Editors' note, August 19, 2018: Sixteen years ago Mary Eberstadt wrote the definitive piece about what was, at the time, a unique scandal in the history of the Catholic Church in America. Today that scandal has erupted anew, with revelations about priestly abuse and—again—willful blindness on the part of the American bishops in dealing with the predators in their midst. "The Elephant in the Sacristy" remains a key to understanding exactly what has happened within the Church's clerisy not just in the past, but in the present.

—JVL

***

"The abuse of the young is a grave symptom of a crisis affecting not only the church but society as a whole."

—Pope John Paul II, speech to American Cardinals, April 2002

As the American bishops gather in Dallas next week to address the continuing devastation and humiliation of the Catholic church, they could do worse than begin by meditating on a defrocked priest from that city named Rudolph Kos. One of the most notorious child abusers in recent history, Kos was, in every sense, the stuff of which today's ecclesiastical nightmares are made. Now serving a life sentence for assaults on boys of all ages whose total is presumed to number in the hundreds, he was also responsible, in 1998, for the largest settlement yet made in such a case: $119.6 million, later reduced to $31 million.

The reason why the bishops ought to bear Kos particularly in mind is that he is typical of many of the other offender-priests who populate the headlines these days. By his own account, Kos was himself abused as a child. As a teenager, he either molested or attempted to molest other, younger boys. With the help of some priest-mentors who were aware of his personal history and apparently indifferent to it, Kos then gravitated to the priesthood--specifically, to a seminary in Texas where homosexuality was apparently out of the closet. One of his teachers would go on to become a celebrated gay writer. Paul Shanley--the most notorious child abuser among the Boston area clergy--was a guest lecturer on homosexuality there. As a priest, in addition to abusing boys from teenagers down to 9 years of age, Kos was also (as he later described himself) a "gay man." Indeed, court documents show that a fellow priest once complained in a letter of the "boys and young men who stay overnight with you [Kos]."

What even this brief recitation makes clear is a cluster of facts too enormous to ignore, though many labor mightily to avert their eyes. Call it the elephant in the sacristy. One fact is that the offender was himself molested as a child or adolescent. Another is that some seminaries seem to have had more future molesters among their students than others. A third fact is that this crisis involving minors--this ongoing institutionalized horror--is almost entirely about man-boy sex. There is no outbreak of heterosexual child molestation in the American church. In the words of the late Rev. Michael Peterson, who co-founded the well-known clergy-treating St. Luke Institute, "We don't see heterosexual pedophiles at all." Put differently, it would be profoundly misleading to tell the tale of Rudolph Kos--what he was and what he did--without reference to the words "homosexual" and "gay."

Of course, as the bishops and many other savvy observers of the debate will also know, just such distortion has become commonplace--indeed, is the literary norm--in the daily renditions of what the tragedies in the Church are actually "about." The dominant view in the press right now--what might be called the "anything-but-the-elephant" theory--reads like this. Whatever the scandals may appear to be about--as it happens, man-boy sex--they are actually about something else. "It should be clear by now," as the New York Times put it in a classic formulation, "that this scandal is only incidentally about forcing sex on minors." Similarly, the New Republic: "We all know that the sexual abuse of minors is horrific; but somehow the bishops did not react with horror. That is what truly shocks." And the New Yorker: "The big shocker has been not so much the abuse itself--awful and heartbreaking though it is--as the coldly bureaucratic 'handling' of it by hierarchs like [Boston's Bernard] Law and the current archbishop of New York, Edward Cardinal Egan." And, for good measure, the New York Review of Books: "The current scandal is not a sex scandal."

Some writers do draw attention to the elephant--but only in order to dismiss it. Here is A.W. Richard Sipe, for example, a psychiatrist and former Benedictine monk who is as widely quoted as any other authority on the scandals: "It's not a gay problem; it's a problem of irresponsible sexual behavior and the violation of boundaries" (emphasis added here and below). Here is a Jesuit writing in the English Catholic magazine the Tablet: "The problem is not the abusing priests' homosexuality, but rather their immaturity and their abuse of power." Thereby has developed what might be called the cultural imperative of the scandal commentary--the proposition, as the president of the gay Catholic organization Dignity put it, that "Homosexuality has nothing to do with it."

