that the priests do it. They make sure that each priest passes out a petition to the parish and make sure that everyone in the parish signs on to the war against gay marriage. You can’t even imagine what these [gay] priests must be thinking when they do it. I’ve tried to get them to talk to me about it, and many priests have said to me, “Well, I’ve refused to do it.” But I don’t know that they can [refuse] without coming out. They’re so afraid. If the statistics are right and if there are, say, 15,000 to 25,000 gay priests in America, [among those assigned to] parishes there’s not a single out priest who’s willing to stand in front of the parish and say, “I am a gay priest. I am a celibate gay priest, but I’m a gay priest.” They just don’t exist. If they have a parish, which is the ultimate goal of most priests, they don’t say it because they are sure they’ll get kicked out of that church.

So it sounds like priests today are just as repressed as priests in the ’60s and ’70s. Why do you think they know who they are?
They know they’re gay priests. Even if they learned it not from their own sexual experimentation, even if they learned it from Will & Grace, they know who they are, they know what homosexuality is, and they know their church is wrong in its teachings [about] homosexuality.

There’s a concern that since the crisis broke, the Vatican [is becoming even more repressive on gay issues]—especially the office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. That’s the old Inquisition office; they’re the people who try to keep Catholicism Catholic. It’s run by Cardinal Ratsinger—one of our big problems; [he’s] a true crusader. They’ve been working on a document in which they intend to bar the ordination of homosexuals. In fact, according to the language that’s been leaked—no one’s seen the document—they intend to say that any gay man who was ordained was not rightfully ordained, therefore the ordination itself never took place, or at least it wasn’t the sacramental ordination. Which would be a great problem; it would mean that every marriage those people presided over wasn’t a sacramental marriage, and every confession wasn’t a sacramental confession. I don’t know how they could say it or how they could do that; it’s going to be an interesting mess.

We know of the conversation that’s keeping a lot of openly gay or integrated gay men from joining the seminary. Reports from the various seminaries around the country suggest that the people who are signing up now as new students in seminaries are much more antigay than previous students in previous years—much more conservative on all matters of sexual conduct and sexual morality, much more likely to believe wholeheartedly that a condom can’t be used even to prevent the spread of HIV, and most likely be intolerant of any sort of dissent within the church. So, ironically, at the end of this sex abuse crisis we might be heading back to a period that resembles the period in the priesthood that created the problem in the first place.

From what you’re saying there are likely to be fewer gay priests.
One thing I looked and looked for was any sort of study that would help us understand why gay men and lesbians seem to be proportionally more drawn to religion and positions of leadership in religion [than heterosexuals]. We know it historically and we know it anecdotally. But why is that?

Don’t you suggest in your book—again, anecdotally—that the reason is to escape questions of sexuality?
Not for this generation. I don’t suggest that at all. This generation entered the priesthood so young that they were really unaware of their own sexual orientation. The 12-year-olds in today’s culture may be full of knowledge of themselves and have an identity, but 12-year-olds from the 1950s didn’t.

But how does that explain a higher proportion of gay men in the priesthood?
You’re suggesting that it’s a conscious decision made by gay men and lesbians to go into the ministry.

No, I’m suggesting that if you’re uncomfortable dealing with questions of your sexuality, whether conscious or unconscious, that going into the priesthood—even in the ’50s and ’60s—could be a choice, because you’re going into an institution where you don’t necessarily have to make a conscious decision about your sexuality. You become a priest, then you don’t have to worry about it because you have to be celibate anyway.
That sounds like a logical argument, and it feels very right. The Catholic Church tells all gay men they can’t have sex, and all lesbians. So that’s a punishment that you turn into a positive thing by saying, “Well, I’m not having sex because I’m declaring my celibacy for the priesthood.” But in my reporting in each of the cases—and I followed most of the major cases throughout the country over the last two years—I don’t believe that there is a conscious decision to avoid sex by joining the priesthood. I think the original impulse to join the priesthood was a spiritual impulse. What I was looking for was some sort of neurobiological data that might tell us why gay women and men might be more attuned to that spiritual impulse—because my instinct is that [they are].

