Sex and power issues expand clergy-lay rift
Pedophilia crisis feeds surging discontent

By THOMAS C. FOX

A potentially crippling rift is growing between U.S. lay Catholics and their clergy, and the issues involve sex and authority in the church. If they are not acknowledged and examined, further divisions can only grow.

At one level, the issue causing much of the strain is human sexuality and increasingly divergent views concerning what constitutes a healthy Catholic sexual morality. At another level, the issue is more about power and who gets to define morality. These issues have become so tightly wrapped together that they have virtually merged into one. The result is tearing at the foundations of the church.

This modern divergence dates back at least to the July 1968 issuance by Pope Paul VI of the encyclical Humanae Vitae, which condemned as sinful all forms of artificial birth control for the laity. Research has shown that nearly nine out of 10 lay Catholics have disregarded the teaching, seriously eroding episcopal authority.

In the past decade, the divergence has grown around a number of other issues related to sexuality, most visibly the exclusion of women from the clergy and all official decision-making roles, the right of a woman to choose to have an abortion and Vatican pronouncements concerning the "intrinsic disordered" state of homosexuals. None of this is new ground for those familiar with Catholic tensions within the church.

More recently, yet another division has been added to the list pushing lay Catholics into further conflict with their clerical teaching authorities. This issue also deals with sex and authority, but in a different form.

The issue is clergy sexual abuse. It has received far greater national media attention and may be causing more lay Catholics to question the health of their church leadership than any of the earlier sex-based or related issues.

Lay criticisms of their clergy may not be new, but the widespread intensity of such criticism is, and should be, of considerable concern to episcopal leaders. Never was this new phenomenon more visible than at a recent national gathering of sexual-abuse victims of Catholic clergy held in a Chicago suburb last month.

Attacks on offending priests and denying bishops were mixed with remorse and anger -- and with sadness that their clergy had betrayed them, bitterness that the institution cared more about protecting its own priests than feeling compassion for the victimized.

What made these universal criticisms more telling was that they came from no one particular segment within the church. Not from the left or far left, not from the right or ultraright. No, they came tellingly from across the entire Catholic spectrum.

The Oct. 16-18 conference, sponsored by VOCAL (Victims of Clergy Abuse Linkup), a lay network that claims to be in touch with about 3,000 clergy sexual-abuse victims or supporters, occurred in Arlington Heights, Ill., a 40-minute drive from the heart of downtown Chicago. It was the first national gathering of clergy sexual-abuse victims and clearly represents a new phase in the growing lay-clergy rift.

The conference was billed as a healing and educational forum. Many noted the scarcity of clergy (a handful) among the 300 to 400 participants and viewed their meager numbers as one more sign of the gravity of the problem lay Catholics face.

The meeting was not limited to Catholics, but nearly all who came said they have or had ties to the Catholic church.

At first glance, clergy sexual abuse, limited to a small minority within the priesthood, may seem a grossly unfair measure for assessing lay-clergy relations. But as the conference developed, it became increasingly clear to those assembled that the consistent patterns of such abuse, especially patterns of denial and cover-up, warranted critical judgment.

Victims, who prefer to call themselves survivors, spoke openly of their sexual abuse. They also shared stories of a second form of abuse they said was often far more damaging to their personal faith lives and diminished ties to their Catholic religion: psychological abuse, the result of seemingly unyielding institutional denial.

Barely contained in three days of speeches, story-sharing, counseling and network formation was a common emotion -- rage. It may be expected that clergy abuse of minors would trigger such anger. However, what I did not expect to find was that these survivors, most often unable to entirely cut ties to the church, were attempting to channel their bitterness into more constructive efforts, including reaching out to other survivors while examining abusive patterns with an eye on church reform.

"The first abuse is sexual; the second and more painful, is psychological," I heard many times. The pattern of the second abuse, the pattern of denial and cover-up, brought VOCAL into existence and unexpectedly placed it in an emerging new role in widening lay efforts to critique and reform the Catholic clerical structures.

The VOCAL gathering had an intimacy uncharacteristic of many conferences I have attended. Almost from the moment people walked into the Arlington Hilton & Towers Hotel, they shared the most personal of stories. Survivors appeared to arrive in a seemingly desperate search for listeners and people who could finally understand their experiences.