Such strenuous, willful, and perverse denial of the obvious, repeated unceasingly on paper and airwaves and websites these last several months, has been injurious to the greater good on at least two critical counts. First, the insistence on false definitions has deflected attention from where it ought to be--i.e., on who, exactly, has been injured in all this, who has done the injuring, and how restitution might be made. Second, and what is even more dangerous, this widespread repudiation of sheer fact has been inimical to the most important mission facing the bishops and, indeed, all other Catholics. That is the responsibility of doing everything in one's power to prevent this current history, meaning the rape and abuse of innocents by Catholic priests, from ever being repeated. Insisting that things are not what they appear subverts that end, to say the least.

In what follows, therefore, I propose that we tunnel down through the diverting abstractions in which the debate has been shrouded, and then reason back upward from the level of simple fact. For in focusing precisely on the uncontested facts of cases, we do learn something potentially useful not only to the bishops as they hammer out policies for the future, but also to the victims, and possibly even the perpetrators, of this evil. In order to get there, however, we must be able to call the elephant by its name. The real problem facing the American Catholic church is that a great many boys have been seduced or forced into homosexual acts by certain priests; that these offenders appear to have been disproportionately represented in certain seminaries; and that their case histories open questions about sexuality that--verboten though they may have become--demand to be reexamined.



I.

That the Catholic church is an institution sustained of, by, and for sinners is not exactly news to anyone acquainted with human history, let alone to any Catholic or other reader of today's papers. Even so, there is something surpassingly wicked about the scandal now exploded in North America. Of all that Christianity has represented since its inception, there has been one teaching in which believers could take particular historical pride. That was the notion, virtually unique to Christianity (and Judaism), that not only were sexual relations between adults and children wrong--a proscription that puzzled and irritated the ancient pagans, as it does the pagans of today--but that this particular exploitation of innocents was an especially grievous sin. Accordingly, from the earliest Church histories to the present, penalties for the seduction of boys by men have abounded. Anyone who doubts the historical consistency of the Church's teaching here should know that the advocates of pedophilia in the world today--the outright public enthusiasts for man-boy sex--vociferously deplore the Church specifically on account of its millennia-old condemnation of the sexual exploitation of the young.

It has therefore been perverse in the extreme, at least for many ordinary Catholics, to see that one prominent public reaction to the scandals has been to blame matters not on the molesters, but--incredibly--on the non-molesting rest of the Church. This is, after all, the meaning of the widespread attack on priestly celibacy. As one writer asked in Slate with apparent hopefulness, "Does the celibacy rule turn priests into child molesters?"

There was, to put the matter delicately, more than a touch of schadenfreude in this reaction to the scandals--even some humor, albeit very, very dark. After all, it is not as if all those dissenting Catholics, lapsed Catholics, and outright anti-Catholics chastising the Church these many months had hitherto shown much enthusiasm for its teachings about sexual morality. In its way, the fact that just such critics took out after celibacy did make perfect, if surreal, sense. As First Things editor Richard John Neuhaus shrewdly observed, "The celibacy rule is so offensive to many of today's commentators, Catholic and otherwise, because it so frontally challenges the culturally entrenched dogma that human fulfillment and authenticity are impossible without sexual intercourse of one kind or another."

The nagging problem with the attack on celibacy, however, has been that it does not hold up under any sort of inspection, and this for several reasons. There is, first, the historical point that celibacy has been widely practiced by various religions over the centuries (for a representative list, see the entry on "celibacy" in the "Encyclopedia of Religion"). While the sexual molestation of minors is not unknown in that history, neither does it break out all over--as it would if current critics of celibacy vows were right about the connection between the two. Americans being less historically minded than some others, it is perhaps understandable that the point did not surface more often. But there was also, as it turned out, a pragmatic problem with the same attack. Millions of baby boomer American Catholics had direct experience of being educated and otherwise influenced by priests, and they knew from personal experience that most priests had not been turned by celibacy into moral monsters.(1)

But the biggest problem with the argument against celibacy has been that it simply affronts common sense. To argue that vows of chastity lay somehow at the root of the priest scandal is like arguing that tee-totaling causes drunkenness, or that quitting smoking will increase the risk of lung cancer. The purported causality of the thing, as Michael Novak and others patiently explained, simply could not hold. Even more illogical, if that is possible, has been the idea that allowing priests to marry would somehow reduce the kind of sexual offenses of which the scandals were made. "Right," in conservative columnist Maggie Gallagher's tart words. "As if wives are the answer to the sexual urges of men who get their kicks from adolescent boys."

