The National Catholic Reporter reprints the 1985 church report on the problem of child abuse in the priesthood. It gives the lie to the notion that the hierarchy was unaware of the problem until recently or that some people were unaware of the need for drastic action a long time ago. The paper comments:
Among the insights in this document are clear statements that while help can be provided for abusive priests, there is “no hope” for a cure for some of them, that a bishop “should suspend immediately” a priest accused of sexual abuse when “the allegation has any possible merit or truth,” and that “In this sophisticated society a media policy of silence implies either necessary secrecy or cover-up.” It said, “clichés such as ‘no comment’ must be cast away.”
But Law will keep spinning, won’t he?
BUM RAP ON BUSH: Don’t miss Will Saletan’s excellent dissection of second-guessing in Slate. Will just keeps getting better. A word about my criticisms of the Clinton administration’s policies aganst terrorism. My criticism was never that they could have anticipated something like 9/11; my criticism was their relative insouciance and incompetence in attacking, deterring and undermining al Qaeda over eight long years, despite being well aware of the potential danger OBL posed. On that, the evidence is pretty damning.
REAL MEN COME BACK TO THE FASHION WORLD: Good news from the New York Times. All those pale-faced, anemic, anorexic male models are making way for guys who look like guys. Some of them even have lives and careers. Imagine. Next up: chest hair?
THE REAL BASIL FAWLTY: Yes, he actually existed, and his widow is mad at the calumny directed by John Cleese et al in the comedy classic, “Fawlty Towers.” Alas, her defense was somewhat undermined by the testimony of a former waitress at the hotel that the model for Fawlty, Donald Sinclair, was indeed “bonkers.” There also followed a flurry of letters to the editor of the Telegraph, recalling horrific treatment at the hands of Sinclair. Here’s my favorite:
Sir – In the 1970s, my late wife booked a holiday for four of us at the Gleneagles Hotel. We arrived on the evening of the Thursday before Easter and went for a pre-dinner drink. Donald Sinclair (the original for Basil Fawlty) poured the drinks, remarking: “You had better drink up – my wife doesn’t spend her life in the kitchen preparing good food to have it spoilt because you can’t get here on time.”
It wasn’t the welcome we expected. On the Saturday morning, he explained that there would be two sittings for dinner because they had a dinner-dance. If we wouldn’t mind having the second, we could pre-order to ensure that we received our choice.
When we arrived at the bar that evening, the band was in a heated discussion with Mr Sinclair, after which two of them packed their instruments and left.
In the dining room, we found that some of the items we had ordered had run out, and we had to take alternatives.
On complaining to Mr Sinclair, I was told that the kitchen was not his responsibility and I should speak to his wife. It was clear from her that our order had not been passed on. It then took three attempts before we found a wine on their list that was in stock.
By this time, we had decided our holiday was turning into a mini-war and we might as well call it a day. On the Sunday morning, we calculated how much we owed and packed our bags. Mr Sinclair said that, unless we paid for the full period, he would sue.
In due course, my wife received a summons.
Well at least he didn’t assault his Spanish waiters.
USING THE CHURCH’S CRISIS AGAINST GAY RIGHTS: In a sign of some desperation, Stanley Kurtz has now argued that the collapse of the Catholic Church in America – and it is, indeed, a collapse – is an augury of what would happen to civil marriage if you let those promiscuous child-abusers – i.e. gays – into the institution. The premise here is simple: gays are for the most part unable at all times and in all places to act responsibly; and they are prone to child abuse. Therefore they must be barred from important social institutions. It’s not homophobic to say this: it’s true. I will try not to be personally offended by my friend Stanley’s generalizations. Being offended isn’t an argument. So let me tackle a simple premise in Kurtz’s argument that bears examination. This is the notion that all homosexuals are alike, that the expression of homosexuality in society at all times and in all contexts will be the same, i.e. depraved at best, irresponsible at worst, and that therefore the best policy toward homosexuality is to marginalize and stigmatize it, by denying it any status equivalent or even similar to that accorded heterosexuality. What Stanley doesn’t seem to get is that this is exactly what the Church has been doing to its gay members and gay priests for centuries. For centuries, the civil authorities also kept gays in jail or the closet or at the margins. But now the Church stands almost alone in its inability to confront or even discuss the matter of homosexuality, while the broader society has changed beyond recognition. The result is the current catastrophe. Gay Catholics – priests and laity – are caught between these two worlds. One world is pushing them toward liberation, self-esteem and responsibility; the other is still infantilizing, pathologizing and marginalizing them. In such a context, human beings can lose their way – especially when the Church refuses even to articulate or discuss its own doctrines about homosexuality – or indeed any sexuality. In recent years, I have spoken at Notre Dame, Boston College, Georgetown, and many other catholic universities and colleges about Catholicism and homosexuality. To my amazement, my own presentations were often the first time anyone on those campuses had publicly opened the debate. It’s that inability to grapple with a real social change and a real pastoral concern that lies behind some of the chaos in the American church today, and the stunning lack of guidance and care that gay priests and laypeople have had to deal with.