From the outset, it was an emotionally exhausting gathering. Many scars were quite public. Some people sat with vacant looks, never saying a word. Others indicated they did not know until they stepped onto the airplane that brought them to Chicago whether they could actually muster the psychic strength needed for the trip.

Some tried to speak but, overwhelmed by emotions, they could not. An extended hand or an arm around a shoulder often seemed to be enough to comfort them. Tears were as common as tissues.

The whole idea behind the conference, according to VOCAL organizer Jeanne Miller, was "to break the cycle of silence." To allow this to happen while protecting survivors from further harassment required an understanding from the media to protect some identities. I took names but told interviewees I would not use them in my articles (see NCR, Oct. 30).

Over meals, during seminars and in private rooms late into the night, people talked of abuse, of shattered faith, of betrayal. Fairly or unfairly, they portrayed Catholic clergy as belonging to an unhealthy and misguided group more bent on preserving privilege and power than in serving lay needs.

They pledged themselves to forcing change in the church. This was one of the most striking aspects, or the most ominous, depending on one's point of view: that the survivors were not prepared to settle for talking, or even for healing. They intend to change things.

Wittenberg

If abuse of indulgences was the last straw in 1517 when Augustinian Friar Martin Luther split with the Catholic church, then clergy sexual abuse might well be that proverbial last straw should a split occur in our lifetimes. This was the point made more than once in conference speeches.

"My friends, welcome to Wittenberg," psychotherapist Richard Sipe began his address. Sipe has probably studied the clergy sexual-abuse phenomenon longer than any other Catholic professional. Once an active priest, he now has a private practice in Maryland. The author of A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy (New York: Brunner/Mazel), he has served on the faculties of three major seminaries in the United States.

"The historical significance of this meeting, which transcends all of us individually and even the immediate subject matter, cannot escape any of us here," he said. "This meeting is the first of its kind ever to be held within Catholic Christendom. This is the first time a group of Catholic Christians has gathered to evaluate publicly the celibate/sexual functioning of its clergy.

"We stand on the brink of the most profound reformation of the Catholic clergy and its celibate/sexual system since the time when Martin Luther challenged clerical integrity, on Oct. 31, 1517."

Sipe was not alone in placing the clergy sexual-abuse phenomenon into such a 16th-century context. Sociologist Father Andrew Greeley, another speaker, called the problem of clergy sexual abuse "perhaps the most serious problem the priesthood has faced since the Reformation."

Types of abusers

What's going on with our priests? Among the goals of the conference was to gain a grasp of the dimensions of the problem. Why are some priests inclined to child sexual abuse?

Sipe outlined four forms of abusers: those predisposed by a genetic lock, those predetermined by a psychodynamic lock, those conditioned by a social/situational lock and those rooted in a moral lock.

The term lock, he said, means "that, given ordinary circumstances and nonintervention," those so disposed will inevitably become sexual abusers.

According to Sipe, those in genetic lock never attain "normal" adult sexual patterns and, should they become sexually active, "will inevitably gravitate to minors."

Psychodynamic lock is traced, he said, to factors within early relationships, often coupled with early sexual overstimulation and experiences, which conspire to lock the person at an early level of psychosexual development, making him "extremely vulnerable to regression to sexual attraction to minors."

Social/situational lock is specifically clerical. It is, he said, a state in which "conformity to set answers rather than free inquiry" is rewarded. He explained that, theologically, the celibate male priesthood is a man's world where God is Father, Son and masculine spirit.

The ideal and only woman venerated is mother or virginal (forbidden objects of sexual fantasy). Emotionally, it is a world in which men are revered and powerful (pope, bishop, rector) and boys are treasured as the future of the church.

Said Sipe, "It is clear that the institutional church is in a preadolescent state of psychosexual development. This is a period, typically prior to 11 years of age, in which boys prefer association with their own sex; girls are avoided and held in disdain, often as a guise for fear of women as well as of their own as yet unsolidified sexuality.

"Sex generally is rigidly denied externally while secretly explored. The rigidity extends to strict rules of inclusion and exclusion. Control and avoidance are of primary concern."

The fourth category, he said, is that of moral lock. Priests in this group by design involve themselves sexually with minors because they want to.

One of the questions that came up at the conference was whether priestly pedophilia, the phenomenon of abuse of young children, is related to homosexuality in the priesthood.