Along the same lines we think gay men and lesbians might be more attuned to creative impulses, thus explaining the high percentage in the entertainment industry.
Maybe. We’ve never really looked at that. We know it anecdotally again, and we know it by census analysis, but I’d like someone to do the neurobiological stuff—the real work to figure out who gay people are, which no one has done and I don’t think anyone is working on now.

Once they got [into the priesthood], I think they saw the value of the additional barriers to their sexual expression. They developed a sense of their sexuality, which for the most part didn’t come until after ordination. This one priest whose story I tell, Father George Spagnolia—

He’s the most interesting priest in the book.
He’s so instructive to us on what human sexuality is all about. He joined the priesthood innocent of sexual issues. He was very young; he had never in his life masturbated. His church told him not to, so he didn’t. The Saturday after his ordination—[priests are] 26 to 28 years old at this point—he heard confession for the first time. Prior to this [seminarians] were always the confessors. Now they’re the people who are hearing the confessions. Father Spagnolia told me he had never heard such sexual pornography as he heard that day; things he had never thought of before, ideas that had never entered his mind. He was stunned and horrified to think that this was the way the rest of the human race was comporting itself. He told me that during his career—and he’s in his 60s now—no one ever confessed a lack of charity towards their neighbors. It was always sex.

You get back what you give out, and the Catholic Church spends a lot time giving out about sexuality. Absolutely.

Not a lot of time giving out about charity towards your neighbors.
It really wasn’t until then that sexual thoughts entered his mind. This is a man in his late 20s who has never thought about sex, much less sexual orientation. He told me—I don’t think it made the final cut of the book—that he went home that night and masturbated for the first time in his life after hearing confession. I think that’s every Catholic’s nightmare to think of, but it makes such sense. He’s a guy who had lived a cloistered life, and the day he comes out of his cloister he gets assaulted with six hours of confession. Confession in the old days, before the sacrament bit the dust. It was a six-hour affair for most priests. It drove them nuts. It drove him nuts his entire time as a priest.

But Spags went on to become a remarkable social activist who dedicated every bit of his life every chance he got to helping those less fortunate, doing what he really thought was the real work of the church—to the point that the church drove him out of the priesthood for being too radical. And at that point, when he’s no longer a priest, that’s when he figures out he’s gay.
He fell in love.

And lived in a normal relationship, a pseudo-marriage, for years with his boyfriend. They ran a bed and breakfast in Provincetown, and when the relationship fell apart it caused him to rethink his relationships and love and sex, and he decided that it wasn’t all it was made out to be. Maybe that wasn’t his big goal. Maybe what he really wanted to do was go back and fight the good fight, to go back to being a priest or rejoining the priesthood.
That struggle, that experimentation, was really fascinating. But when he goes back to the priesthood he gets rid of all that other stuff. He gets rid of the memory of the relationship.

To the point that he goes on the record at a press conference saying that he’s always been celibate, which his ex-lover angrily denied.
It doesn’t even cross his mind [that he had broken his vow of celibacy], and he begins telling what are essentially lies. There’s no other way to describe them except to call them lies. He told people freely and voluntarily that the entire time he had been away from the priesthood he had remained celibate. There was no need for him to do that; he just offered it up. It was the truth as he then understood it. Repression, phase 2. And there he was until he was discovered.

But he was discovered because someone made an accusation that he had made inappropriate advances against a teenage boy.
Right.

An accusation which, it’s suggested in your book, is probably not true.
I draw no conclusion. He argues that it’s not true. There are problems with the allegation, [but] it has never been challenged and he’s never been allowed to defend himself. He has been asking for the right to defend himself, and he asked in a very public way [immediately after being accused]. He called a press conference that was broadcast on CSPAN. He was the first priest in the crisis as it was blowing up in Boston to deny it [publicly]. And his parishioners were ready to believe him—they rallied to his support, and he stood up and said, “I didn’t touch this boy. It’s an outrageous charge. I want to be able to defend myself against it. I’ve lived a moral life; my entire life has been moral. I became a priest for all the right reasons; I left the priesthood for all the right reasons; I maintained my celibacy throughout [my life]”—there it was, on live television. His ex-boyfriend saw it. I wish that man had spoken to me because I wanted to know what motivated him to do it: Instead of calling up his former lover, with whom he had lived for years, he called the press and said, “He’s lying about that. And if he’s lying about that, maybe he’s lying about that kid.”

