The embarrassment of the New York Times, Ross Douthat, seems to think that liberals are at least partially to blame for the fact that Catholic priests have been raping the hell out of children for decades:
Liberal Catholics, echoed by the secular press, insist that the whole problem can be traced to clerical celibacy. Conservatives blame the moral relativism that swept the church in the upheavals of the 1970s, when the worst abuses and cover-ups took place.
In reality, the scandal implicates left and right alike. The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era’ overemphasis on therapy. (Again and again, bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how to handle abusive clerics.) But it was the church’ conservative instincts ‚Äî the insistence on institutional loyalty, obedience and the absolute authority of clerics ‚Äî that allowed the abuse to spread unpunished.
Wait, when in the 1970′s was child rape part of the “permissive sexual culture”? Just curious!
No.
Here’s why this is happening:
1. Enforced celibacy is not only weird, it’s completely unnatural. Hetero- or homo-, we have bodies and brains that are wired for intimacy with other consenting human beings. Normal human beings can go through non-sexual dry spells, but that’s entirely different from “You may not have intimacy with another person.”
2. Because of the rape culture environment of the Catholic church, people are pressured and shamed into relegating their sexuality to the strictures of, oh what do you know, celibate men:
Rape culture crops up when male power over women and children is exalted, when sexuality is demonized, and when men are encouraged to think of women (and children’) bodies as their property. All these aspects of patriarchy aren’t only part of the Catholic church, they’re celebrated. The exuberant love of male dominance that is the Catholic dogma is going to turn men into rapists who get a rise out of sexually dominated people they believe are lesser than them.
Duh.
(…)
Rape culture specifically likes to make big distinctions between different kinds of rape. Part of this is innocent enough—attacking children is a special kind of horror, after all. But when we put rape of women in one category and rape of children in another and rape of men in another, we’re discouraging people from seeing the connections. But there is a line between tolerating the abuse of women and tolerating the abuse of children. In a culture where male sexuality is assumed to be domineering and debasing, then some men will, for various reasons, skip right past raping women on to raping children.
3. Likewise, because sexuality, and along with it, sexual paraphilias and disorders, are taught to be good and evil and, again, in need of reconciliation with the ruling men in dresses and fancy hats, those with psychosexual issues often end up signing up for the only life they think might protect them from themselves: the celibate priesthood. The underlying issues, however, remain unaddressed.
4. Finally, this thing has festered for decades because the dominance of the Catholic church is hanging on by a thread in the developed world, and they care much more about protecting the church than they do about any pesky 10 year old rape victims. Educated people are leaving the church in droves, and though the church is having some success in recruiting starving people in the third world by giving them false hope for a better life, they’re also doing their part to kill those very same people with their discredited, sex-shaming policies on HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention. So the faster it becomes public knowledge just how widespread the Catholic child rape problem is, the more people (including their own parishioners) will realize that the jig is up and that they really don’t need to be opening their souls and their pocketbooks to men in white frocks who just might have been diddling their children thirty minutes ago.
So there you have it. Maybe one day the Times will realize what a disastrous mistake they made when they hired Douthat, but I’m not holding out hope.
Oh yes, big tube socks with colored stripes and glittery iron-on teeshirts were just SO sexy in the 70′s. How could anyone NOT want to rape that?
Rape is not sex at all.
It’s violence.
Exactly.
This child molestation scandal is NOT a new thing.
We have the Irish scandal, documented to be going back DECADES.
We have the other Irish scandal of abused girls in owrkhouses, going back I think 100 years.
We have the pious schools scandal of the early 1600′s odcumented so well in Karen Liebreichs “Fallen OrdeR”.
Chaucer comments on it in the the canterbury tales.
Ignorance on the part of this NYT wrtier is no excuse.
I think this is the tip of the iceberg. I would bet that this is still going on because:
1) No women priests
2) No openly gay priests
3) No married priests
4) celibacy
They are still drawing from the same pool of sexually stunted men who are using the priesthood to conceal their secrets.
Until the Vatican changes the rules, they can’t expect different results.
And the idea that the wild 70′s had anything to do with it is BS. I was born in 1970. Growing up, I never saw the types of things than went on in the Vatican. My parents did not engage in that type of sordid activity.
So, I really do not know where Douthat is coming from. But, I can imagine his time in the 70′s was likely to be quite colorful, to say the least.
Conservatives always try to act like the world is one big right vs’ left seesaw – with a moral equivalence.
The truth is, all one has to do is open the newspaper on any given morning to see that the right, particularly fundamentalists, are responsible for much of the world’s misery.
I agree. Catholic clergy pedophilia clearly significantly predates the rise of reproductive and sexual liberalism from the sixties onward. There appears to have been massive institutional enablement and an organisational culture obsessed with external image management as opposed to victim-centred accountability in this context.
Wayne, Douthat wasn’t even born in the seventies. He’s just repeating stuff he’s heard from his parents’ friends. Look at some more of his recent columns, particularly the one on the books that influenced him the most. It’s all stuff he read as a teenager. Intellectually, he’s barely out of high school; chronologically, high school wasn’t all that long ago for him.
He also makes the astonishing statement that Watership Down is the best modern novel about politics. Yes, Watership Down. It may well be the best retelling of Livy (esp. the Rape of the Sabines) that features talking rabbits. And it’s probably the best anti-Soviet allegory that features talking rabbits. But it lacks the sort of insight than can be found in, say, the works of Beatrix Potter.