It is widely believed among those familiar with the church that the Catholic priesthood today, especially priests under age 40, are disproportionately gay, given the norm of society. Estimates of the gayness of the Catholic clergy vary considerably from somewhat above the norm to more than 50 percent of the Catholic clergy. Some say that among the newly ordained this figure may even run higher.

The issue of a disproportionately gay Catholic clergy is a matter of considerable concern to many in the church, including many bishops, but not enough for any to propose a serious study of the sexual inclinations and habits of Catholic priests.

While many think that gathering such information would be a logical first step in the process of facing the perceived problem, critics contend that the bishops have declined to take the step out of fear of what they might discover.

One plaguing question survivors asked during the gathering was whether there is a linkage between homosexual priests and child sexual abuse. The issue is hotly contested.

More research is needed, but it appears both those who vigorously deny any priestly sexual abuse/homosexual linkage and those who have found some linkage may both be right.

Short of serious empirical data, many questions, it appears, are bound to go unanswered. However, medical experts say priests who act out their sexual desires with prepubescent children are, strictly speaking, pedophiles, and this phenomenon has nothing whatsoever to do with homosexuality.

However, some survivors point out that they have been abused after reaching puberty but while they were still legal minors. Those adults attracted to postpubescent teens are called ephebephiles.

From a legal point of view, some convicted homosexual priest sex offenders have said their mistake was to become sexually active with youths under age 18. (Whether in homosexual or heterosexual culture, one of the most serious moral issues facing the nation is our youth cult and, with it, the way teenagers are being sexually portrayed and exploited in advertising. Sexual attraction to the young, it seems, is being programmed into Western culture.)

Lawsuits

How widespread is the problem? Where is it in the legal system?

According to St. Paul, Minn., attorney Jeffrey Anderson, who specializes in such abuse cases, pedophile priest cases now exist in every one of the nation's 188 dioceses. He said he represents 150 victims in 23 states, adding that his best estimate is that 400 to 500 cases have been or are being litigated and that out-of-court settlements run up to $300,000 apiece.

The Catholic church, he said, has already paid more than $400 million in settlements and fees and medical benefits to sexual-abuse survivors and families.

One telling point Anderson made was that he has never worked with a survivor on a lawsuit who had not first tried to settle accounts within the pastoral context of the church. Survivors go to the courts, it appears, not as a first resort, but as a last resort.

Many more cases, he said, are expected to become public. He explains that the trauma of sexual abuse, especially when it occurs to the very young, can get buried in the psyche, only to resurface, triggered by the unexpected, years or decades later. This is the reason VOCAL and attorneys who specialize in clergy-sexual-abuse lawsuits are working to lift state statutes of limitations on these offenses.

Sipe's work indicates that about 6 percent of the Catholic clergy (2 percent of priests are psychiatrically defined pedophiles) have had sexual contact with minors. Other studies show the average pedophile priest abuses 285 victims. The conclusion many drew was that the church is nowhere near the end of the sexual-abuse tragedy.

Denial

Nearly all those who addressed the conference at one point or another addressed the issue of "denial," the unwillingness of Catholic bishops to either acknowledge or handle the problem in a pastoral way.

Public denial by church officials, said Sipe, "has been almost monolithic." He said the church has erected defenses revealing "a deep, desperate and knowing personal involvement in the problem."

Said Sipe, "The church knows and has known for a long time a great deal about the sexual activity of its priests. It has looked the other way, tolerated, covered up and simply lied about the broad spectrum of sexual activity of its priests, bound by the law but not the reality of celibacy."

Sipe concluded by outlining what he called 14 "truths" the church must recognize before it can reform itself:

1. Sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic clergy is a long-standing problem.

2. The phenomenon of the sexual abuse of minors is a worldwide problem among Roman Catholic clergy.

3. When the whole story of sexual abuse by presumed celibate clergy is told, it will lead to the highest corridors of Vatican City.

4. Sexual abuse of children is part of a larger pattern of sexual involvement by priests with others -- adult women and men.

5. Seminary training does not prepare clergy for celibate/sexual reality. Seminary training produces many psychosexually impaired and retarded priests whose level of adjustment is adolescent at best.