When the American cardinals returned from their April meeting with the pope, bearing the news that the Vatican was not about to abandon the celibacy rule no matter how many lapsed, anti- and un-Catholics in the United States demanded it, there surfaced another purported explanation of how the scandals came to be--that they were the outcome of a "culture of secrecy" within the Church. This argument had particular force because it has been put forward by the well-known reporter and Catholic Jason Berry, whose remarkable 1992 book, "Lead Us Not into Temptation," remains the single best factual account of the forces and personalities at work in the prophetic first round of scandals over a decade ago. "The crisis in the Catholic Church," as Berry put his larger argument recently in the New York Times, "lies not with the fraction of priests who molest youngsters but in an ecclesiastical power structure that harbors pedophiles, conceals other sexual behavior patterns among its clerics, and uses strategies of duplicity and counterattack against the victims." Closely related to this argument of Berry's was a similar procedural explanation of the origins of the scandals--that they were the result of "clericalism," or undue emphasis on the privileges and prerogatives of the clerical estate.

Both charges were, and are, undeniably true in a limited sense. No doubt, shameful efforts by some Church authorities to dodge rather than comply with the criminal law have allowed priests to continue molesting when they might instead have been confined in a cell. No doubt, either, that the personal grandiosity of certain prelates has also inhibited the desire to clean Catholic house. The criticism now raining down on the American hierarchy for its negligence is largely deserved.

Even so, in the effort to understand how the crimes happened, as well as the even more pressing business of deterring them in the future, the arguments about "secrecy" and "clericalism" amount to a sideshow. For while both phenomena obviously made the sexual assault of children possible, neither secrecy nor clericalism caused the assaults in the first place. Plenty of other institutions, from the CIA to 4-H clubs, keep institutional secrets all the time, and with no visible upswing in the sexual abuse of male children as a result. It is certainly arguable that post-Vatican II Catholic America has been bounded by a three-way collusion among disobedient priests, disobedient lay people, and child-molesting clergy benefiting from general laxity--a kind of ecclesiastical Bermuda triangle in which discipline and traditional moral teachings have mysteriously disappeared. But this is hardly the problem that writers who finger Catholic "secrecy" as the main factor in the scandals have in mind.

Yet another theory that serves to evade the elephant, this one prominent in some Catholic circles as well, is the argument that what "actually" lay at the root of the scandals was something called sexual (sometimes "psychosexual") "immaturity." Referred to frequently by A.W. Richard Sipe, among others, this theory blames minor molestation not exactly on molesters themselves, but on the all-male religious communities through which they pass. "There is a structure within the Church that fosters immaturity," as Sipe put it recently on PBS. "We're boys together, and the Church supplies all that. It is a kind of adolescent attitude, and there are those who turn to adolescents because of their immaturity."

Such analysis has a strong following not only among the sophisticated secular media, but also within the American Catholic hierarchy, as the language of its scandal-managing sometimes shows. (Thus, a spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said recently that what is needed is "to assure the people that the candidates for the priesthood are suitable people, and any problems that might lead to immaturity in behavior would have been caught or addressed in seminary.")

Nevertheless, even a cursory examination of reality brings the abstractions of "immaturity" up short. There is, first, the uncomfortable fact--or what ought to be an uncomfortable fact, especially for Catholics--that the explanation from "immaturity" bears no resemblance to the language of sin and redemption. It simply medicalizes the problem, emptying the abuser's acts of moral meaning and (literally, in this case) defining deviancy down. But that is not its only limitation. Rather, the fundamental shortcoming of the "psychosexual" argument is that it does not explain what it purports to explain--namely, where the scandals came from.

For if the argument is that perpetrators are somehow "frozen" in a stage of "immaturity," the objection immediately presents itself that most 9-, 13-, even 16-year-old boys do not act the way offending priests do. Immaturity in a boy may present itself in varied ways--sibling-teasing, homework-losing, bathroom humor--but a compulsive search for adult-orchestrated homosexual esoterica is usually not among them. Child and adolescent sexual exploration, to be sure, is hardly unknown; one thinks especially of Britain's famous boarding schools. But "intergenerational sex," with its inevitable elements of adult power and coercion, is not something children gravitate toward intuitively.

