ARTICLES

The Elephant in the Sacristy

A Cluster of Facts Too Enormous to Ignore.

By Mary Eberstadt

Editor: the following is the final section of a longer article printed on June 17 in the Weekly Standard. The full version is available at www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/344fsdzu.asp

"Though some dioceses do not ordain gays, chancellor Callahan said the San Diego diocese does not automatically exclude them." -- San Diego Union-Tribune, June 18, 2002 [this quote not in original Weekly Standard article]

A review of the details of the scandal cases yields three common denominators that arise in too many cases to be dismissed as incidental to the abuse. The first important fact suggested by the record so far -- and one that obviously demands definitive study as soon as possible -- is that some seminaries appear to be disproportionately represented in abuse cases. In one of the few secular discussions of this aspect of the elephant, two Boston Herald reporters examined one such seminary in some depth. Their report is worth quoting at length:

"A Herald analysis of cases of priests facing serious pedophile allegations in the state ... shows that a disproportionate percentage attended [Boston's] St. John's in the late 1950s and 1960s.... Regardless of why, the numbers are staggering, especially for certain classes. "The class of 1960 contained at least five men involved in pedophilia allegations. That's out of a class of approximately 77 graduates. Experts put the incidence of pedophilia in the general population at around 1 percent. For the St. John's graduates ordained in 1960, the figure appears to approach 7 percent -- seven times the national average for men....

Then came the class of 1968, which included six men accused of pedophilia, including Paul Mahan -- target of some of the most vile allegations. Significantly, this graduating class was far smaller than those that had passed through St. John's a decade earlier. With fewer than 50 members, the incidence of alleged pedophilia in the class rises to about 12 percent....

One student described an atmosphere of frequent experimentation. Gay students quickly identified each other, he said, and established networks that would last in some fashion until years after graduation and ordination into the priesthood....

A priest in the archdiocese who studied elsewhere but was involved in events at St. John's said the biggest concern among administrators was students who were torn between piety and banned sexual behavior. Many young men are "mixed up" at that age, the priest said, and vulnerable to exploitation by older or more sophisticated classmates.... "By the 1960s, despite sometimes iron rule in the archdiocese by Richard Cardinal Cushing, St. John's was the focus of dissent."

As this account suggests, some seminaries have been home to a highly combustible mix of ideology, rebellion, and future criminality. This aspect of the crisis has been decades in the making. How did it come to be? Perhaps one sort of rebellion breeds another. Perhaps, too -- a point that comes up anecdotally in the scandal literature-some offenders are actually made worse by contact with like-minded men. If observers like Robert Johansen are correct and the problem is already on the way to amelioration, so much the better -- that is information that both Catholics and a concerned public ought to have. Either way, the Vatican's decision to address the abuse cases in part through a review of the seminaries comes none too soon.

The second feature of the cases that arises too often to be dismissed as a coincidence is the fact that many of the offender-priests caught to date report that they were molested as minors themselves. This is hardly surprising. Clinical estimates for the rate of childhood victimization among abusers range as high as 80 percent. In other words, though not all victims of sexual abuse go on to become perpetrators, many perpetrators do seem to have started as victims. This overlooked fact of the abuse cases has profound implications, including for Catholic bishops and other policymakers now asking how such cases may be prevented in the future. From the point of view of simple deterrence, it puts a red flag over any candidate who was himself sexually seduced by an adult as a child or adolescent. Ordination, after all, is not a civil right. Screening for a history of victimization might sharply reduce the likelihood of future generations of priests becoming fodder for headlines. Put simply, if such men had been turned away from seminaries during the last several decades, the scandals in the Church as we know them would never have reached today's scale. Would screening for such victims (and admittedly, perfect truth-telling is unlikely) have the effect of discriminating against homosexually oriented men? The answer is very probably a qualified yes. This is because homosexuals as a group, according to a variety of clinical sources -- including those by gay and gay-friendly researchers-are more likely to have been sexually abused themselves than are heterosexuals.