6. The celibate/sexual system that surrounds clerical culture fosters and often rewards psychosexual immaturity.

7. The homosocial system of the hierarchy that excludes women categorically from decision-making and power at the same time that it glorifies exclusively the roles of virgin and mother creates a psychological structure that reinforces male psychosexual immaturity and malformation.

8. A significantly larger proportion of the clergy than the general population has a homosexual orientation.

9. By refusing to deal honestly with the reality of homosexuality and the clerical state, Catholic teaching fosters self-alienation of its clergy and encourages and enables identity confusion, sexual acting out and moral duplicity.

10. The Catholic moral teaching on sexuality is based on a patently false anthropology that renders magisterial pronouncement noncredible.

11. Clergy deprived of a moral doctrine in which they can believe are also deprived of moral guidance and leadership in their own lives and behavior. Sexually, priests and the hierarchy resort to denial, rationalization and splitting in dealing with their own sexual behavior and that of their colleagues.

12. The hierarchy cannot claim ignorance of the sexual practices of their own -- themselves and their fellow priests -- and at the same time assert that they are credible and authoritative sources of leadership in sexual morality for the laity.

13. The hierarchy cannot use the psychiatric system to deal with the problems of sexual abuse -- whether with children, with adult women or with adult males -- and sidestep their personal and corporate roles as enablers.

14. Child abuse by clergy, the tip of the iceberg, does not stand on its own. Difficult as it is to accept, we are certain that the hierarchical and power structures beneath the surface are part of a secret world that supports abuse. These hidden forces are far more dangerous to the sexual health and welfare of Christ's church than those we can already see.

Bernardin

Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin had agreed to speak at the VOCAL gathering but pulled out just days before it opened. He issued a statement saying his "appearance would not achieve his goal of furthering the healing of victims of sexual misconduct and could, in fact, be counterproductive for those involved."

The decision came just days after he issued stringent guidelines for handling clerical sexual-abuse cases within the Chicago archdiocese.

VOCAL organizer Jeanne Miller is the mother of a child who has been sexually abused by a Catholic priest. Hearing of Bernardin's guidelines, Miller at first criticized them, saying they were not enough. After familiarizing herself with them, she said she regretted her earlier statements.

Following Miller's remarks, reported in the press, Bernardin bowed out, sending Miller a handwritten letter. Looking ahead to the conference, the two had met several times and worked for many hours trying to bridge a gulf of suspicion and uncertainty.

Bernardin's presence was to have been part of the healing process and another first: a member of the U.S. hierarchy willing to appear in a public forum, visibly accountable to the aggrieved laity.

Bernardin had been the object of serious lay criticism in recent years for what was viewed as his failure to adequately address the clergy-sexual-abuse problem in his archdiocese. But he appointed a commission to study the problem and, acting upon its recommendations, issued the strict guidelines that included bringing charges of sexual abuse to a lay-dominated board to consider them within 48 hours.

Meanwhile, Bernardin has dismissed 23 priests for sexual misconduct. Chicago-area priests, meanwhile, see themselves as potential victims of what they fear could become clergy-sexual-abuse hysteria on the part of the laity.

Bernardin's absence, deeply disappointing to those attending the conference, is an indication of just how difficult it is to restore good faith between an outraged laity and seemingly honest and sincere episcopal efforts to face the problem.

Only a handful of clergy was in attendance at the gathering. Some were themselves survivors of priest sexual abuse. Others have been working with abusers. At least one priest unquestionably has won the respect of those attempting to work with survivors and to force the bishops to face up to the gravity of the problem.

Thomas Doyle

Dominican Father Thomas P. Doyle was appointed secretary-canonist to the apostolic nunciature (Vatican Embassy) in Washington, D.C., in September 1981, and served in that capacity until 1986. In that capacity, he stumbled onto the clergy-abuse issue in the fall of 1984 when he was assigned the task of monitoring the correspondence of then-accused and later convicted pedophile Father Gilbert Gauthe in Lafayette, La.

The Gauthe case was one of the first to come to national attention and was the case that first drew the National Catholic Reporter into following the widening problem.

It was in his apostolic nunciature role that Doyle began to work with Father Michael Peterson, a psychiatrist, and Louisiana attorney Ray Mouton. The three collaborated on an extensive 92-page paper on the looming crisis that called upon the bishops to issue national guidelines.