Which is a conclusion that is easy to make.
Correct. Although in this particular case there was only one accuser.

One kid.
Yeah, and there have never been any other accusers against “Spags,” as he calls himself. He’s such a colorful character.

I don’t recall any other priest in your book who had only one accuser.
Right. It’s highly unusual, especially in the last few years when it has been all over the papers. There have been so many accusations that no one can tell any more which of them were even credible.

Spags is fascinating. Where is he now?
He’s still trying to get his day in court. The kid didn’t sue him, didn’t go to the cops. There were no criminal charges against him. The kid went to Spags’s bosses and the chancellor and told them. He just wanted people to know.

I believe that he believes that it happened to him. I don’t think that there is any kind of venal effort of retribution. We have to look at all these cases—there have been tens of thousands that have popped up in the papers and in the courts over the last few years—and assume that some of them are “me too” cases rooted less in the truth of what happened than in some other reality.

Representing the very opposite of repression is Paul Shanley, who is the only accused priest that The Advocate has spent time profiling because of his long history in the ’60s and ’70s essentially as a gay activist. Whether or not he was openly gay seems debatable—he was openly gay with some people but perhaps not publicly openly gay. Here’s a man who ministered openly to gay people and defied the church over its teaching on homosexuality. And to some degree he was open—or at least suggestive—about his own lack of celibacy. And then he ends up accused by two different sets of people: the people who claimed he coerced them into sexual relationships who were over the age of consent, and then the two or three boys—all from one posting in the many postings that he had in the Catholic Church—who say that he molested them when they were quite young and for years. I realize you don’t draw conclusions in your book, but there are obviously people you spoke to—including Shanley’s own niece—who think those things never happened. But those boys, even from the presentation in your book, seem to believe it completely.
Paul Shanley was a hero, the first Roman Catholic priest to say anything positive about gay people. And not just once or twice; he made it his career. He was traveling across the country in the early ’70s, organizing conferences, speaking at the founding conference for Dignity [the organization of gay Catholics]. He was the spirit of gay rebellion: a dashingly handsome priest with a sharp tongue and no patience whatsoever with anyone who would not accept his completely liberationist view of homosexuality.

For many years during the ’70s he also ran a kind of counseling service. He took out ads in gay papers in Boston. Kids would come to him and talk about their struggles with homosexuality. His ads would say, “Gay? Bi? Confused? Call Father Paul.” And these kids would come and say, “I think I might be gay, and it’s just destroying me because of what my church says.” He’d go on and on about how they should forget the church [on that issue]. And invariably he would make a proposal: “Well, let’s try it and see if you like it.” He saw himself as a self-styled sexual liberationist.

He appointed himself the Masters and Johnson of the Catholic Church—an early sex surrogate.
So he would have sex with these men—perfunctory sex, which a lot of them are still angry about. And this is sex that, if he were a therapist in any other setting, would open him up to lawsuits and certainly cost him his license to practice. It may even have crossed legal boundaries with criminal law. I’m not arguing that what he was doing was in any way right or good, but it wasn’t pedophilia, and the boys he was having sex with were the age of consent and older. Now, were they consenting? Big question—we don’t know. They argue in many of the suits that they weren’t consenting at all, that you can’t consent to having sex with a therapist or a priest in a Roman collar [whom] you go to as a Catholic looking for counseling or making confession. But I also include stories in the book of men who went to him for counseling and sex and were thankful for both in the end.

