The Gay Priest problem

Well, it is Ash Wednesday, so let's talk about something difficult, something that requires penitential self-examination.

Father Neuhaus calls "The Faithful Departed" by Phil Lawler "the best book-length treatment of the [Catholic] sex abuse crisis, its origins and larger implications, published to date." Again, let me commend this excellent book to all Christian readers, not just Catholics, who want to know how it is that a church's leadership class can become corrupted by trading fidelity to the church's true mission for worldly power and comfort. Here's a quote Neuhaus cites from Lawler's book, one that originated in "The Gay Priest Problem," a powerful Catholic World Report essay from the year 2000, by the Jesuit Father Paul Shaughnessy:

If we examine any trust-invested agency at any given point in its history, whether that agency be a police force, a military unit, or a religious community, we might find that, say, out of every hundred men, five are scoundrels, five are heroes, and the rest are neither one nor the other: ordinarily upright men who live with a mixture of moral timidity and moral courage. When the institution is healthy, the gutsier few set the overall tone, and the less courageous but tractable majority works along with these men to minimize misbehavior; more importantly, the healthy institution is able to identify its own rotten apples and remove them before the institution itself is enfeebled. However, when an institution becomes corrupt, its guiding spirit mysteriously shifts away from the morally intrepid few, and with that shift the institution becomes more interested in protecting itself against outside critics than in tackling the problem members that subvert its mission. For example, when we say a certain police force is corrupt, we don’t usually mean that every policeman is on the take—perhaps only five out of a hundred actually accept bribes—rather we mean that this police force can no longer diagnose and cure its own problems, and consequently, if reform is to take place, an outside agency has to be brought in to make the changes.

That is worth pondering in sorrow.

Neuhaus continues with this critical point:

Lawler adds: “Homosexual influence within the American clergy was not in itself the cause of the sex abuse crisis. The corruption wrought by that influence was a more important factor.” He very gingerly addresses a theory proposed by a number of commentators on the crisis, namely, that bishops engaged in cover-ups and other deceptions because they were threatened with homosexual blackmail. He cites a number of instances in which this appears to be the case and bishops were permitted to resign when their misdeeds could no longer be denied. “The blackmail hypothesis,” he writes, “provides a logical explanation for behavior that is otherwise inexplicable: the bishops’ willingness to risk the welfare of the faithful and their own reputations in order to protect abusive priests.”

This is a difficult topic to discuss, for obvious reasons. As a Catholic, I was aware before the scandal that there was a significant number of gay priests in the Catholic clergy, but I had no idea at all that the situation was like what I eventually would learn. I think most Catholics, and indeed most people, really haven't a clue -- and God knows the media won't touch this topic. In my investigations, and in talking to priests, scholars, lawyers for victims, ordinary Catholics and activists on the church's left and right, it became very, very clear that the reality of homosexuality among the clergy was, as Mary Eberstadt put it, "the elephant in the sacristy."

Some conservatives don't understand the nature of the gay priest problem. It's not that gays = child molesters, a formulation that is not only factually incorrect, but understandably offensive to homosexuals. (Still, it cannot be denied that while all gays are not molesters of youth, in the Catholic scandal, the authoritative John Jay College report found that nearly all molesters of youth were gay). The real effect of the gay priest problem has to do with the institutional corruption it spawned, owing largely to do with secrets, lies and clericalism.

Over and over again, in interviews, I'd be told stories. There was the laicized priest who finally left the priesthood in disgust over the way the large gay contingent in his diocese openly violated their celibacy vows, and made sure the bishop, who is thought to have been compromised, looked the other way when a sexual corruption scandal hit the local seminary. That's the way it works: it's not that the gay priests in that diocese were molesters, but it is that they formed a network that shared a bond of secrecy that was used to cover up for all kinds of sexual misconduct. This former priest told me that his gay clerical colleagues constantly taunted the straight priests in their diocese, telling them that they might as well get girlfriends, because nobody cared. In fact, said the former priest, this was true: the bishop was in their corner, and nobody would care at all. The former priest said the rigors of the celibate life were tough enough without having to deal with many of one's fellow priests making a mockery of it. This man told me every heterosexual in his ordination class eventually left the priesthood, demoralized.

