Church of Sinners

As a cradle Catholic, you might imagine the last few months have been especially hard for me, and you would be right. I have felt a variety of emotions: deep compassion for the many victims of clerical abuse; sympathy for the vast majority of faithful priests; roiling, righteous anger at those who hid the abuse, attacked the victims, and perpetuated the sins; and charity towards anyone who finds faith shaken by the news.

One feeling I did not experience was shock. I admit, after I read the entire report from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s grand jury, I did feel sick to my stomach. It is 1,356 pages of non-stop perversion, lying, and cover-up, and while it is available here, for once I do NOT recommend reading it. Take my word, it is horrible. Horrible, but not shocking to me, because some fourteen years ago, I read another document which confirmed me in the suspicion that more was coming.

Near the end of the revelations coming out of the Boston Archdiocese about the sexual predation which occurred there, the US Catholic Bishops’ Conference chartered the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City College of New York, known for their investigative and forensic faculties, to gather the relevant data about the crisis in the United States. This report, known as the John Jay Report, was published in 2004. While it has none of the terrible specificity of the grand jury finding, it has three hundred pages of dispassionate and comprehensive analysis.

I was not surprised that the institutional Church tried to avoid bad publicity: this is classic institutional behavior, even if the institution in question claims to be holy. What jumped out at me from that report was the simple fact that so many Church leaders at all levels avoided punishing even the most unrepentant repeat offenders. At the time, some clerics offered the defense that they followed the reigning psychological treatment which emphasized therapy. That was true, and for a one-time event even defensible. But many of the offenders came out of therapy and re-offended, and the Church leaders just kept repeating their original mistake. It seemed clear something else was going on here. What it was, was an appalling lack of fidelity among Catholic clergy.

That lack of fidelity was to the Church’s teaching on sex. Which has been very simple and consistent: sex is a gift from God for the procreation of mankind and the bonding of married couples, two inseparable conditions. Period. End of sentence. Exclamation point. Which means it is (1) only between a man and a woman, (2) only permitted when those two are married, and (3) only allowable when the act is open to the possibility of new life.

This was always a hard teaching, and Jesus doubled down on it when he added that even thinking about sex with someone else, when married, was adultery! Of course, human history was rife with transgressions of this hard teaching, but all Christian denominations held to it as true, even as they practiced mercy when the faithful inevitably sinned.

That all changed during the sexual revolution. The notion that anybody could live without sex, or should do so for even a period of time, was stood on its head. Now, everybody should have as much sex, with anybody/anything/nobody as they want, without any consequences. Abstaining from sex in any way is considered unnatural and perverse. The only sin is to deny oneself sexual pleasure.

The Catholic Church maintained its original teaching, most famously in Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humane Vitae. This is one I do suggest you read, as it is only thirty-one paragraphs and has some of the most amazing predictions of what would (and did) happen as a result of the sexual revolution. The teaching was not well received, including by yours truly. Like many Catholics, I didn’t read the encyclical even when I became an adult, and I rejected the teaching as old fashioned and incoherent…without ever reading it. Many Catholic clergy had to deal with Catholics (like me) in the pews who were openly hostile to the Church’s doctrine. In fact, some of those same clergy that hoped for a change in Church teaching were themselves engaging in sexual acts, and excusing themselves by the same reasoning that the sexual revolution provided.

Now mind you, I know many otherwise intelligent people who have told me that the Catholic Church’s problem is that it is obsessed with sex. Funny thing is, I have been going to Mass more than once a week for over fifty years, and I can count on one hand the number of times I have heard sex mentioned in Church. Of the roughly 300 Papal Encyclicals written in the last 300 or so years, sex is the subject of only a handful. Sex is mentioned in 33 paragraphs of the 900 pages of the Catechism, and most of those references are to the “fact of” two different sexes. I challenge anyone to watch one evening’s worth of cable TV and count the number of sexual ads, comments, situations, and graphic acts, then tell me who is obsessed with sex.

If you read the John Jay report, and the recent report by the German Catholic episcopate, you will see some data ignored by the press coverage. Most of the victims were adolescents older than twelve, indicating ephebophilia rather than pedophilia as the predominant problem.* Between 70 and 80% of the victims were adolescent boys; all the perpetrators were men. This indicates, as the German report points out, that the formation process for Catholic clergy attracted an unusual number of men who have same-sex attraction and underdeveloped sexual maturity. These are just data.

These same men, corrupted by their own lust, proved unable to defend or even explain the Church’s traditional teaching. They emphasized excuses, extenuating circumstances, and mercy without repentance, because that is what they themselves desired. Some continued to rise into positions of power, and looked out for those who were like-minded. Some Bishops looked the other way, either because they were implicated or they lacked the courage to profess the Church’s teaching in the face of ridicule. And the scandal spread. All this was clear back in the early 2000s, yet ignored.

The problem was not the Church’s teaching, which proved to be best for all concerned in the long run. Once I finally read Humane Vitae, I saw its logic and reason and self-evident holiness, which contrasted remarkably with the state of society after the sexual revolution. The problem was not clericalism, that is the treatment of those ordained as somehow better than others, for in fact the clergy was behaving exactly like most of the people. The problem was infidelity. And infidelity should rarely surprise us.

Among the original Apostles, one was a betrayer complicit in murder. Another had so little faith he responded to the Good News of the resurrection with a literal “habeus corpus?” Two counselled calling fire down on one’s enemies, and were overly concerned with having choice seats at the heavenly feast. All but one ran away when the going got tough. Their first-among-equals was called Satan by the Lord Himself, denied Jesus thrice, and even at the end had to be reminded to have faith (“quo vadis?”).

“Put not your trust in princes” (Psalm 146:3), even Princes of the Church, apparently.

I’ll posit what all this leads me to believe in a future post.

*In case the terms are unfamiliar, pedophilia is a sexual crime of power where the perpetrator sees the victim as an object to control; ephebophilia is a sexual crime where the perpetrator sees himself as sexually equal to an immature victim. In the first case the attackers rarely show remorse or awareness of the victims; in the latter case, the perpetrators often express their “true attachment” to the victims.