The suits that were generated around Paul Shanley mostly involved these sorts of cases—until Shanley became the most notorious priest of Boston. That’s when the pedophilia charges came up. Three young men, now in their mid 20s, were all in the same education classes with him [when they were age 6 to 10]. Each of them has come to their memories of this abuse through very similar roots. They all say that they hadn’t recalled the abuse. We see a paper trail of [their previous] denial of sexual molestation, at least on the part of one of them, whose therapist had been asking him over the years, “Are you sure nobody touched you? Nobody really touched you?” The therapist was so concerned about why [this young man] was having emotional problems that he thought it could be caused by nothing other than sexual abuse. After years of this hammering, Father Paul Shanley’s name appears in the paper, so [the young man] accepted that that’s what happened to him. The details develop and clarify over time—it’s a classic recovered memory. I think that in this case there’s a lot to be suspicious of.

And all three of these boys—the only three to accuse Shanley of pedophilia—are from the same very specific religious education class that Shanley taught.
He didn’t teach it. It was taught by moms.

Right. He was somehow present in this class, but all the mothers were there too.
Mothers were there. He argues in his defense, “Look, if I were to take the kids’ stories, they add up to an almost wholly unbelievable series of allegations.” The accusation is that the priest came to the class every week and took them out in threes, scattered them around the schoolyard and the church, played strip poker with one here while the other one was in the bathroom, went and raped—anally raped—the one in the bathroom, [then raped] the one he had stashed behind the altar and sexually had his way with him, then gathered these kids up after these violent sexual violations and returned them to class—on a weekly basis. These are hour-long classes. The logistics seem illogical.

And none of the mothers who taught the class and supervised the children remember any of this.
None of the women who taught those classes recall it. And they say in their police reports, “Well, it would have been suspicious to us if the father were removing the same three children every week and bringing them back.” And wouldn’t the children be crying? Wouldn’t the children come back in some traumatized state? To hear them tell it, they were brutally torn apart by Paul Shanley and yet showed no signs of it upon their return—if they’d ever left. It’s going to be interesting when this case goes to trial—that will be sometime this summer. He’s standing criminal charges.

How long did this allegedly continue?
It began at age 6 and ended at 10. So four years of regular, often weekly, sexual assault, often with groups. They’re going to have a lot to prove in that criminal case. And it’s very clear that the prosecutors aren’t eager or aggressive about wanting to pursue that. He was arrested over a year ago, but they’re not rushing to trial.

And he’s no longer incarcerated.
He’s out on bail. But now to come back to your very first question, here’s a guy who goes out on bail, a friend puts him up in Provincetown, and he’s picketed by the gays there. I can understand [being] very angry at the guy, but in some way he’s a product of the system that we’re all a product of, and he has wounds that we all have. He may be more self-deceptive than the rest of us. He’s certainly more messianic in his belief that what he was doing was absolutely right in these sexual encounters with teenagers, which disturbed so many, but not all, of them.

But the troubling part, the Achilles’ heel in the Paul Shanley story, is always the North American Man/Boy Love Association.
He was [supposedly] at a meeting that somehow led to the formation of NAMBLA. That’s always the glue that holds together the Paul Shanley who was the exploitative therapist with the Paul Shanley who’s the accused pedophile. It isn’t true, and I spell this out in the book: nambla was formed by a caucus of people meeting after a larger meeting that took place in Boston. The larger meeting was attended by Paul Shanley as a representative of the Roman Catholic Church. There was a representative of the Methodist Church; there were representatives of other denominations. There were legal representatives. There were leaders of the gay community. The larger meeting was about a specific legal problem in Boston that involved underage prostitutes, and there was a [smaller group] within this group that called for a caucus meeting after the conference was over. And it was [that] group of people, including Daniel Tsang, who were the founders of NAMBLA. Shanley didn’t attend that side meeting. He was quoted in a gay periodical at the time as being aggressively in defense of the sexual expressions of young people, always a dangerous line to take—it’s dangerous now; it was dangerous then—to suggest that just because you’re underage doesn’t mean you don’t have sexual agency. We don’t know whether he was quoted accurately; he has never said one way or the other. We do know the article was written by Daniel Tsang, who was a proponent of intergenerational sex, [and it] may be that that colored some of the quotes. The quotes were shocking coming from a priest, but he wasn’t advocating the molestation of children. He was advocating the sexual agency of children. And that’s what got him labeled a NAMBLA priest. But I think once you get the NAMBLA tag attached to you, there’s no getting rid of it. There’s no bigger stink than that, and he hasn’t been able to shake it.