As a simple matter of arithmetic, therefore, they might be disproportionately affected by such a standard compared to heterosexuals. But if such discrimination is the shortest cut to reducing the number of tomorrow's victims, it is hard to discern the competing moral principle on which it could be opposed.

The third and final implication of the abuse cases -- this one society-wide, to return to the pope's words -- is a corollary of the victim-turned-perpetrator phenomenon. The subject of early sexual experience and its role in future orientation needs to be allowed back into legitimate public debate.

This is, of course, a suggestion likely to be disputed by gay activists, whose ideology of "orientation" is exactly why the subject of environmental influences on sexuality has become verboten. This is not to suggest that the gay community alone holds such a view -- far from it. What is almost universally called "sexual preference" is now believed by many Americans -- including in some parts of the religious culture -- to be inborn, as fixed as such genetic markers as melanin or the pattern of one's fingerprints, and presumably just as immutable.

The facts of the ongoing priest scandals, however, challenge that view. In the end, one must believe one of two things about the offenders: Either they were born with a sexual "orientation" toward molesting children; or somehow, just maybe, the experience of being molested themselves affected their future sexual feelings. If one holds to the "orientation" view, one faces the serious problem of explaining away as "coincidence" a broadly shared experience of childhood or adolescent molestation -- one out of proportion to the general population. But if, on the other hand, sexual predators are made, not born, a currently forbidden hypothesis suggests itself: that other "sexualities," too, may be affected by experience. Today, the few researchers and clinicians who dare touch this subject are treated as professional lepers. Think only of the calumny that has come the way of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), which provides counseling to homosexual men and women who believe that sexual "orientation" is susceptible to change. Public opprobrium has also been the fate incurred by groups like Courage, a ministry to homosexuals from the perspective of traditional Catholic teaching. There is no doubt that the experience of groups like these -- similar to those of the few writers who have dared dissent from the contemporary secular articles of faith about homosexuality -- has had a chilling effect on public discussion, including discussion that could help identify, diagnose, and treat offenders in the future. And here is where a contemporary secular taboo -- that of questioning the ideology of "orientation" -- crashes head-on into the greater public good.

What the priest scandals demonstrate beyond argument is that what we need, right now, is in-depth study of the victim-to-perpetrator causal chain. We need answers to questions that, properly understood, will help prevent other boys from being preyed upon in the future-for example, why some children who are abused do not go on to become abusers themselves; why others become compulsive offenders whose victims number as high as the hundreds; and how institutions of all sorts might better screen and thwart and help the adults tempted by this profound evil. Today, however, because the ideology of "orientation" has effectively foreclosed discussion of just these issues, there is a tragically short supply of such theoretical and clinical exploration -- and likely an even shorter supply of personal will and fortitude among potential researchers. As the Journal of the American Medical Association article cited earlier noted suggestively -- in a review, recall, of the clinical literature on the sexual abuse of boys -- "No longitudinal studies examined the causal relationship between abuse and gender role or sexual orientation." There should be such studies.

Interestingly, among the proposed reforms the bishops will discuss in Dallas, one promises that "we offer to cooperate with other churches, institutions of learning, and other interested organizations in conducting a major research study in this area" -- namely, "the problem of the sexual abuse of children and young people in our society." Such information would not only be useful to the bishops and the rest of the public in contemplating the matter of deterrence. It might also shed light on human sexuality more generally.

In particular, it might help explain the prominence of the theme of man-boy seduction -- which I have documented in two essays in these pages -- in gay literature, journalism, and culture. It is now over 20 years since gay eminence grise Edmund White observed that "sex with minors" was one of two features of gay life "likely to outrage the straight community" (the other, he believed, was "sex in public places"). In the wake of the priest scandals, a few other gay voices have acknowledged just such a homosexual/heterosexual divide on the question of minors. As a writer for the Washington Blade put it with surprising candor, "These cases -- where the 'victim' lies somewhere in between childhood and adulthood, and the 'abuser' may or may not also have a gay adult sexual life -- prove far murkier than either the Catholic Church or many gay rights advocates seem willing to admit."