I heard this kind of story over and over again, and not just from conservative Catholics. Richard Sipe and Fr. Tom Doyle are very far from being conservative Catholics -- in fact, Fr. Doyle has been involved with Call to Action -- but they also happen to be among the most knowledgeable experts on the sex abuse crisis. Sipe, who is probably the expert on the sexual lives of Catholic clerics, told me that the seminary system is the problem. Many seminaries are run by corrupt gay clerics, he said (Fr. Doyle agreed). If a seminarian struggling with homosexuality and chastity is admitted, the attempt will quickly be made to corrupt him by getting him involved in sexual activity. If he falls, he's done for. Even if he repents and lives a blameless celibate life thenceforth, the network has something on him, and is willing to use it. He's been neutralized. Besides, the network takes care of its own.

It's impossible to say for sure how many bishops are thus compromised. Reporters who have covered the scandal intensely all have stories, few if any publishable, given the reluctance of those in a position to know to name names. I had wondered about a particular bishop, whose reputation was that of a fierce conservative, but who had made some extremely bad and hard to explain decisions to turn a blind eye from abusers. As it turned out, I interviewed a woman who had worked for him closely in one of his previous assignments, and who had gone to him to report that one of his priests was engaged in some very perverse sexual acts in the church. The woman told me that Bishop X. did nothing about it, and even informed the malign cleric, who taunted the woman by saying, "He's not going to touch me. When you have them by the balls, their hearts follow." This priest eventually went to prison (I checked) for sexually abusing minors, and this bishop's career advanced to a plum see.

Unless you've spent a lot of time talking to people who have dealt with this stuff personally, it's hard to believe this situation really exists. I interviewed a seminarian who had been studying in a religious order's seminary, but who left for a diocesan seminary because, he said, gay sex was open and rampant in the particular order seminary in which he was studying. He told his own parents about what he was dealing with, and they didn't believe him. They couldn't believe him: priests didn't do these sorts of things, as they saw it. I firmly believe that John Paul II was so dreadful on the scandal because he couldn't face the extent and degree of the corruption. As I've mentioned here before, I interviewed several prominent Catholics, including a priest, who traveled to Rome at their own expense to warn the Vatican not to elevate a certain archbishop to the cardinalate because of this archbishop's history of forcing seminarians into sexually compromising positions. The archbishop got his red hat after all, and when word got back to him that I was looking into the matter, he had his lawyer -- a prominent attorney who is closeted -- phone my editor and request that I be taken off the story. My editor didn't do that, but the story never ran because -- as usual -- no one with direct personal knowledge of the story would risk going on the record. Some didn't want to embarrass the Church. Others feared for their position. None of those helping cover for the cardinal were, to my knowledge, gay. But you see how this works.

Another story: a thoroughly orthodox Catholic acquaintance, a layman who retired from teaching at a seminary admitted that there was a great deal of gay sex going on in the seminary, and he was deeply troubled by it. Did the archbishop know? I asked. Yes, of course he knew, came the answer. Nobody ever accused this archbishop of being gay, or even thought he was -- so why didn't he do anything? My acquaintance had no idea -- yet he loved and respected his archbishop, and so lived with the cognitive dissonance. The archbishop is a good man. His seminary is corrupt. The archbishop knows about it. The archbishop is doing nothing to intervene. You can't reconcile all of them, and my acquaintance emotionally couldn't do it. So he more or less turned a blind eye too.

It hardly needs saying that the media, which have done a good job of exploring all angles of the scandal's root cause, have studiously ignored the complex story of gays in the priesthood and their role. It's true that many conservatives would love to blame the entire mess on gays and be done with it. I can't say strongly enough: that is way too simplistic, and therefore unjust. But the media, it seems to me, have gone out of their way to avoid looking at the homosexualization of the priesthood. An investigative reporter known for his liberal sympathies once mentioned to me that it was deeply frustrating to him when he spoke with liberal Catholics, how they refused to discuss the gay priest issue, and declared it off limits (I told him there was a similar phenomenon on the Catholic right with regard to the roles played in the scandal by celibacy and Church authority). To their credit, this is a topic that some liberal Catholics, including the aforementioned Sipe and Doyle, as well as Fr. Andrew Greeley, Fr. Richard McBrien and Fr. Donald Cozzens have not ignored. Here's the editor of the liberal National Catholic Reporter, reflecting on Cozzens' painfully direct book about the contemporary priesthood:

So much of the understanding of the church and the current state of the priesthood is carried in our own stories and intuition. More than 15 years ago, I sat with a man who had been head of an order on the East Coast. As almost an aside, I asked about the order’s seminary that we could see from where we were sitting. “Are you still getting the best and brightest?” His demeanor changed. It became clearly pained, and he answered that they were not getting the best or brightest and that many, if not most, of those entering were gay and, he said, he knew they remained sexually active. He didn’t, quite frankly, know what the order was going to do.

