Responding Compassionately, Truthfully and Thoroughly, Part II
by Fr. Roger Landry - April 30, 2010
Last week, we examined the Pope's meeting with Maltese victims of clergy sexual abuse as well as the comments of retired Vatican Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos about the relationship between bishops and priests and the responsibility bishops have not only to be spiritual fathers to clergy but to all God's faithful. Today we take up another recent statement that made headlines, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone's comments in Chile about the predominant homosexual nature of the sexual abuse by clergy. This is likewise relevant to the full response of the Church to the evil of the sexual abuse of minors within her fold.
When Cardinal Bertone was asked in Santiago on April 12 whether he believed there was a connection between celibacy and pedophilia, he set off a media firestorm when he replied, "Many psychologists and psychiatrists have shown that there is no link between celibacy and pedophilia, but many others have shown, and have told me recently, that there is a link between homosexuality and pedophilia."
The firestorm was partially ascribable to terminological imprecision on the part of the journalist and the Cardinal: using the term "pedophilia" to refer in general to all cases of the sexual abuse of minors in the Church. Taken in a strict sense, pedophilia signifies sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children, and in this sense there is clearly no psychological link between those who have attractions to post-pubescent members of the same-sex and sexually-undeveloped children. But taking the question and answer in the way they were intended, Cardinal Bertone was saying that there is a clear and undeniable correlation between same-sex attractions and the incidence of clergy sexual abuse, one that no one who is sincerely interested in ridding the Church of the clerical sexual abuse of minors can ignore.
When the National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People published its probing report "The Crisis in the Catholic Church in the United States" in February 2004, it listed the most notable factors in the sex abuse crisis in the U.S. Catholic Church between 1950-2002. One of the most notable ones, it stated, concerned "issues relating to homosexual orientation." The authors wrote, "The overwhelming majority of reported acts of sexual abuse of minors by members of the clergy victimized boys [ages 11-17]. Accordingly, the current crisis cannot be addressed without consideration of issues relating to homosexuality. We do not seek to place the blame for the sexual abuse crisis on the presence of homosexual individuals in the priesthood as there are many chaste and holy homosexual priests who are faithful to their vows of celibacy. However, we must call attention to the homosexual behavior that characterized the vast majority of the cases of abuse observed in recent decades. That eighty-one percent of the reported victims of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy were boys shows that the crisis was characterized by homosexual behavior."
Some critics of that conclusion said that the fundamental reason why there more than four out of five abuse victims in the Church were boys was because priests seeking to abuse had disproportionate access to boys from 1950-2002. There were no altar girls for the vast majority of that time period, so the disproportion of male victims, they assert, is ascribable only to access rather than sexual attraction. Such a contention, however, makes the methodological error of pretending all clerical sexual abuse imitates pedophilia, which the majority of psychological experts say is gender non-specific.
It also seems to ignore the data. The National Review Board documented that 81 percent of the abuses cases were of boys, and of these, 78% of the reported victims were 11-17 when the abuse began. A February 2010 follow-up study of new credible allegations (mostly for abuse that happened years ago) by Georgetown's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate for the U.S. Bishops' Conference confirmed the same clear trends: in 2005, 81 percent of abuse cases reported to the Church were male; in 2006, 80 percent; in 2007, 82 percent; in 2008, 84 percent; and in 2009, 84 percent. Only fifteen percent of these cases overall were for pre-pubescent children. At a world-wide level, Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the chief investigator of clerical sexual abuse for the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said in a recent interview that about sixty percent of the cases that have come to his office have involved sexual attraction towards adolescents of the same sex, thirty percent heterosexual attractions to adolescent females, and the remaining ten percent were cases of true pedophilia.
So those who are serious about ending the sexual abuse of minors in the Church need to confront the fact the overwhelming majority of cases involve same-sex molestation of post-pubescent boys. While it would be false to imply a causal relationship between same-sex attraction and the sexual abuse of minors — for same-sex attractions in a particular priest do not imply any greater likelihood to violate celibate chastity and abuse a young person than heterosexual attractions do — there is at the same time a profound need to examine this "crisis within the crisis" of the clerical same-sex molestation of teenage boys.
This has not yet been done. It has been avoided on the part of Church leaders, it seems, fundamentally out of a desire not to single out the preponderant homosexual dimension of the crisis and thereby unintentionally scapegoat all priests with same-sex attractions for the clergy sex abuse scandals. It has probably not occurred as well because the members of the secular media have not only not been clamoring for this problem to be confronted head on, but also would likely try to frame such an investigation falsely as a dodge. Many in the media are not interested in this investigation because it might endanger popular culture's and their politically correct esteem for same-sex attractions and activity; furthermore, it might subvert the attempt by some critics to use the scandals to undermine priestly celibacy: how ludicrous is it, after all, to propose heterosexual marriages as the solution to the problem of the same-sex abuse of adolescents? But even though the hostile elements of secular media are not holding the Church's feet to the fire to investigate and eliminate this problem, it is essential to the integrity of the Church's response — and more importantly the protection of children — that the Church does so.
Soon after Benedict XVI became pope, he published a document whose production he had supervised for a decade, which was the beginning of an ecclesial response not only to this "crisis within a crisis." It was also a reaction to a defective ecclesial clerical culture — soft on same-sex activity in general among priests — that in some ways abetted the abuse by weakening a repugnance against sexual sins among the clergy and by blunting pastoral clarity and vigilance with regard to disordered sexual inclinations. The 2005 document said, "The Church, while profoundly respecting the persons in question, cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies, or support the so-called 'gay lifestyle.'" This was a start to the Church's addressing the issue of same-sex attractions and activity among the clergy, but it did not really get into the subject of what the factors might have been leading to the vast statistical preponderance of same-sex molestation of adolescents among clerical sexual abuse cases and why it was allowed to continue. That study still needs to be done.
Hopefully the recent attention given to Cardinal Bertone's remarks as well as the renewed attention to the nature of sexual abuse in the Church will lead to this much overdue examination.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