But no gay writer has sounded a more poignant note than the unnamed man who wrote in a letter posted on Andrew Sullivan's website -- which contribution Sullivan deserves credit for publishing: "I must disagree with your disavowal of any homosexual complicity in the Church scandal.... Until all queers are able to face the fact that we have created for ourselves a culture that values youth and beauty above all else, and to realize that this obsession creates, in at least some gay men, a deviant and abusive tendency toward sex with minors, we are doomed to continue to create victims as surely as the atrophied Church." What this letter clarifies is why public gay reaction to the scandals has been an exercise in moral dissonance. It is incoherent to excoriate the Church for its child molesters, as all leading gay newspapers have done, and simultaneously to print an interview with a gay man saying (to take an example from the Blade) that "he doesn't think the older men who had sex with him [when he was a child] were ephebophiles or predators.... 'I personally hold them completely blameless.'" It is incoherent to denounce offending priests, as just about every gay-activist and activist-friendly source has done-and meanwhile run soft-core personal stories by gay men thanking the priests who allegedly molested them as teenagers.

And finally, to take a particularly striking example of the same contradiction, it is preposterous to thunder piously against the Church, and on the other hand to hail as a "gay icon" the likes of assassinated Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn -- which is exactly what some libertarian gay writers have been insisting upon since his death. Fortuyn's writings in favor of man-boy sex, including but not limited to a column in Holland's largest newsmagazine in praise of the "vision" of a famous convicted pedophile, are a matter of public record. Nor is that record obscure. Those writings have been brought to public attention by several authors in English these last few weeks, among them National Review's Rod Dreher (twice). In fact, precisely because of his soft spot for pederasty, Fortuyn is also mentioned favorably in pro-pedophile publications.

To observe all this is not, of course, to accuse Fortuyn's admirers of sympathizing with pedophilia. But it is to emphasize that for reasons we may never fully understand, on the subject of sex with minors, the dissonance issuing from the gay community is simply deafening. What most other people call "sexual abuse," some significant part of the gay counterculture knows as "initiation." What the criminal law calls a "perpetrator," the gay counterculture calls a "troll." And what parents and the rest of the world know as a human child is dubbed in that other world with the unspeakably inhuman designation, "chicken." That dissonance, which will continue in North America even if the Catholic church is razed to the ground tomorrow, is something the bishops should not hesitate to point to as they try to prevent anything like today's crisis from happening again.

No matter what is decided in Dallas or elsewhere by the bishops and the rest of the Catholic hierarchy, some public reappraisal of homosexuality in American life seems very nearly an inevitable consequence of the Church's man-boy sex problem. In following through, we are all called to intellectual humility, and the Catholics among us to spiritual humility as well. For believing Catholics, more than any others, it makes no more sense to be "homophobic" than to be "contracepto-phobic," say, or "fornicato-phobic," or "phobic" of any other group falling short of the Church's rigorous moral demands. The Catholic church teaches compassion towards all mortals, homosexuals very much included. The Catechism, among other Church documents, emphasizes this particular call to charity: "This [homosexual] inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most a trial."

At the same time, today's ideological sensitivities must not be allowed to trump what ought to be a universal effort to protect the young. Much about human sexuality remains a mystery, and we may never know why men who abuse children do what they do. But if humility is now required of Catholics, so too is backbone. If it takes shutting down certain seminaries to protect boys of the present and future, close them now. If vocations to the priesthood should be so far reduced by stringent screening for abuse victims that American Catholics have to travel 50 miles to Mass, let them drive. And if protecting children means reopening the uncomfortable question of what makes sexual orientation, that too is a sacrifice that everyone should be willing to make. There is more than enough for all of us to do, Catholic and non-Catholic. As John Paul II said, this mission is society-wide.

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