The theory about "immaturity" is perhaps a useful heuristic tool for theorists. But it obscures the real-life point that priests who molest the young do not sexually or psychologically resemble typical adolescents and children in the least. The exception, of course--and this is a point to which we will return--is that of children who are themselves sexually abused. For such children, compulsive sexuality--the attempt to inflict on other, younger children what they have been forced to learn themselves--is a well-documented clinical norm. (This is true for heterosexual and homosexual abuse alike.) But the psychosexual theory, recall, is that the institutions rather than the individuals explain the abuse cases. The problem with perpetrators, however, is not that they are "immature"; the problem is that they are all too mature, they are predatory, and they are also, according to most case studies, largely unrepentant.



II.

When these sorts of substantive or quasi-substantive arguments failed to become the definitive case for what the scandals were "actually" about, another, more ideological response began circulating throughout the media. This was the argument that the "real" problem at hand was that Catholic conservatives would use the scandals as the pretext for a "witch hunt" to "purge" the Church of homosexuals. In the past several months, virtually interchangeable essays to that effect have appeared all over the American media--from mainstream newspapers and magazines to gay-activist or activist-friendly sources, including the Advocate, the Independent Gay Forum, Slate, Salon, and many more.

It is certainly true that some Catholic traditionalists--precisely because they have been unconstrained by the secular cultural imperative of evading the elephant--have been willing to point to one or another feature of it. "You cannot blame people," as Rod Dreher of National Review put it in one of his many plain-spoken contributions to the discussion, "for asking if there's something about the culture of homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood that fosters this phenomenon. . . . [I]t is not homophobic to ask." Writing from a very different corner of the Catholic world, Germain Grisez--one of the Church's leading moral theologians in the United States--has been equally blunt: "The bishops and those who speak for them," as he wrote recently, "should acknowledge honestly that most clerical sex crimes that have come to light have been seductions of adolescents and young men by homosexual priests." Other traditionalist lay Catholics have also violated the cultural imperative in their own discussions of the scandals.

One singularly fearless such examination was published well before the Boston scandal broke in January. This was an extraordinary essay called "The Gay Priest Problem," published in the magazine Catholic World Report in November 2000.(2) In it, Jesuit Paul Shaughnessy took aim in orthodox language at what he called "the ugly and indisputable facts: a disproportionately high percentage of priests is gay; a disproportionately high percentage of gay priests routinely engages in sodomy; this sodomy is frequently ignored, often tolerated, and sometimes abetted by bishops and superiors." Citing controversial Kansas City Star pieces reporting that priests were dying of AIDS at some four times the rate of the general population, Shaughnessy also drew attention to the fact that certain orders and institutions were noticeably more affected than others. (Of seven novices ordained in the Missouri Province of the Jesuit order in 1967 and 1968, for instance, he reported that "three have (to date) died of AIDS, and a fourth is an openly gay priest now working as an artist in New York.") He further noted that gay priests themselves "routinely gloat about the fact that gay bars in big cities have special 'clergy nights,' that gay resorts have set-asides for priests, and that in certain places the diocesan apparatus is controlled entirely by gays." Shaughnessy also sounded a prescient note in daring to question what he called "the dogma that the preponderance of male victims [of clerical sexual abuse] is entirely unrelated to priestly homosexuality."

Another examination of homosexuality in the clergy from a traditionalist perspective--this one also written before the recent round of scandals, but published in tandem with them--comes in the form of Michael S. Rose's newly released book "Goodbye, Good Men," a scathing polemic charging that the "lavenderization" of American seminaries has driven vocations down. Much discussed in traditional Catholic circles, and largely, though not entirely, the object of cultural omerta outside them, Rose's book outlines in part the charge that a "gay subculture" has come to flourish in many seminaries.