NOT TAMING: The broader argument that I and others have made is not that civil marriage or equal civil rights will somehow “tame” homosexuals. We’re not animals and we don’t need taming. The argument rather is that much of the dysfunction in gay lives stems from social marginalization and the deep psychological wounds of childhood, where same-sex orientation is stigmatized to this day. The effect upon the sexual and emotional development of gay kids can be brutal, and it is this experience – not homosexuality – that accounts for some of the social and psychological problems many gay men have. Imagine, say, that your first heterosexual feelings and crushes were simultaneously understood to be disgusting, threatening and vile. Now imagine suppressing all of those feelings for years, and living with layer upon layer of shame, guilt self-doubt, self-hatred whenever you found yourself falling in love or feeling the first lure of sexual and emotional intimacy. Do you really expect the adults who emerge from this psychological hell will be as adjusted as those whose sexualit
y and emotional lives have been affirmed from the very beginning? But when these adults have difficulty constructing relationships or maintaining monogamy, some social conservatives use that failure not to argue for a change in the way gay kids are brought up, or for involving gay people in mainstream society and institutions, but as an argument to reinforce the very social ostracism that helps create the dysfunction in the first place. And those gay men and women who, mirabile dictu, do manage to have viable, healthy lives and relationships are effectively dismissed as an insignificant fringe, or, when they struggle and fail, as examples of how depraved they all are anyway.
NOW TAKE GAY PRIESTS: Here you have, for many, a particularly harsh form of the psychological torment (and that is not too strong a term) that many gay men experience. Stanley speaks as if in the 1970s, liberal gays suddenly decided as a matter of policy that they would all join the priesthood. But of course, this is extremely silly. Gay men had dominated the church for centuries before that. And, from Cardinal Spellman to many of today’s Cardinals, the most orthodox were often the gay ones. These were not social revolutionaries. Their reactionary theology was the inverse of their own sexual panic. Conservatism was their means of self-control and control of others. Many of the closeted gay priests they protected hadn’t even begun to deal with their sexual orientation. They sought the church as a refuge from themselves and from reality. The celibacy requirement was a firewall for them against the desires they feared and alternately revered. Their emotional development, stunted and perverted by the very attitudes Kurtz wants to reinforce, got arrested in their teens. They often had mother complexes, in which they attempted to appease their mothers’ desire for them to be married by becoming a priest instead. And then the sexual revolution happened – and these men’s bifurcated lives and psyches began to unravel. As the Church’s teachings on non-procreative sexuality were rigidified, as the sexual freedom and options of straight potential priests multiplied, and as more prosperous Catholics left the tight-knit communities of their parents, two things happened. Vocations, especially among straights, declined dramatically. And the gay plurality within the Church began, in a vacuum of leadership, to experiment with their lives – often (but not always) to disastrous effect. So you had a priesthood still full of screwed-up gay men but with fewer and fewer straight men and far more sexual temptation. And the arrested development of these men also led them into the pathologies of pedophilia or the infantilizing desire to relate to teenagers. Again, this was not a function of their homosexuality. It was a function of their psychological dysfunction. And the response of the hierarchy was the worst of both worlds. What they needed to do was either end celibacy in order to encourage more straight men into the priesthood, or stop gay ordination (and watch the Church go down the tubes), or, better still, deal openly and candidly with gay priests, to provide psychological counseling, support, and openness in order to help them live chaste lives. Instead, the Church did nothing. Worse, it looked the other way. So all sorts of terrible abuses occurred – ranging from the more benign sexual exploration of some priests to the horrifying instances of pedophilia and ephebophilia that we’re now hearing more of. Like a family with a teenager acting out (and many of these screwed-up priests had the emotional development of teenagers), the father refused to talk, refused to see what was in front of him, and refused to deal. And now the kid’s in jail.
UNTIDY TRUTHS: How tidy it would be to see this crisis as a function of a group of malign ideologues and libertines ‘flooding’ into the Church to destroy it, and now begging to be admitted to civil marriage so they can destroy that too. Tidy, but wrong. Not just wrong, in fact, but a further ratcheting up of the sexual denial and incoherence that really exists on the social right. They believe that if you ban or stigmatize something, it will go away. It won’t. It will simply re-emerge in sad or perverse or self-destructive forms. What many of us are trying to do – in politics, in culture, and in our own lives – is to find a way to heal the wounds of the past and bring gay people into the family of society and the church where we belong. We are not without failure or sin. But we are also not without hope and virtue. And our witness is something that the Church desperately needs, if it is to end the rigid, callow and incoherent account of sexuality it still clings to as much out of fear as conviction.
WHAT THE WEB CAN DO: If you have nothing better to do with your time than track down old movie quotes.
The Dish 