In 1985, they distributed it privately to the nation's bishops, who largely ignored it. (The story of the men's collaboration and that of the wider clergy-sexual-abuse scandal is reported thoroughly in the recently published Lead Us Not Into Temptation, by Jason Berry (see NCR, Oct. 30).

Once an insider working elbow to elbow with Archbishop Pio Laghi, Doyle now sees himself very much as one more frustrated outsider. His ministry of choice is that of an Air Force chaplain.

To many survivors, Doyle is one of their last links to the Catholic institution. His calls for church reform recently led him to be chosen as recipient of the Cavallo Prize for Moral Courage, an award that goes to someone who "has chosen to speak out when it would have been far easier to remain silent."

Doyle described the VOCAL weekend as "part of a momentous movement," an awakening to the recognition of a need for "massive reform."

He traced his story of frustration, including an effort to get a discussion of the pedophile problem before the bishops as early as June 1985. It was quashed by officials in the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

He also asked, "Why the denial?" He said, "To acknowledge the problem in its fullness would open the whole (clerical) system to critique. It would weaken the presumed power base and strength of the hierarchy." He characterized today's church as having a "closed-in, clerical culture" that maintains that "we are somehow different, apart and above the laity."

Doyle was not the only priest to speak critically of the "culture of clericalism" in the priesthood today. Andrew Greeley, a prolific author and sociologist, said priests are not being held to professional standards And he asked why priests aren't speaking out.

"Priests cannot make harsh judgments about the behavior of other priests," Greeley said, "even when sexual abuse is the issue, because to do so would violate not merely the rules of the club but would, much worse, be an assault on the immunity of the caste and a threat to the loyalty norm which holds the group together." He said the priesthood is "the last vestige of feudalism in the modern world."

In this light, he said, Bernardin's sexual-abuse guidelines have a historical significance -- "the one area of behavior in which priests will be subjected to standards the violation of which will be sanctioned -- and they will not be judged merely by other priests, but by laypeople."

Jason Berry, NCR contributor and author of Lead Us Not Into Temptation, which traces the priest sexual-abuse story over the past eight years, was another featured speaker. As much as anyone, Berry has attempted to bring the story to public attention.

We worked together, beginning in 1985, when each of us took considerable heat for simply reporting cases of clergy sexual abuse. NCR has repeatedly editorialized on the subject.

"Church authorities have the obligation to act to restore that trust," we wrote in June 1985. "The U.S. Catholic bishops are presiding over a scandal. The church's moral posture in society is at great risk as a result," we wrote in January 1988.

"Once again -- before inaction mangles any more lives -- we call upon the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to establish a national policy that will allow the church to handle the problem with justice, honesty and compassion," we wrote in August 1989.

"So far, the U.S. Catholic Conference has resisted efforts by some bishops to establish national guidelines, relying, instead, on local dioceses to formulate their own responses. The result has been haphazard and often cannot stand up against the temptations to approach pedophilia within the church as primarily a legal problem," we wrote in August 1990.

The subject of clergy sexual abuse has seemingly consumed Berry for eight years, and his efforts were gratefully acknowledged by many conference participants.

Berry and others who have studied the problem feel strongly that clergy sexual abusers must leave the priesthood. "Certainly, it is preferable for priests who have abused youngsters to receive professional care. But I reject the notion that it is better for the church to monitor such men through their careers rather than defrock them," he said.

Berry claims that part of the problem is related to lowered seminarian standards. "The church," he said, "is desperate to attract unmarried males. And so, good men, whose flaw is that they are married, and good women, whose flaw is their gender, are denied the opportunity of priestly service. If the American bishops had biological mothers in their ranks, women who had borne and raised children, I do not think this scandal would have reached such heights."

In the wake of the gathering, Jeanne Miller, its principal organizer, said she thought it had accomplished its goals, that it had broken "the cycle of silence."

"In order to resolve a problem, you have to first name it," she said. "Then you have to admit it is occurring and then educate yourself to all sides so you can act toward resolution."

She said she thought that the first gathering of survivors had begun a process of both healing and education, and that there would be another conference next year. The healing appeared to be an energizing healing among the ranks of survivors, but there was little, if any, indication that it had extended across lay/clergy lines, where critical wounds persist.

To that end, the work seems to have only just begun.

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