There are, for example, the seminaries so homosexualized that they came to be known as "Notre Flame," "Theological Closet," and the "Pink Palace." In some, says Rose, seminarians make public outings to gay bars together. In others pornography is ubiquitous. In still others, sexual access to young men is so taken for granted as a perquisite that sexual-harassment lawsuits by former seminarians long ago ceased to be remarkable. Rose also reports--as has a recent, post-scandal story in Newsweek--that the role of the heterosexual seminarian in such a world is not an enviable one. He details cases of non-sexual harassment--by disciplinary action, coercive "counseling," or social ostracism--by which "lavender" seminaries punish or exclude heterosexual men who are perceived as theological or social threats. Rose's book is more anecdotal than systematic, and more than one review has criticized his impressionistic approach. But such charges do not diminish the shock effect of such anecdotes--or their effectiveness in illuminating just how lax in various ways authorities in some seminaries have been.(3)

DESPITE THESE and other piecemeal attempts by orthodox Catholics to assay the beast, however, the fact is that it is not Church traditionalists who have been in the forefront of diagnosing and publicizing the man-boy sex scandal. In fact, if traditionalists as a whole can be said to have shared a single fault in the scandal history, it is that many of them chose to look the other way as compelling evidence emerged--starting with Jason Berry's articles for the National Catholic Reporter in the 1980s--that both active homosexuality and minor molestation were increasing among priests. To many traditionalists, no doubt, these were subjects summoning such personal repugnance that they could not be faced. Some simply refused to believe that priests had been sexually active. To others--and this reaction remains powerful still--the mere notion of airing the Church's dirty laundry in the media is unthinkable. Either way, certain evils were not seen. In the New York Review of Books, Garry Wills has taken traditionalists to task for opting over the years toward the view that the scandals were being blown out of proportion. Evident though Wills's anti-orthodox agenda may be, on this point he is right. Confronted with the horrifying facts about man-boy sex instigated by Catholic priests, many such Catholics behaved as if the explosion of sexual abuse cases were just an expression of anti-Catholic bias.

Even so, the reluctance of the orthodox to face as much proves exactly how wrong the charge of a traditionalist "purge" really is. Orthodox American Catholics, far from brandishing their torches, are in fact (exceptions already noted) coming late to what others have established. What the "purge" argument really does is to deflect attention from something much more interesting--namely, the fact that points like Shaughnessy's and Rose's have been made repeatedly over the years by other writers, including some who cannot possibly be described as ideological tools of the would-be "purgers."

One such authority is Donald B. Cozzens, whose 2000 book "The Changing Face of the Priesthood" came endorsed, among others, by Theodore Hesburgh, liberal icon and former president of Notre Dame. Cozzens--a priest, professor of theology, and former president-rector of a seminary--observed that "the need gay priests have for friendship with other gay men, and their shaping of a social life largely comprised of other homosexually oriented men, has created a gay subculture in most of the larger U.S. dioceses. A similar subculture has occurred in many of our seminaries."

Like Rose, Cozzens emphasized two other consequences of this gaying of the priesthood: the reordering of what had been masculine social life along feminized lines drawn by gossip, favoritism, and cliques; and the consequent deterrence of some unknown number of actual and potential heterosexual seminarians. "Not infrequently," Cozzens explained, "the sexual contacts and romantic unions among gay seminarians create intense and complicated webs of intrigue and jealousy leading to considerable inner conflict. Here the sexually ambiguous seminarian drawn into the gay subculture is particularly at risk. The straight seminarian, meanwhile, feels out of place and may interpret his inner destabilization as a sign that he does not have a vocation to the priesthood." Writing in the Boston Globe earlier this year, Cozzens took the opportunity to put the same point even more forcefully: "My own experience as a former seminary rector made it clear to me that the growing number of homosexually oriented priests is deterring significant numbers of Catholic men from seriously considering the priesthood. Moreover, seminary personnel face considerable challenges dealing with the tensions that develop when gay and straight men live in community."

If the example of Cozzens suggests that there is more to the concern over active homosexuality than a traditionalist witch hunt, the example of Jason Berry proves the point. Berry's treatment of the role of overtly gay priests in the scandals, as National Review contributor Stanley Kurtz has acutely observed, is "all the more striking for coming from the pen of a Catholic who would himself like to see a liberalization of the Church's sexual teachings." Moreover, Berry obviously takes pains to be charitable toward gay priests. Even so, the reporter in Berry is unable to avoid the correlation of the scandals having grown in tandem with openly and actively gay priests. His own groundbreaking work on the scandals is shot through with ambivalence about just that.