I want to come back to the present day and have you help me through again what the Vatican is doing now, which we typically refer to as the scapegoating of gay priests. The Vatican is saying, “We wouldn’t have had this problem if there hadn’t been gay men in the priesthood.” How is that different from what you’re saying?
I say you can’t ever have a priesthood without gay folks, just as you can’t have any aspect of society without gay folks. The presence of gay men didn’t create the problem. The presence of homophobia created the problem. The frothy, hysterical escalation against homosexual expression and homosexuality and homosexual identity by the Catholic Church, beginning in the post-Stonewall era, is the sharpest description of homophobia we’ve seen in modern times. That’s what I think created the problem. It has certainly never routed the homosexuals from the priesthood. No policy saying that the homosexual doesn’t belong in the priesthood is ever going to get rid of them there—just the way we can’t get rid of gay people in the Army. People join these institutions because they believe in them. Often they join them without knowing who they are, and then only learn later that their very essence is in violation of the organization. Get rid of homophobia and we wouldn’t have this. Homophobia is also responsible for the next layer [of scandal]: When news of this abuse drifted upward to the bishops and the cardinals, they were so ashamed and embarrassed by the recognition of the existence of the homosexual in the priesthood that they decided they couldn’t let the word out, and they began the policy of the cover-up. That took the problem and metastasized it, spread it from parish to parish first and then diocese to diocese as these guys were getting more and more dissociated in their sexual expression—letting them go on in their predator lives until they reached sad old age.

So homophobia is not only behind the sexual behavior but behind the cover-up, because the Catholic Church doesn’t want to admit that homosexual behavior could take place in the context of the Catholic Church.
And they don’t want anybody thinking they’ve got homosexual priests, so they want to quell the news about it. We’ve seen case after case where the bishops have traveled to the police station and talked to the chaplain—the Catholic chaplain or the Catholic police captain—or have gone down to the courts to meet the Catholic judge. In the hierarchy of the Catholic community, nobody trumps the bishop or the cardinal. They say, “Look, we can’t let this news out. If this news got out, that somebody like this was ordained to be a Roman Catholic priest, what would the mothers think? What would the fathers think? How can we survive if people started to believe that we have these aggressive homosexuals?” They didn’t see them as disordered and disturbed and severely repressed and psychologically broken men. They thought that’s what homosexuality looked like. They thought it looked like criminal behavior because they created a world in which that was the only expression they could see. Remove that, and the problem is gone—and you could have a 100% gay priesthood, and it would be the most lovely church.

With great vestments.
Yes—everyone would dress well, and you would see a reversion to a sexually safe priesthood because in the general population we know that gay men are significantly less likely to engage in nonconsenting sexual activity with anybody—much less minors.

One of the arguments is that the policy of celibacy is partly responsible. The policy of celibacy remains, so why won’t the crisis continue? Even if we had a church for all the gay priests who know their own identity, with the policy of celibacy still in place, how can some of them not continue to act out in that way?
Today in the United States, although celibacy is the law, it’s not the norm. We don’t know the extent to which priests are sexually active in consensual ways—their partners are not bringing charges—but we know from surveys that perhaps a third of the priesthood, perhaps two thirds, depending on which survey we’re looking at, is engaged in regular adult sexual activity, often with regular sexual partners—ongoing [relationships], often involving love, often involving commitment. We hear the stories of the old priests and the old widows whom they’ve taken up with. We hear stories of middle-aged priests who’ve taken up with other middle-aged priests—and all of these things are regular occurrences within the church. Just as in the earlier years, aspects of the church’s teaching, the church magisteria, were jettisoned by Catholics, this one is being jettisoned by the current priesthood—not just in the United States but in the West. I think they just said, “We’re not going to follow that rule.”

