Tuesday, November 20, 2018

The Catholic Dilemma: How to Deal with Human Sexuality


Pope Francis has generally been viewed as a sympathetic figure by US commentators.  He has been described as relatively liberal Catholic leader who is attempting to relax some of the Church’s traditional views and make life a bit easier for its members.  But recently, his liberal standing has been threatened by a claim by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò that he participated in the coverup of instances of sexual abuse.  Viganò went so far as to call for Francis to retire.  This has followed additional releases of data describing decades of sexual abuse by Catholic clerics that was well-known within the Church hierarchy but not publicly admitted.  The question of Pope Francis’s guilt or innocence in these matters is crucial to his future credibility as Church leader.  Alexander Stille provided an assessment of the Pope’s options in moving forward.  It appeared in the New York Review of Books under the title The Sins of Celibacy.  He makes clear the dire consequences of many decades of continuing the requirement of priestly celibacy while at the same time sheltering the Church from the harm from sexual abuse by its priests.  It seems the Pope’s options moving forward are more complicated than one might expect, and the need to take some form of action is becoming more urgent.

Stille provides this background on the issues facing Pope Francis.

“On August 25 Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò published an eleven-page letter in which he accused Pope Francis of ignoring and covering up evidence of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and called for his resignation. It was a declaration of civil war by the church’s conservative wing.”

“As a result of Viganò’s latest accusations and the release eleven days earlier of a Pennsylvania grand jury report that outlines in excruciating detail decades of sexual abuse of children by priests, as well as further revelations of sexual misconduct by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., Francis’s papacy is now in a deep, possibly fatal crisis.”


An existential crisis for the leader of the Catholic Church?  How could this have come to pass?

It seems that early decisions by the first Christians with regard to sexuality were not, and, eventually, could not be corrected as times changed.  Initially, there were many views as to what constituted Christianity.  Many sought a more personal interaction between a believer and his God.  Often such attitudes were more consistent with equality before God for both men and women.  These beliefs were opposed by those who believed that Christ’s apostles, all men, formed a hierarchy of authority that would be passed down to their successors.  As in almost all human organizations leaders were identified and the remainder became followers.  What emerged was a military-like organization with specialized uniforms and levels of command.  And the commanders were all male.  Women became second-class members, if not a sub species, and men defined their roles as they wished.  What emerged is a very restrictive view of women’s reproductive rights: they have none. This and the restriction of the priesthood to men has generated long simmering issues with women.

Church leaders also developed some strict sexuality standards for men as well.  It was wished that priests be viewed as exceptional men, above the lower desires that beset other humans.  Eventually, this developed into a requirement that all priests would vow to forego any sexual activity.  This code was always difficult to follow and for centuries sexual relations were ongoing but tolerated within the priesthood. 

“The modern church has boxed itself into a terrible predicament. Until about half a century ago, it was able to maintain an attitude of wise hypocrisy, accepting that priests were often sexually active but pretending that they weren’t. The randy priests and monks (and nuns) in Chaucer and Boccaccio were not simply literary tropes; they reflected a simple reality: priests often found it impossible to live the celibate life. Many priests had a female ‘housekeeper’ who relieved their loneliness and doubled as life companions. Priests frequently had affairs with their female parishioners and fathered illegitimate children. The power and prestige of the church helped to keep this sort of thing a matter of local gossip rather than international scandal.”

The term celibacy can be interpreted as merely remaining unmarried.  Chastity is more specific when it comes to sexual activity: it is only allowed between married individuals (a man and a woman according to the Church).  Pope John Paul II made the policy crystal clear when he stated those who would become priests must be “blessed” with the gift of “celibate chastity.”  That means young men who enter the priesthood are expected to forego all sexual activity forevermore. 

Celibate chastity is clearly an unnatural state for a human male and is certainly going to lead to behaviors that will be problematic for the Church.  The long history of heterosexual excursions by priests indicates that the system did not and could not work.  And given the environment in which priests and prospective priests lived, homosexual activities were inevitable.

Consider this perspective from and article written in 2004 by Michael J. McManus: Only Half of Catholic Priests are Celibate.

"’Obligatory celibacy and the church's official teaching on human sexuality are at the root of the worst crisis the Catholic Church has faced since the time of the Reformation,’ writes Father Richard McBrien, professor of theology at Notre Dame in the Foreword of a new landmark book "Celibacy in Crisis," by A.W. Richard Sipe.”

“In an interview, Father McBrien explained, ‘The Eastern Orthodox do not have celibate clergy, and they have no sexual abuse crisis. When you require celibacy as a life-long commitment from any control group, you are inevitably, automatically and infallibly limiting your pool of potential recruits to one of the thinnest slices of the population.”

"’There are some healthy people who practice celibacy. But that requirement of the priesthood will attract a disproportionately high percentage of men who are sexually dysfunctional, sexually immature, or whose orientation will raise the question - are they attracted to the priesthood because of the ministry, or because it is a profession that forbids one to be married’?"

