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By Dr. John Corvino (Detroit, Michigan) | FIFTEEN YEARS AGO I was a candidate for the Roman Catholic priesthood. One night during a candidate retreat I was alone in a monastery rec room with a youngish priest — let's call him Fr. Jack — who was attempting to counsel me as I struggled with the difficult decision of whether to enter training that year. Fr. Jack, who seemed genuinely concerned about my emotional state, offered to give me a massage. The proposition was simultaneously strange and appealing, and I nervously accepted. He began with my back and proceeded slowly to cover virtually every inch of my body — except, notably, my genitals and buttocks. Fr. Jack then looked at me in an eager and suggestive manner and asked, "Is there any part of you that is still tense?" Quite uncomfortable at this point, I blurted, "Um, yes — my mind!" and then quickly gathered my shirt (which one of us had removed) and excused myself.
The current paedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church reminded me of this event. I do not mean to suggest that Fr. Jack was a pedophile. The massage, though sexual at some not-very-hidden level, was not tantamount to sex. More to the point, I was about eighteen years old at the time — not a child, and not incapable of granting or withholding consent. But the story involves a number of issues that have been raised, often confusedly, in discussions of the ongoing scandal: priestly sexuality; priestly homosexuality; authority, secrecy, and vulnerability.
The scandal by now is familiar to anyone paying attention. In brief, there has been a disproportionately high incidence of sexual abuse among Roman Catholic priests, and the Church hierarchy have been going to great lengths to cover it up. These things by themselves would be bad enough, but in fact it's worse: Not only have the hierarchy covered up the scandal, but they have repeatedly reassigned known pedophiles to posts which put them in contact with children. These reassignments are perhaps the most inexplicable aspect of the scandal. The paedophilia can be explained (to an extent) as a psychological disorder combined with moral weakness. The cover-up can be explained as a misguided attempt at damage-control. (To say that these two things can be explained is not to say that they should be excused — both involve culpable behavior.) But the reassignments are sheer reckless stupidity. The current priest-shortage notwithstanding, there are plenty of posts within the church that do not involve youth ministry. (Next time you're in Church, consider the ratio of blue hair to baseball caps and you'll see what I mean.) If these known pedophiles were to be reassigned at all (and that's a big "if"), why not restrict them to working with older parishioners?
The Vatican's response to this and other difficult questions has been — you guessed it — to change the subject and scapegoat gays. In a recent interview Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls contended that most of the sexual abuse cases involved teenage boys, not children, and thus did not really constitute paedophilia. He then inferred that gays must be unfit for the priesthood: "People with [homosexual] inclinations just cannot be ordained," he concluded, suggesting that ordinations of gay men should perhaps be invalidated.
Navarro-Valls' proposal, if implemented, would eliminate about half of the priests in the United States. (As a former candidate who spent a lot of time with priests and seminarians, I can confirm that this oft-repeated estimate is a reasonable one.) But does his argument for the proposal work? Even supposing (what seems likely from the reports) that the majority of the victims have been male, Navarro-Valls' conclusion doesn't follow. For the question to ask is not what percentage of sexual abusers are gays, but rather, what percentage of gays are sexual abusers. Consider an analogy: The vast majority of rapists are male. But it does not follow (and it is not true, pace Andrea Dworkin) that the vast majority of males are rapists. Thus, eliminating males from a given population would not be a fair or appropriate way of curtailing rape. Analogously, even if most sexual abusers within the priesthood were gay, it would not follow that most gays within the priesthood were sexual abusers. Eliminating gays from the priesthood would be horribly unjust to the vast majority of gay priests, who are innocent of sexual abuse and as horrified by it as the rest of us.
Thus, Navarro-Valls' point about gays is a red herring. It is one thing to be attracted to persons of the same sex; it is quite another to be inclined to abuse persons of the same sex, be they children or otherwise. Conflating these distinctions not only slanders gays, it misdirects our attention away from the real problem, which is sexual abuse. Such scapegoating is a familiar tactic, sadly, and it is morally repugnant — far more so, I would contend, than the clumsy advances of Fr. Jack when I was eighteen.