I’m going to remind you of another quote in the book from John McNeil, who was defrocked as a priest because of his ongoing argument that homosexuality was normal within the church and that the church’s teachings on homosexuality are not only abnormal but dangerous. He has written many books about it—principally The Church and Homosexuals. He explained this to me: For this period of time, when celibacy was something that everyone was trying to practice, from his point of view the demand for chastity for heterosexual priests and homosexual priests was entirely different. They were not at all crippling, he said—a heterosexual priest’s sexual desire to reach out to a woman is considered good in itself and always a valid choice if they choose to leave the priesthood. The homosexual priest is taught that his desire to reach out to another man is evil and never an option. [Celibacy] is not a question of sacrificing good, as it is for the heterosexual; it’s repressing the evil desire. The church, he said, wants gay priests to internalize homophobia and self-hatred, and that leads to all sorts of neurotic stuff. I think that that is different now because of the encouragement and different culture that we’ve made as a community—the normalizing of homosexual love that we’ve been demonstrating or arguing for over the last three decades or so. We’ve reached [many priests who] felt their way to sexual integration.

If the church continues to hold the line as society moves forward, what happens to the church?
That’s what time is going to tell. The ordinary lay Catholic was innocently [living] the life of a faithful person prior to this sexual abuse scandal—they paid no attention to [the church] and threw money at it; [they accepted] the appointment of priests to their parish without knowing anything about the priests; they were not consulted on financial matters. They accepted that the church is a hierarchical church that exists above and beyond them. And now in large numbers they’ve begun to demand an active role in running the church. They argue that if just one lay person, if just one mother, had any responsibility for the management of personnel policies or legal policies or financial policies, none of this ever would have happened. And the church itself is saying, “Well, then you’re looking for a Protestant church, in which case you should go join a Protestant church and not drag us there.” That’s the kind of schismatic battle I think the Catholic Church finds itself in now. Will it make adjustments to these modern times and modern ethics [with] sexual civil liberties, or will it go back to a time when it relished and enjoyed its exclusive control over these ideas? Whichever way it goes, it’s going to be a changed church. If it goes back, it’s going to be changed because it’s not going to have, in Western countries, the power base [it has had]. It’s not going to have followers; it’s not going to be the Catholic Church of Catholic America. And if it goes the other way, it’s going to be leaving Rome; it’s going to be leaving the Third World, which is very concerned [about homosexuality]. It’s going to be leaving its own traditions. I think this is a crossroads as potentially devastating to the church as the Reformation. We just don’t know yet how it’s going to go.

In describing your book to people, I keep comparing it to Randy Shilts’s Conduct Unbecoming or And the Band Played On because it has the same quality of an enormous amount of reporting at the service of very human storytelling. How many priests did you talk to?
Scores. I talked and talked and talked. I didn’t know how the book was going to end because I didn’t know how the crisis was going to end—it still hasn’t ended. It wasn’t until the very end of my reporting that I stumbled on a group of sexual-abuse victims who all claim the same priest as their abuser: [the late] Father Joseph Birmingham. They called me and said, “You have to come up to Lowell, Mass., and hear our story.” I thought, If I go up there, I’m just going to hear more stories of more sexual abuse. I was feeling overburdened by this baggage that people were bringing to me. It was a time of truth-telling; it was a time of unburdening, and I became the person that people were unburdening to from all sides. I didn’t want to go up there. I didn’t want to hear more stories. Then I thought I heard a little reporter’s voice in the back of my head saying, Never say no to an interview. So I drove up to Lowell and met these guys, and I realized that they were the spine of my story, they held the story together. I knew where they had been and where they were going and their emotional journey—their journey was all emotional, from the time of their abuse in the early ’60s to the time of their legal filings. As we learn about them through the course of the book, in the end they became the sounding board for Cardinal Law. When he was at his most isolated and his circle of powerful Boston financier friends were no longer a part of his world, these guys, these survivors of abuse by Joseph Birmingham, somehow infiltrated his world and took it on themselves to try and talk the church into moving into the future by solving it’s problems from the past. Their sense of themselves, their self-knowledge—their faith, really—and who they were as human beings…

