Catholic Scandals:
A Crisis for Celibacy?
The Real Story Behind Clerical "Pedophilia"
& What It Really Means
by Leon J. Podles
The Catholic Church has been the object of much unwanted attention, some of which it has brought upon it-self. Dozens of cases involving clerical "pedophilia" have been tried in the courts, several priests have gone to jail, and various dioceses have had to pay out tens or perhaps even hundreds of millions of dollars (the exact sums are often in sealed settlements) to the victims.
There have been some high-profile cases: Bishop Symons of Palm Beach resigned after he admitted his sins with teenage boys. The archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Groer, was forced to resign after several seminarians complained that he had molested them. The diocese of Dallas had to pay out $23.5 million in a case involving Rudolph Kos. The bishop of Bayeaux is being prosecuted for not reporting to the police child molestation by one of his priests. And most recently a media storm has raged around the archdiocese of Boston since it became public that a pedophile priest, John Geoghan, was transferred from parish to parish in the 1980s, with the knowledge of the archbishop, Cardinal Law.
In view of this, a long-suffering public often wonders whether the Church would not be better off with a married clergy. Of course, the Latin tradition of clerical celibacy has been under attack for a long time for various reasons (celibacy is never exactly what one would call popular), and the latest scandals have only served to make the question more pressing in the minds of many Catholics.
True Pedophilia Is Rare
Philip Jenkins in his book Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis (Oxford University Press, 1996) tries to look at the problem objectively and dispassionately. According to Jenkins (who is not a Catholic), true pedophilia is extremely rare, is perhaps more common among Protestant clergy than among Catholic priests, and is even more common among married laymen. There is certainly a problem in the Catholic Church (and other churches), but it is not exactly what the media make it out to be.
First, as to the nature of clerical misbehavior: Pedophilia refers to sexual desire for pre-pubescent children. This is extremely rare, and only a handful of cases in several decades have involved priests who are true pedophiles.
Almost all the cases reported in the media as pedophilia actually involve an attraction (which a priest has acted on) to adolescent boys who are sexually mature but under the age of consent, which is 18 in civil law and 16 in canon law. This behavior is a variety of homosexuality. Homosexuals are often attracted to very young men because they combine the charm of boyishness with sexual maturity. Such sexual attraction is called ephebophilia, which the ancient Greeks cultivated to some extent but which rapidly fell out of favor as Christianity transformed classical culture.
In the 1960s and 1970s the Catholic Church followed secular psychological advice that sexual involvement with minors should be dealt with quietly and privately, that the youth involved were more likely to be hurt by a public fuss than by the sexual involvement, and that sexual interest in minors could be disciplined and cured.
This opinion changed in the mid-1980s, when many of the cases that had occurred from the mid-1960s onward came to light. In this period of about 20 years, about 150,000 men had served as Catholic priests and religious in the United States. There were about 500 reported (not all proved) cases of sexual involvement with minors, thus involving 0.3 percent of the clergy and religious, and most of the cases involved fifteen- to seventeen-year-old boys. Since not all allegations were substantiated, Jenkins says the evidence "suggests an offence rate of 0.2 percent." The archdiocese of Chicago did a survey of all its clergy files from the years 1951–1991, and found allegations against 2.6 percent of priests, allegations that may have been justified against 1.7 percent of them. Moreover, it found only one true case of pedophilia, which involved a priest and his small niece.
True pedophilia occurs most often within families; celibacy removes most Catholic priests from temptations of that sort. When it comes to pedophilia (not ephebophilia), clergy in churches that do not require celibacy have the same (if not worse) problems. The Catholic Church has been a target because it keeps good records, but the Episcopal Church has a comparable problem, and some of the worst cases have been in fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches—but these cases rarely receive public attention.
Jenkins also shows how the "pedophilia" cases in the Catholic Church (and the bungling way church authorities sometimes handled them) have been used by would-be church reformers as a tool to further their agenda: the end of clerical celibacy (and much else) in the Catholic Church.
Ultimately, the chief beneficiaries of this misinformation and the disorder in the Catholic Church are the secularizers who want to undermine the moral authority of religion in society. The Nazis also were great exposers of clerical scandals, and it was not because of the greater National Socialist purity of heart (both Philip Jenkins in his book and Victor Klemperer in I Will Bear Witness refer to this anti-clerical campaign).
Homosexuality Is the Problem
Second, and most important, Jenkins’s analysis indicates that the true nature of the problem in the Catholic Church is not pedophilia, but homosexuality, which can lead to sexual relations with sexually mature but underage boys.
Neither the media nor the Church have made it clear to the public that most of the abuse cases involve teenage boys, for this would focus the issue on the problems of homosexuality, a topic that is not politically correct. By not making thisclear, the media has given the impression that the Catholic Church attracts sick priests who like little children, as opposed to homosexuals who like teenage boys (not a good thing, but not as disgusting as pedophilia).
No one knows what percentage of clerics is homosexual, partially because it is not easy to define a homosexual, a modern category that contains many hidden, dubious assumptions. Is a homosexual a man who has ever felt the slightest sexual attraction to another male, or a man whose desires are largely directed to other men, or a man whose desires are exclusively directed to other men, or a man who acts on these desires, or a man who structures his personality around these desires?
Certainly an occasional homosexual desire does not make a man homosexual any more than an attraction to his secretary makes a heterosexual married man an adulterer. Temptations are often given to test the soul. What most people mean by a homosexual is a man who acts on a sexual desire for a man or whose personality is structured around that desire.
What percentage of clerics are, in fact, homosexuals in any of these senses? Donald Cozzens, the rector of the Cleveland Roman Catholic seminary, in The Changing Face of the Priesthood, quotes figures from 23 percent to 80 percent. He suspects that the priesthood has become or is rapidly becoming a gay profession, one in which heterosexuals are increasingly uncomfortable.
From my own experiences with clerical homosexuals, I suspect that the figure is well under 20 percent, although this is still 7 to 8 times the occurrence in the general population. The Vatican’s request for better screening has been ignored like everything else the Vatican says. Indeed, the guidelines put out by the American bishops clearly envision the possibility of accepting "gay" candidates if they agree to be celibate.
In the 1960s, I thought I might have a vocation, and I applied to a seminary program. Other applicants and I went through a psychological evaluation that may have been aimed at weeding out general nut cases and homosexuals. It failed on both accounts. In retrospect I would guess that a quarter of the people in the program were homosexuals or effeminate. My roommate was a homosexual, and when he approached me, I left the seminary within hours. CLICK HERE FOR FULL ARTICLE