Which brings me back to the age issue. Navarro-Valls is correct that in some of the cases, pedophilia is not the real problem. (It is difficult to know the percentages, since the Church has been stubbornly uncooperative in releasing data.) There's a big difference — legally, psychologically, morally — between sex with an eight-year-old and sex with a seventeen-year-old. Cases of the latter type, which often involve seminarians and seminary candidates, may be an abuse of power and a violation of priestly vows, but they are not paedophilia.
Eliminating gays from the priesthood would, indeed, eliminate many of these latter cases. But it would also eliminate a good many decent priests, and needlessly so. For the real culprit here is not homosexuality, but rather the Church's refusal to address the issue of sexuality directly and realistically. Human beings are sexual, and priests are no exception. Celibacy is demanding, and repression and denial are not helpful in mastering it. If the Church is serious about addressing sexual misconduct, it should focus on healthy ways for its priests to manage their sexuality, which does not disappear once they take vows.
Fr. Jack is a prime example, and my memory of him reminds me of the saying "There but for the grace of God go I." Had I decided during that retreat to enter religious life, I would have done so as an eighteen-year-old with no sexual or romantic experience to speak of. I would have been thrust into an all-male environment where I would be forbidden not only to have sex but also to masturbate. And sooner or later my sexuality would have asserted itself — doubtlessly in the awkward manner characteristic of the sexually immature. Perhaps I, too, would have eventually found myself attracted to a naive and fresh-faced seminary candidate, and perhaps I too would have behaved like a creep. (For the record, I decided to enter when I was nineteen and then withdrew almost immediately, correctly believing that I needed more "life experience.") Navarro-Valls' scapegoating of gays doesn't solve such problems; it perpetuates them — while ignoring far more serious ones. It is time for the Church to worry less about protecting its image and more about protecting the people it serves.
John Corvino, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and philosophy professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. His column “The Gay Moralist” appears Fridays on 365gay.com.
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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Paedophilia is the sexual attraction to the biologically juvenile form of the human being. This is not the 'legal child', but is the 'biological child' Paedophilia is often used to mean the sexual attraction to a person under the age of consent, but that age varies worldwide, 13 in some places and 18 in others.
I think it gets started badly because of that mis-definition.
It is a given that some men abuse people who are under the age of consent. It is also a given that some women do the same thing. These are, generally, people who abuse their position of power, and the outcome is a satisfaction of misdirected sexual urges.
If one is talking about a post-pubertal child then the misdirection is social, not paedophilic. If one talks of a per-pubertal child then it is paedophilic.
Paedophilia is common enough to be a 'normal' sexual response, but is a wholly unacceptable one for many reasons, including but not limited to- Physical damage to the child
- emotional damage to the child
- reinforcement in the abuser that such acts are acceptable
- socially, the desires are misplaced
However, as we can see from Bonobos and their behaviour, paedophilia and indeed rape is a natural part of that creature's sexual behaviour.
Probably the problem is that the human is unique in being able to voice complaint about the behaviour of others, and is able to discriminate sufficiently to moralise and to do something about it.
But sexual abuse is not, usually, about sex per se, even with Bonobos. It is either to do with power and dominance (see the Bonobos again), or it is to do with giving pleasure.
To consider that pleasure giving first, I think none of us will deny that sexual stimulation is pleasurable. There is no age before which it is not pleasurable. If it were socially acceptable to give sexual pleasure to a child, and to do so selflessly, then this would be deemed to be a good behaviour. It is when, as so easily can be seen to happen, this behaviour becomes selfish, that abuse takes over. Indeed, it is abuse in many ways to take a child and to awaken sexual pleasure in it, primarily because that is usually done in order that the child wishes for more of the same. It is, after all, fun!
But it is socially unacceptable.
We have chosen to create laws and ethical codes that render it to be considered to be a bad and punishable act. And that is fine.
With some men and women sex is always a power trip. And that leads us on to consider the way they can twist things such that they will always be in the driving seat. That is easiest with a smaller, weaker, and more easily cowed person as the other party. Those are children. Children are smaller, weaker, and can be browbeaten more easily than adults.