They’re not hardcore Catholics. In fact, they’ve left the church.
Not one of them goes to church anymore, but their faith—it was how they learned faith. I’m not a religious person myself, and I saw what they were expressing was a faith in humanity that their Catholic Church couldn’t acknowledge, that the human being [is] imperfect and flawed, gay and straight, married or divorced, full of hope—that’s what they tried to tell the church. That’s the message they were trying to bring to Cardinal Law. That’s why they were with Cardinal Law on the day he decided to resign. They tried to stop him from resigning. This whole behind-the-curtain story that they shared was so tremendous and so spiritual, even without the notion of the Holy Spirit or the Catholic trinity or any of that stuff. They taught me so much about humanity. I realized this story was really about those core things. It was really about love, really about hope. It was really about faith.

It was only through them that you got any kind of human side to Cardinal Law?
Absolutely, because they were willing to see it, just as they were willing to see humanity even in the priests that abused them. They found some way to forgive him, and they found a way to forgive their church. All of those emotional themes are in this book of many stories and many sadnesses; the action is all emotional, all on an emotional plane. It’s how people respond, how they learn, how they suppress and repress, and it’s all about self-knowledge. Those are the stories I focused on. Although I spoke to a ton of priests and a ton of victims and a ton of lawyers in just about every part of the country, I pared down my narrative to emotional themes. To follow [these priests] is to understand self-knowledge. If that’s not a gay theme—if that’s not the gay theme—I don’t know what is.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From the archives of The Advocate
11/11/03: The shame of father Shanley
He appeared to be a pioneer for gay liberation in the 1970s, but it seems Father Paul Shanley’s compassion was just part of a scheme to abuse vulnerable boys and young men

By John Gallagher 09/30/03: Danger behind bars
03/21/02: The Catholic Church at the crossroads
Allegations of priestly sexual abuse have opened valuable debate about the vow of celibacy. But the church remains unable to distinguish between gay priests struggling with their vows and pedophile priests molesting their flock. Will the church learn and grow from these scandals?
By Lewis Whittington

we know statistically that gay men are less likely to be pedophiles than straight men

This is simply not true.

The probabability that any given man who has sex with men is a pedophile is far higher than that for a straight.

Since there are only 2-5% of the population of the US who are homosexual, yet they account for about 30% of the pedophilia cases, then it is easy to see that truth mathematically.

The number of pedophiliac straights, since they represent 95-98% of the population, is far greater. They are heterosexual and the abuse is generally male abusing younger female for which they should be imprisoned.

God bless Cardinal Ratzinger.

Wow! Powerful and interesting report. Thanks for the post.

Will it make adjustments to these modern times and modern ethics [with] sexual civil liberties, or will it go back to a time when it relished and enjoyed its exclusive control over these ideas? Whichever way it goes, it’s going to be a changed church. If it goes back, it’s going to be changed because it’s not going to have, in Western countries, the power base [it has had]. It’s not going to have followers; it’s not going to be the Catholic Church of Catholic America. And if it goes the other way, it’s going to be leaving Rome; it’s going to be leaving the Third World, which is very concerned [about homosexuality]. It’s going to be leaving its own traditions. I think this is a crossroads as potentially devastating to the church as the Reformation. We just don’t know yet how it’s going to go.

You wrote
"I don't disagree with your factual analysis. The author of this piece is writing from a somewhat skewed vantage point but the gist and information in the article is interesting (to me, anyway) and you gotta read through the crap and make use of the useful information."

I would agree, this piece is not really useful for examining the relationship between homosexuality and abuse (it is an unbelievably biased and non-factual account). But it does give an interesting view into how at least some people with same-sex attraction tend to view the issue. The gist what I got from it is the argument that "Well, if they were abusing minors then obviously homosexuality had nothing to do with it because we choose to define homosexuality as only sex not involving minors, so there".
I was listening to a call in show a few days ago and a caller said he worked with atheists who would argue that because of suffering in the world, God could not exists. The response from the host was- excellent, you are dealing with rational atheists who deal with reason. These are people whom you can discuss, debate, and challenge. There are others who do not use reason, they simply state "There is no God because, well there just isn't" For these you can only pray- they refuse to use reason. My feeling is there are people with same sex attraction who fall into both of these camps, however for most of them it is such an emotional issue and they have arranged it at the focal point of their life, that they find it difficult to use reason to argue their point.