I see – so he is getting his information on the 70′s from watching documentaries on Studio 54 or Boogie Nights reruns. Now it is all making sense.
A few people genuinely have a religious calling that requires celibacy — not for the purpose of avoiding sex, but to make room for other things.
However, I doubt there are enough such people to meet all the RC church’s staffing needs, hence the reliance on these cases of arrested development. If they made celibacy optional, there’d be fewer ecclesiastical hidey-holes for such men. Ordaining women would also de-glamorize the priesthood for many of those guys — it’s an unfortunate fact that once women make up at least 50% of a given profession, that profession’s status goes down. So becoming a priest would be a much less effective way for some pedophile to shore up his feeble sense of self-worth.
@Frijondi “it’ an unfortunate fact that once women make up at least 50% of a given profession, that profession’ status goes down.” PLEASE EXPLAIN THAT COMMENT!!
Celibacy DOES NOT cause one to be a pedophile. Neither does being unmarried. The only thing you are accomplishing by making such ridiculous claims is giving these men excuses for their crimes.
Much more likely is that these men were pedophiles before becoming priests and they either became priests because they thought it would help them with their problem (which it doesn’t, of course) or because it would provide them unfettered access to children. It isn’t at all uncommon for pedophiles to seek out positions that allow them easy access to children.
It is not that celibacy causes molestation. However, it is an unhealthy state of being for people with normal sex drives. Thus, institutions that mandate it are more likely to attract unhealthy people with sexual issues. These issues include child molesters who think that the vow of celibacy and the priesthood will keep their desired at bay. But, this often does not work (as you pointed out) and the easy access to children is a bad combination.
Being unmarried also does not cause molestation. But, allowing marriage would increase the chances of healthy people applying for the priesthood. It would also break-up the good ole boys club.
The fact is, creating an institution where people are sexually satisfied and live healthy lives will decrease the chances of sexual abuse. Ending forced celibacy and allowing marriage – as well as openly gay and women priests — will lead to a better institution and be less attractive, less of a haven for those who harm kids.
This is not a result of celibacy. It is the result of a system that provides cover for this crime.
These guys network believe it or not. They know how to recognize each other. They learn where they can practice their crimes and get away with it to go on and do it again and again.
As one of their victims once said “priests don’t become pedophiles, pedophiles become priests”.
See this for what it is, a controlled system where almost all the the bishops, cardinals and even the popes started out as small parish priests with access to children. It would seem that some may have been pedophiles. It only makes sense that some of the pedophiles would move up through the ranks into positions to protect their like minded brethren.
Let’s see the church really shake itself clean and subject all it’s leadership and other staff to examination. Jesus demands it!!!
[...] leadership. His blame-the-victim mindset in the last paragraph is appalling, yet typical for the rape culture mindset of Catholic [...]
I agree with ozma10 and MissSW. Celibacy is not the cause of pedophilia. In fact, I was under the impression that celibacy (except for solo sex) was *encouraged* for pedos. I am supportive if the priesthood wants to remain a celibate institution for men only. Mithraism had similar groups, i believe. Some feel a calling to that lifestyle.
I don’t know a lot about what goes on in the priesthood, though. Is this a similar problem among Buddhist monks? They DO allow women but celibacy is a mandate I believe.
Not that I know of, but patriarchal sexual control is not a part of the Buddhist practice, as far as I know.
It is also common for people to become Buddhist monks for a period of years and reenter secular life. There are some lifetime monks, and they are great teachers, but leaving the monastery is normalized and accepted as an individual decision. For the Catholic priesthood, people are expected to make a life commitment and needing to relinquish that commitment after ordination is seen as a failure.
If this sort of absolutism — including needing dispensation from Rome for married or divorced men to become priests — were relaxed, Catholics would probably see more priests. It’s hard to find priests when the primary pool is pious bachelors who will choose religious life over both the freedom of the bachelor lifestyle and the possibility of marrying or starting a family.
I know that some convents (groups of nuns, female celibate religious) have different lengths of vows you can take. Some can take temporary vows of a year, for example, and this is normal. I don’t know about the male orders but I believe the daughters of charity, for example, have temporary vows; I know other orders do as well. This is not the priesthood but it is a celibate religious institution segregated by gender.
While it would be incorrect to say simply that mandatory celibacy causes paedophilia, I think that there is a connection. Richard Sipe, who was once a Roman Catholic priest, and who has done a tremendous amount of research into sexual issues among the RC clergy makes the following points:
“In combination with the other factors that comprise the clerical culture, required celibacy does predispose, promote retain, hide, and defend clergy who are sexually active in their ranks.
“Sexual deprivation can be instrumental in predisposing a person to sex with a minor. RC clergy often find adult sexual partners unavailable due to their deficient psychosexual development and the social constraints on intimate adult interaction. The availability of admiring and vulnerable youngsters to ill educated ministers with unconscious childhood strivings coupled with unsublimated sexual drives can lead to sexual contact of a priest with minors.
“A significant number of RC clergy are psychosexually immature. This has been studied and well documented. The church prefers men and women on this level of development for church service because they are easier to control….
See http://www.richardsipe.com/vatican_connection.htm
I have also heard Sipe say in a BBC radio interview that clerical molesters, whatever their chronological and mental age, are commonly of the same EMOTIONAL age as the children or adolescents whom they molest.
In fact Richars Sipe’s website generally is well worth studying:
http://www.richardsipe.com/