Sipe was an ex-priest who left the Church, married, and made a career out of providing psychological counseling for sexually troubled priests as well as sexual partners of priests.

“The issue goes far beyond the sexual molestation of minors. Sipe writes in his new book, ‘I estimate that at any one time 50 percent of priests are practicing celibacy’. He makes these shocking estimates: ‘Thirty percent of priests are involved in heterosexual relationships, associations, experimentation or patterns of behavior. Fifteen percent of priests are involved with homosexual relationships...Six percent of priests involve themselves with minors’."

This indicates that about 50% of priests have a sexual relationship with another individual.  So much for celibacy.  Chastity is in even greater trouble.  Stille references a study that indicates that 95% of priests engage in masturbation.

The Church is aware of these issues.  Stille provides these comments.

“When Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council in 1962, bishops from many parts of the world hoped that the church would finally change its doctrine and allow priests to marry. But John XXIII died before the council finished its work, which was then overseen by his successor, Paul VI (one of the popes most strongly rumored to have been gay). Paul apparently felt that the sweeping reforms of Vatican II risked going too far, so he rejected the pleas for priestly marriage and issued his famous encyclical Humanae Vitae, which banned contraception, overriding a commission he had convened that concluded that family planning and contraception were not inconsistent with Catholic doctrine.”

The result of a path to priestly marriage being cut off led to many heterosexual priests leaving their calling and fewer heterosexuals entering the priesthood.  But the attraction of the priesthood to those with homosexual leanings was undiminished.

Stille gains additional perspective from a Father Thomas Doyle, “a canon lawyer who was tasked by the papal nuncio to the US with investigating abuse by priests while working at the Vatican embassy in Washington in the mid-1980s, when the first lawsuits began to be filed.”

“Conversely, the proportion of gay priests increased, since it was far easier to hide one’s sex life in an all-male community with a strong culture of secrecy and aversion to scandal. Many devout young Catholic men also entered the priesthood in order to try to escape their unconfessable urges, hoping that a vow of celibacy would help them suppress their homosexual leanings. But they often found themselves in seminaries full of sexual activity. Father Doyle estimates that approximately 10 percent of Catholic seminarians were abused (that is, drawn into nonconsensual sexual relationships) by priests, administrators, or other seminarians.”

The increase in homosexually oriented priests does not seem to be associated with an increase in people who might prey on children, but it does lead to increasing dysfunction within the priestly ranks.

“Sipe, during his decades of work treating priests as a psychotherapist, also concluded that the lack of education about sexuality and the nature of celibate life tended to make priests immature, often more comfortable around teenagers than around other adults. All this, along with a homosocial environment and the church’s culture of secrecy, has made seminaries a breeding ground for sexual abuse.”

The Church has an ungodly mess to deal with in terms of sexuality.  How is Pope Francis doing?  One of his more curious moves was to jointly declare that Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II were saints.  John XXIII has an unblemished reputation and might have had the courage to deal with the Church’s problems, but John Paul II is responsible for the policy of protecting the Church’s reputation by trying to deny there was a problem with sexual abuse.

“The greatest responsibility for the problem of sexual abuse in the church clearly lies with Pope John Paul II, who turned a blind eye to it for more than twenty years. From the mid-1980s to 2004, the church spent $2.6 billion settling lawsuits in the US, mostly paying victims to remain silent. Cases in Ireland, Australia, England, Canada, and Mexico followed the same depressing pattern: victims were ignored or bullied, even as offending priests were quietly transferred to new parishes, where they often abused again. ‘John Paul knew the score: he protected the guilty priests and he protected the bishops who covered for them, he protected the institution from scandal,’ I was told in a telephone interview by Father Thomas Doyle…”

John Paul also eliminated any path to equality for women.

“John Paul II did his best to tie the hands of his successors by declaring the prohibition of female priests to be an ‘infallible’ papal doctrine, and Francis has acknowledged that debate on the issue was ‘closed’.”

John Paul’s legacy is a large number of high-ranking priests who are guilty of participating in his policy toward sexual abusers.  Any attempt to punish all the guilty would lead to the removal of much of the Church hierarchy.  It would require a momentous decision on the part of Francis to pursue such an outcome.  Conservatives are already trying to run him out of office, so there is no hope of relaxing views on celibacy, homosexuality, and female roles.  This leaves Stille with a rather pessimistic view of the future of both Pope Francis and the Catholic Church.

“Both radical change and the failure to change are fraught with danger, making Francis’s path an almost impossible one. He is under great pressure from victims who are demanding that the church conduct an exhaustive investigation into the responsibility of monsignors, bishops, and cardinals who knew of abusing priests but did nothing—something he is likely to resist. Such an accounting might force many of the church’s leaders into retirement and paralyze it for years to come—but his failure to act could paralyze it as well. As for the larger challenges facing the church, Francis’s best option might be to make changes within the narrow limits constraining him, such as expanding the participation of the laity in church deliberations and allowing women to become deacons. But that may be too little, too late.”


The interested reader might find the following article informative:



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