Thank you for posting the article. I'm not against some of the things he said until I got to this:

Remove that, and the problem is gone—and you could have a 100% gay priesthood, and it would be the most lovely church.

I don't see how anyone in their right mind could come to such a conclusion. And I'm not saying that they wouldn't be *nice*. What would such a configuration have to say to heterosexual people, even those who have a high tolerance for homosexuals?

It almost comes across that he is against heterosexuality because it is some kind of threat.

David France, who wrote the definitive investigation of the Catholic Church’s sex scandal, argues that the Vatican’s homophobia drove many gay priests to abuse youths

"Homophobia" is a leftist term. It's concocted by homosexuals to suggest that people who oppose their agenda are suffering from some mysterious psychosis.

There is no such thing as "homophobia", unless it is used to refer to someone who believes he will die if he sees a homosexual.

People who merely find homosexuality abhorrent, disordered and contrary to God's design for human life have nothing wrong with them. Make no mistake; they are perfectly normal.

Homophobia is just another term like "diversity" used to further the Leftist agenda. Wherever it is used, you can be sure you are being fed a Leftist viewpoint.

Colleen,you said you found some insights that you had not found before,can you clue me in on them? Maybe I am missing something.

My thoughts would be along the iine that I am surprised that such a strange,somewhat pointless,very prohomosexual interview was published in Catholic World News. Was there any commentary in addition to the short prefacing paragraph? The article includes every bit of informatiion that is used to further the homosexual agenda while depicting the Church as totally out of step.

Nonetheless,there were some items that need to be pursued further before any new policies are developed for recruiting and screening future candidates to the priesthood. It was particularly disturbing to learn that the Church made no mention during the formatiion period of sexuality and the power of the sexual urges that these boys would encounter as they got a little older. Somehow that struck me as being very sad,both for the boys as well as their teachers. That absence of information must have created an emptyness and/or confusion that was hard to bear. Who could they talk to? That is something that can be addressed and I think has been addressed at this time.

The positive information,connecting the abuses to homosexual priests was good and necessary. The fact that it came from this writer means they recognize it can no longer be denied. The slipping around and skipping mention of the fact that homosexual men often seduce teen aged boys,for recruitment and to satisfy the sexual longing for youth and beauty was only one of the twists and spins I noticed in the interview. It is standard m.o. for homosexuals and the priests were exhibiting the same homosexual behaviors that there compadres eshibit.

What in the world is that last paragraph about Cardinal Law and his band of supporters all about? Had you ever heard of it. And Father Birmingham's boys? Help me.

The insights I found were just insights into how the gay mind works regarding the Church, the priesthood, the excuses and the scandal. Not to mention active homosexuality itself. Of course the story is totally skewed... the author is gay, the newspaper is gay and the journalist is gay. I found the story mentioned on CWN (follow the link, it is an insightful commentary on this thread) but the origin is "The Advocate" which is a gay newspaper. I couldn't post from the Advocate as FR wouldn't allow it so I had to use the CWN address.

Perhaps the story is too local? The priest "Spags" grabbed local and I think national attention because he was all over the news - tv and print - early on in the scandal - proclaiming his innocence from the parish steps, many times, many interviews, many impassioned speeches. Turns out that he.... wasn't exactly innocent as you can see from the story I posted here.

I also found other things interesting... why teenagers were prey (although I don't think the author was entirely truthful here), why homosexuals entered the seminaries, the start of mentioning that these things were problems brewing before Vatican II, etc., etc.

I never heard anything remotely resembling the story told here about Cardinal Law. I tend to think it is bs and wishful thinking. If those guys were around it was not apparent as towards the end, there was just about 24/7 reporter coverage at the chancery gates. Until of course, we found out that Cardinal Law had actually jetted off to Rome and wasn't even in Boston!

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