I ordered this book because the more I heard and read about "pedophile priests" the more I began to wonder if the Catholic Church deserved to be at the center of attention of those who care about protecting young children from sexual abuse. The terms "pedophile scandal" and "Catholic Church" just seemed to me to be an unnatural pairing. I am neither religious nor particularly spiritual. I was raised in a mainstream Protestant tradition and grew up mostly around Catholic families whose kids went to local parochial schools. The abuse stories I heard from them were entirely about how hard this or that nun had pounded their knuckles with rulers, twisted their ears, and/or made them sit in the corner with gum on their noses. Would not, prepubescent Catholic kids during the peak period of alleged abuse, roughly 1965 to 1995, have been vastly more likely to have contact with female nuns than males priests? Moreover, post-pubescent kids are more likely to have been cared for by priests as altar boys and high school students and improper sexual contact between adults and same sex early teens isn't pedophilia, it's homosexual sex abuse - a subset of hebephilia.
Yet over and over media reports refer to pedophilia within the Church. The thought struck me that we are experiencing a strange kind of double bind wherein both critics and supporters of the Church have been helping the story develop along the line that maximizes their political gains and minimizes their losses. Enemies of the Church harp on about pedophilia since the idea of sex with little children is so sickening that they could quickly get the attention of an otherwise indifferent public. At the same time erstwhile "defenders of the faith" might have been disinclined to point out how unlikely it was that actual "priestly pedophilia" might have taken place because any abuse was so much more likely to have been between Catholic post-pubescent males and priests, either or both of whom might have been unaware of their sexual preference till the moment of temptation
If the focus of the complaints were "homosexual abuse by priests" would not Church authorities then have to deal with all those allegations by anti-Catholics that priestly celibacy seemed to have encouraged the development of a priesthood disproportionally homosexual? Most studies now suggest that 5 per cent of male humans are genetically predisposed to be homosexual and that such awareness is likely to take place in late adolescence. It's not hard to hypothesize that hundreds of candidates for the priesthood would end up on a career path where most contact is between males and temptations for improper contact abound.
Politically, once the Church had already been convicted in the court of public opinion of "protecting pedophile priests" there was nothing to be gained by substituting abuse of adolescent boys for abuse of little boys. Indeed, a fair-minded person might somewhat sympathize with a Bishop who wasn't eager to go public with the rotten apple in his parish when the victim was a little girl or boy. But if the issue really were an elevated level of homosexuality in the priesthood, a major pillar of the Church would be undermined and all the good works of the Church might be threatened.
So why didn't the opponents of the traditional Church blow the whistle? My thinking is that they didn't t because they are all part of the great identity group coalition of the victimhood. If the real problem were gay priests it would call into question the post-modern conviction that gay men, like women, are universally victims of male hegemonic culture. It made sense to me. I wondered if there were research on the subject. Google and Amazon led me to Jenkins.
Philip Jenkins wrote this book in 1996 and it is anything but out of date. It is as much a case study of the way "social problems" (he backs away from "social panic" by the end of the book) are "constructed" by a set of actors working within a particular social arena during a critical period in history.
Though he doesn't use the term, he presents a picture of a "perfect storm" of brewed up by political interests and historic circumstances that have driven the Church dangerously near the rocks, because:
1. of distant memories of horror stories told by (Protestant and political) opponents of the church since the Reformation began in 1513. Catholics replied, of course, with equally wild slanders, but with generally less imagination.
2. Jenkins argues that when the first cases of priestly abuse of pre-pubescent children surfaced in circa 1970 that the consensus of professional therapists was that the damage to children was less that most would imagine and that it would not be impossible for therapists to mitigate such damage and to straighten the twisted impulses of the perpetrators. He acknowledges, of course, that while both suppositions were wildly off the mark, they partially explain why the Church administrators let rotten apples continue to rot and infect. All this is quite beyond my expertise. I do remember the time as one of naïve and touchy-feely acceptance of sexual experimentation.
3. The fact that the bureaucratic structure of the Church and the obligation of formal confession generated a volume of written evidence that researchers, both fair-minded and otherwise, could mine for evidence and/or exploitation. I would add that Church doctrine accepts the humanity of homosexuals but demands that they abstain from sexual activity.
4. The hierarchal structure of the church is such that the sins of individual practitioners are easily aggregated by its enemies and thus sin stories become cumulative - while the sins of those employed by other groups, professions, and agencies are more likely assigned to individual perverts. Who remembers the follies of the Bakkers in the 80's?
5. The extreme wing of American feminism has found the church a wonderful foil for attacking their imagined world of paternal male exploitation. When accused of sexism, corporate America says "take us to court". The Church can only say "that's the way it is". Hammer away girls.
6. An obvious bonanza for American trial lawyers. How hard is it to morph an austere, elitist, and morally judgmental institution into a dangerously creepy haven for pedophiles before a jury of one's presumed peers.
7. And a bigger and better second life for the repressed memory and therapy crowd. Back in the 80's, prosecutors were getting convictions for pedophilia based on all kinds of questionable testimony adduced by fringe players of the poorly regulated crowd of psychotherapists then so much in vogue.
8. Alas, Jenkins' review of the evidence neither supports nor contradicts my suspicions about the "double bind" referred to above actually explains the way the story of the "pedophile priests" has unfolded. He does refer to the results of what he considers a meticulously fair (and rare from both sides of the issue) study of clerical involvement in sexual misdeeds conducted by and within the Chicago Diocese by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin that seem to suggest that I am on the right track. The Chicago study found that improper priestly sex was between post-pubescent males in close to 80 percent of the cases. Jenkins, of course, is well aware that hard evidence in this area of human behavior is hellishly difficult to come across.
So by all means, read the Jenkins book. He is a lot more judicious and academically correct than most of those who do nearly all the talking about "The Church in Crisis".
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