Here, for example, is Berry writing of that very uneasiness ten years ago in "Lead Us Not into Temptation":

"I felt sympathy for most of the gay priests I interviewed; I also found myself troubled by things some of them said. Of eighteen priests . . . I interviewed on a [National Catholic Reporter] assignment about clergy, only two claimed to have honored celibacy. . . . It would be irresponsible not to note that a strain of gay culture is taken up with youth love. . . . Many gay bookstores feature books celebrating man-youth (if not man-boy) sex. . . . There are also some homosexuals who are drawn to an age zone of young manhood that hovers close to the age of legal consent."

The case of Stanley Kurtz is comparable. Though he writes most frequently for National Review, Kurtz, a non-Catholic, has stated publicly that he does not believe homosexuality is a sin. Nevertheless, he has been more adamant than any other observer in connecting the dots between the priest scandals, on the one hand, and such explosive political issues as gay marriage, on the other. "The uproar over priestly sex abuse," he argues, "offers spectacular confirmation of nearly every warning ever issued by the opponents of gay marriage." The American church presents "a case in which gay sexual culture has not been tamed, but has instead dramatically subverted a venerable social institution." In defending this essay, Kurtz also linked the scandals with yet another issue of society-wide significance: gays in the military. "Surely much of the difficulty" in the Church cases, as he put it, "derives from an institutional setting in which large numbers of gay men, whatever their internal psychological state, room and travel together, and are given intimate access to young men. Gay-rights advocates have tried to pretend that, in cases like the military, such access does not matter. But it does. . . . [O]ne lesson of this scandal is that the integration of homosexual and heterosexual men in the same living areas can in fact break down 'unit cohesion,' thereby causing institutional disruption."

The idea that the crisis is being stage-managed as a traditionalist plot ought finally to be put to rest by another whistleblower who has consistently exposed and decried both the scandals and the proliferation of active homosexuality in Church life. In 1989, this Catholic complained: "Blatantly active homosexual priests are appointed, transferred and promoted. Lavender rectories and seminaries are tolerated. National networks of active homosexual priests (many of them administrators) are tolerated." The United States, this writer went on to charge, is developing "a substantially homosexual clergy, many of whom are blatantly part of the gay subculture."

The author of these and many other unminced words on the subject is no icon of Catholic traditionalists, but rather their bete noire Andrew Greeley--jet-setting Jesuit sociologist, racy novel writer, and no one's idea of a Church reactionary. Here is Greeley again, in 1990, urging the archdiocese of Chicago to "clean out the pedophiles, break up the gay cliques, tighten up the seminary, and restore the good name of the priesthood." Greeley, for one, has not hesitated to identify the elephant. In that sense, his unassailable standing as a political liberal in all other respects has likely proved invaluable. Recall the outcry that greeted Cardinal Adam Maida of Detroit in recent weeks for observing that the Church's problem was "a homosexual-type problem" and that "it is an ongoing struggle to make sure that the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men.'' Yet Maida's are milder words on the subject than many of Greeley's over the years. One can only imagine the explosion had any traditionalist recently written, as Greeley was quoted years ago saying, that "the two phenomena [of homosexuality and pedophilia] shade into one another."

If this is the stuff of a Catholic traditionalist "purge," it has acquired an unusual officer corps.



III.

This last quotation of Greeley's brings us to the most pernicious evasive maneuver of all. That is the attempt to define the problem away with the language of therapeutic expertise. Central to this effort has been the supposed distinction that, as Newsweek and a thousand other sources have put it, "The great majority of cases now before the church involve not pedophilia but 'ephebophilia,' an attraction to post-pubescent youths."

Indeed, the appeal of this pseudo-scientific distinction is one of the curious features of the scandal commentary. Social conservatives and traditionalists have embraced this distinction, as they have similarly the sociological language of author Philip Jenkins (who describes the current crisis as a "moral panic"). The attraction of this approach for traditionalists seems to be that it is marginally less damaging to the reputation of the Church if its priests are seen more as preying on teenagers than on pre-adolescents. Meanwhile, Church dissidents and gay activists have seized on it for a related reason--namely, that it is marginally less damaging to the reputation of homosexual priests if it turns out that the renegades in their ranks are having problems with teenage boys, rather than engaging in "true" pedophilia. The fact that this serves as yet another example of defining deviancy down--i.e., that ephebophilia is discussed not as a horror in its own right, but as a less-bad alternative to sex with little children--has been under-discussed, to put it mildly. In fact, of all critics and commentators, it is Wills who has best exposed the corrupt rhetorical uses of this distinction: "If 'real' pedophilia involves only the abuse of prepubescents," he writes, "that instantly reduces the number of priests who can be called pedophiles. Those who 'just' molest adolescents look less monstrous and even--somewhat--forgivable."