So an attraction to a child can be created because that child has all the characteristics that the power person requires. It may also be an attraction based on many things about childhood that would take far to long to even scratch the surface of here.
Below the age of puberty a boy and a girl are physically remarkably similar. They are hairless, similarly shaped, and with immature and pretty irrelevant genitals. The child is almost androgynous. Only after puberty starts does the child become recognisably male or female. Faces alter, genitals develop, and sexual orientation demonstrates its arrival.
Men and women who abuse children under the age of puberty often, but not always, choose boys and girls with sufficient variety for the choice to be almost random. Over the age of puberty their choice tends towards but is not always congruent with their own sexual orientation. But, and this is key, in almost every case the act of sexually abusing a child is a power trip, and nothing to do with sexuality per se. Sex is involved, but not the driving force.
Now that was a lengthy preamble to answering the article's points.
"Are gays the problem?"
No.
The problem is that the clergy is in a unique position with unfettered access to young boys and girls. A priest (in any religion at all) may easily have an excuse to closet himself or herself alone with a child and may coerce that child with seemingly reasonable requests to shed clothing and to perform sexual acts.
A poor priest perceives a positon of privilege and power, and has a very real temptation to abuse the children in his or her care. Robbie Garner in his book "Nobody Came" - see http://bit.ly/2x9LZm - describes nuns who rubbed his 5, 6, 7 year old little penis with fervour in the orphanage where he was sent. This appears to have been some sort of ritual at bath time.
Couple that temptation with the undeniable fact that children flirt, even though they have no idea what outcome may be generated by flirting, and you see that a weak priest may fall into the trap of saying that the child initiated the acts, thus attempting to absolve the adult of blame and responsibility.
Children enjoy sex. I know I did at 11 or so, but that sex was a solo experience. An abuser might have seduced me had he or she known I could be seduced, but no-one attempted it. That's good. But a priest might have achieved seduction and subsequent abuse by invoking the name of a deity and showing me how this was god's design for me.
So no, the problem is not gays. Nor will removing gay priests solve the problem. Nor, I suspect, will removing celibacy from Roman Catholic priests remove the problem.
What will solve it is an acknowledgment of the problem by the management of the religious organisations and the offering up of the abusers for prosecution.
It is time that The Pope stopped protecting and hiding the paedophiles in his organisation
[Updated on: Sun, 15 November 2009 16:42]
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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Macky
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Really getting into it |
Location: USA
Registered: November 2008
Messages: 973
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Blaming the Church's failings in preventing pederasty on gays is like..real sick. My bishop was much more interested in the possibility that I could help him manage his new "big iron" computer system, than when I told him I was gay. That was a non-event during the face-to-face as well as on the personality quizzes.
What a powerful article though. Really hit home with me. Days before I was to begin seminary, after fighting with the decision until I was in my late 20s, I hit the street and met a guy ...long blond hair, blue eyes, very handsome. He was a sincere conversationalist too. We talked about my impending enrollment in seminary.
I was a staunch Catholic who was exceptionally up tight about my sexuality. Perhaps I thought that I could run away from it in the priesthood.
And this guy, was a criminal. He had done stuff like robbing trains. One time he told me a story, with a smile on his face, that almost made me throw up. To me it was obvious that he was describing a rape in which he was the assailant. He didn't seem to realize it.
We became close, can you believe it? He was a moral wreck, but in some crazy way, he was sincere and innocent too. Just like me. We had a strange affection for each other. Somehow, it became OK when he would steal orchard peaches for us, something that would normally be morally abhorrent to me. It's not that he taught me to appreciate being bad, but, for him, somehow, it didn't seem bad because there didn't seem to be any bad in his heart when he did it. Was he morally petrified, or just innocent? I don't know. If it weren't for him, however, "there for the grace of God go I", just like Fr Jack in the article. Anyway that's a different subject.
Thank you for putting up the article.
Macky
Behold, how good and how pleasant it is
For brothers to dwell together in unity!
Ps 133:1 NASB
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