Another priest, some years later, someone who had worked with sexually troubled as well as gay priests, predicted in private conversation that the next scandal that would run through the clerical ranks would be priests with AIDS. What was more essential than ever, for both straight and gay priests, those sexually active and those who kept their vows, was that priests and bishops begin talking about sexuality, he said. He also predicted that would not happen because there was no will to delve into such a difficult topic.

Cozzens, an insider, a loyal son of the church, a “priest’s priest” as his friends describe him, has taken the bold step.

“I confess to a certain anxiety as I begin this reflection on homosexuality and the priesthood,” he writes. “Whatever is said about such a sensitive and complex issue is open to misunderstanding and seeming insensitivity. Some will deny the reality that many observers see as changing the face of the priesthood - that the percentage of homosexual priests and seminarians is significantly higher than it is in society at large. Others will see any attention given to the phenomenon as a symptom of the homophobia that is characteristic of individuals with less than open minds. Still others will wonder what difference sexual orientation makes in the celibate lives of priests. Regardless of the risks, the issue, I believe, deserves attention.”

Fr. Cozzens was, and is, correct. And Fr. Shaughnessy, the Jesuit who identified the Catholic Church's inability to deal straightforwardly with the powerful gay subculture in its clerical ranks, is also correct about the broader institutional effect of this culture of denial. But I don't look for the Roman Catholic church, or other churches dealing with the issue in its clergy, to talk about this honestly, or at all, anytime soon. Too many people, gay and straight on all sides of the issue, inside the churches and outside, are too invested in keeping up appearances.

UPDATE: I ran across just now an old post from Grant Gallicho at the Commonweal blog asserting that conservative Catholics are distorting statistics to make the scandal seem like an exclusively gay problem. Grant quotes directly from the John Jay Report:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female.

Some high-profile conservative Catholics cite the fact that four out of five victims were male, and that three out of four were over age 11, as proof that this wasn't pedophilia, strictly speaking (that is, a pathological compulsion to have sex with prepubescents), but a non-compulsive choice to have sex with young males, period. Ergo, this is not a psychological problem, but a moral one involving corrupt priests with homosexual orientations. Grant counters by pointing out that pedophilia is defined by medicine as involving sex with a partner under 13. That being the case, the pedophilia diagnosis would appear to cover far more of the victims than conservatives care to admit, and that, in turn, the crisis becomes less a matter of undisciplined homosexual priests, and more of a matter of mentally ill priests. I'm not convinced -- some young men become sexually mature earlier than 13, but surely no younger than 11 -- but I thought I'd mention this contrary view all the same.

If you really want to do some intense, sober, even searing reading about the scandal, read Lee Podles' recent book "Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church." Bill Cork reviews it here. Lee's a friend, and an orthodox Catholic. I told him after reading parts of his book in manuscript form that I didn't believe I was spiritually strong enough to take in all that he reports. From what I have read, Lee is utterly unsparing on the bishops for the evil they allowed to fester in the Church. He also confronts the gay subculture, but says that ordinary sexual desire, homo or hetero, cannot fully account for the kinds of diabolical evil that manifested itself here. Lee also makes it clear that those on the Catholic right, as he is, are lying to themselves if they think this evil only entered the Church at Vatican II in the 1960s.

One key component of the scandal -- and again, this is a lesson that applies to all religious believers and their communions, not just Catholics -- is that the self-serving silence and complicity of the laity allowed this evil to perpetrate itself. "Self-serving" in that many in the laity didn't want to know what was happening, because to know means to become responsible, and to be responsible meant having to do something about a phenomenon too horrible to contemplate. Therefore, they -- we -- look the other way, and even punish the truth-tellers who come forward.