But there is a deeper problem than this rhetorical sleight of hand with the reliance on the pseudo-scientific ephebophile/pedophile distinction. The real problem is that the distinction is useless as a taxonomic description of most actual offenders. It does not begin to catalogue accurately the tastes of the most notorious abusers--i.e., the very people it purports to classify.

Pulling together the threads of case after case of prominent offenders proves the point. A very few abusers, of whom Boston's defrocked John J. Geoghan appears to be one, apparently found their sexual appetites limited to prepubescent children.4 But as Boston Globe reporters Michael Paulson and Thomas Farragher observed in March, "those cases [like Geoghan's], in which priests became sexually involved with multiple boys and girls who have not yet reached puberty, are actually relatively uncommon." Much more common, as anyone reading the details of cases will know, is a polymorphous pattern of abuse in which the easy therapeutic distinctions dominant in the media and the secular therapeutic worlds cease to apply. Some abusers--again, a minority--prey on boy children only, others prey on boy children and teenage boys, others still prefer teenagers and men, and some are what might be called sexually omnivorous, attracted to other gay men, teenagers, and young boys too.

Begin at the beginning, of sorts, with the notorious case that is explored at length in the opening of Jason Berry's Lead Us Not into Temptation--the case, indeed, that first put Catholic priest offenders into the headlines 15 years ago. The priest in question was Gilbert Gauthe of Louisiana, eventually sentenced to 20 years in prison for the rape and sexual abuse of more than three dozen boys. Sexually molested himself as a child, Gauthe went on to claim what may have been hundreds of boy victims as he was reassigned to one parish after another. Yet while Gauthe is frequently cited as a textbook prepubescent child molester--at times as the classic priest-pedophile--the reality is more complicated. For Gauthe's victims ranged in age from as young as 7 to as old as 15--and those are the limits gleaned only from Berry's account; the actual age span of his victims may have been wider. The point is that Gauthe did not appear to discriminate, as contemporary therapeutic language would have it, between adolescents and pre-adolescents. Frankly, and like many other offenders, Gauthe preyed on both.

Now consider the case of James Porter of Fall River, Massachusetts, who pled guilty in 1993 to the sexual abuse of more than two dozen children and is also thought to have claimed victims in the hundreds. Porter, another offender-priest who reportedly was molested as a child, attended seminary at the institution identified in Rose's book as the "Pink Palace." A clinical rarity, Porter appears to have been what can only be called pansexual. His many victims included a few young girls (the overwhelming majority of those he molested were boys). Before getting caught, moreover, Porter married and had children of his own. In fact, this pansexuality is what makes Porter's case remarkable, perhaps even singular, in the annals of priest offending, as the cases outlined below suggest.

Paul Shanley's is one case among many that belies the cut-and-dried distinctions now governing debate. Here was no textbook pedophile or ephebophile, but rather a sexually active gay man with a taste for children and adolescents too. (Shanley has written that he himself "had been sexually abused as a teenager, and later as a seminarian by a priest, a faculty member, a pastor and ironically by the predecessor of one of the two Cardinals who now debates my fate.") Just how many boys and teenagers Shanley molested may never be known, but given the years in which he was reshuffled from one place to another despite complaints, the number of each is assumed to be high. Note that word "each." To put the matter emblematically, the specific criminal charges against Shanley involve Gregory Ford, whom he is accused of raping between 1983 and 1990--in other words, over the course of seven years beginning when Ford was 6 years old. Under current therapeutic understanding, what would this pattern alone make Shanley--a pedophile when Ford is 6, and an ephebophile when he is 13?

To pose the question is to reveal its absurdity. Shanley was indeed sexually active with children, he was also sexually active with adolescents; and he moreover participated in various ways in openly gay Catholic society. To put the matter another way, while Shanley's pedophilia has never been in public doubt since his name hit the headlines--the most trumpeted fact about him is that he is thought to have been a founding member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association--his simultaneous standing in the gay community has barely been mentioned. Yet if anyone could be said to be a credentialed member of gay Catholic social and intellectual life, it would have been Shanley. He was, for example, affiliated with Dignity USA from its early days (he appears in its archives as a "major speaker" in 1975). He was also an expert speaker on the seminary circuit (not on pedophilia, of course, but on homosexuality). And he co-owned a gay resort with another gay priest.

