April 25th 2005
intolerance and illogic
Ed’s note: Though this post is not of a terribly timely nature, regarding actual media coverage, it’s still something I want to share. So don’t read this with an eye for “current events.”
I’ve been reading and participating in a thread about the sex scandal in the Catholic Church on a listserv for alumni of my alma mater. One of the things that’s really given me pause in the discussion is how many people associate sexual abuse of children or adolescents (particularly of boys) with homosexuality.
It all began with a post lauding the election of Benedict XVI, because of his adherence to orthodoxy. The post further stated that the sex-abuse scandal was the result of “moderates” in the Catholic Church convincing the church leadership that allowing homosexual priests was OK, since they’d be celibate. And what happened then? A bunch of little boys got raped!
The logical fallacy here is astonishing. Anecdotal evidence shows that the Catholic Church has had homosexual priests for centuries—men who became priests because of a strong and true vocation along with men who became priests because they didn’t know what else to do with their lives. (Note that the latter is true of heterosexual priests also—second sons in large Catholic families were often encouraged to become priests, whether they felt a true vocation or not. Also, it wasn’t uncommon for a young man to enter seminary at age 13, and never leave. How can you know your vocation before you finish high school? But I digress.)
So if homosexual priests (and priests with less-than-true calls to the vocation) have been around for so long, how can there be a connection between homosexuality and sexual abuse when we are only now seeing so many ocurrences of sexual abuse by priests?
We have to forget about homosexuality—after all, most sexual abusers of children are heterosexual. And we have to think about what’s going on in the Church that has fostered this behavior. Assuming that the sexual abuse actually increased and the scandal wasn’t solely a result of greater reporting of such instances, I can guess at some of the factors:
I feel great pity for the young men who entered the seminary for the wrong reasons and found themselves sinking—perhaps weighted down by their own proclivities and emotional weaknesses, with little support from their fellow priests or from their superiors. The culture of silence in the Church would only exacerbate the problem. I do not excuse any priest who abuses his parishoners, children or adults, but I am very saddened by a church that would see the abuse happening and cover it up—and, what’s more, fail to provide appropriate treatment for the abusers! What could have been the motivation—economics? We’ve already got too few priests, so let’s keep the bad ones around and just move them away from where they’ve already done damage. Or was there some deeper, more sinister drama going on—of the “it’s always been this way, so let’s just hide it” variety?
I didn’t intend this post to devolve into a commentary on the actual sexual abuse in the Church. Rather, I meant to pick apart the foolish arguments I’ve been reading about the abuse and its (in my mind, non-)connection to homosexuality.
For instance, someone made the connection between the average age of the victims (12) and a statistic that most homosexual men have their first sexual contact at the average of 12.7 (compared to 15 and 16 years old for heterosexual men and both homosexual and heterosexual women). If those who later identify as homosexual are having such early first sexual encounters, who is initiating this contact? Why, it must be older, predatory homosexuals! Why is there an assumption that, because a young(er) adolescent is having sex (or a sexual encounter of some kind), he must be the victim of an older man? Is it because a lot of people still have this idea that a homosexual can be “made”—early sexual contact with another male must make little boys gay?
What upsets me most is that this discussion was occuring among some very well-educated men and women, including attorneys, physicians, and other advanced degree holders. I know that education is not a proxy for tolerance, but I hoped it might be a proxy for a willingness to hold an open discussion. (And, to be fair, many of the participants in the discussion were quite open to dialog. It was the few, the profoundly intolerant, with their blanket statements and overwhelming arrogance, that got under my skin and made me so angry.)
Sexual abuse is about power, not about sex. Sexual abuse is usually situational and opportunistic, which is why most victims know their abusers. And sexual abuse in an institutional setting, without repercussion, will only feed on itself. This is the real tragedy. If the Church would stop thinking about sexual orientation and start thinking about transparency, perhaps this is conversation that wouldn’t be happening.