And so the breakdown of the pedophilia/ephebophilia distinction goes. After Shanley and Geoghan, the most discussed arrested cleric in the Boston area is Ronald H. Paquin, who has admitted to having molested what the Boston Herald describes as "numerous boys," some for years on end. Currently in the headlines as a textbook case of a molesting priest repeatedly reassigned by Boston's Cardinal Law, Paquin reports that he himself was molested as a child by his own hometown priest. Some allegations against Paquin are particularly awful; he is accused by parents of bearing responsibility for one teenager's suicide, and another teenager was killed in a car Paquin was driving, allegedly upon return from one of many assignations with teenage boys. Incidentally, Paquin attended the same seminary as Paul Shanley.

Finally, consider a prominent case outside the Boston area, that of the Rev. Maurice Blackwell, who was shot in Baltimore last month by a man alleging that the priest had abused him over a three-year period. After that shooting, according to the Baltimore Sun, another man filed a police report claiming that Blackwell had also abused him as a teenager. According to a third man, Blackwell molested him from the time he was a fifth-grader "until the victim was 26 years old." These sexual encounters, the accuser said, occurred in the seminary Blackwell attended. This was the "Pink Palace." The charges against Blackwell are not proven. Church officials involuntarily removed him from his parish in 1998 because of what they call a "credible" accusation of "inappropriate activity" with a minor. Alleged victims are continuing to come forward. Blackwell, like others, is accused of preying upon boys of varying ages, up to adulthood. In sum, the standard pedophile vs. ephebophile explanation of how the scandals came to be is empirically unsound. No doubt for that reason, as Washington Post reporter Sandra G. Boodman put it in an unusually well-informed newspaper account, "experts in sexual abuse outside the Church rarely make this distinction."



IV.

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 J. 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.5 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 JAMA 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.6 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.7 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.

Footnotes:

1Of course, there was also more than a little human comedy in the fact that some of the public critics now demanding a married clergy for themselves were just the sort of people known elsewhere for loudly deploring the hardships of juggling family and career. As mentioned, the spectacle of a largely secular press attacking the Church for its own sexual sins, real and unreal, has not been without its (again, black) humor.

2This same essay is reprinted as a comment on the scandals in the current issue of Catholic World Report, and can be read online at www.catholic.net/rcc/Periodicals/Igpress/2000-11/essay.html.

3For an extended critique of the book which argues that the situation in the seminaries is no longer as dire as Rose describes, see Rev. Robert J. Johansen's essay in the May 2002 issue of Culture Wars magazine.

4I say "apparently" because, here as elsewhere, the public record is incomplete. According to published reports, Geoghan's victims ranged in age from 4 to 12. Like other offenders, Geoghan may well have more victims, of a larger age range, than has so far been revealed in print.

5In a recent review of the literature in the Journal of the American Medical Association, for example, two researchers noted that "abused adolescents, particularly those victimized by males, were up to 7 times more likely to self-identify as gay or bisexual than peers who have not been abused." "Sexual Abuse of Boys: Definition, Prevalence, Correlates, Sequelae, and Management," William C. Holmes, Gail B. Slap JAMA Dec. 2, 1998 vol. 280, No. 21. For a pro-gay-rights source making similar claims based on several other studies, see Caitlin Ryan and Donna Futterman, Lesbian & Gay Youth: Care and Counseling (Columbia University Press, 1998): "In a survey of sexual abuse victims who attended STD clinics, for example, 37 percent of gay men had been sexually abused as children or adolescents. And in an outcome study of lesbians and gay men who had completed inpatient substance abuse treatment, 44 percent reported having been sexually abused (37 percent of males and 67 percent of females) with abstinence being much more likely among those who had not experienced abuse. Prevalence of sexual abuse appears higher among gay males than heterosexual males, although gay males may be more willing to report such abuse."

6See Pedophilia Chic, June 17, 1996, and "Pedophilia Chic" Reconsidered, January 1 / January 8, 2001.

7Readers can find the Dutch text at www.pim-fortuyn.nl by following the "columns" link to "30-10-1999 De moderne schandpaal." An English translation can be found here.