The  Catholic Crisis

The Catholic Church is facing its most serious crisis in 500 years. In these last few months, a new wave of clerical sexual abuse revelations left the world in shock. From Australia to Chile to Germany to the United States, horrifying reports revealed thousands of cases of child molestation by members of the clergy. One U.S. grand jury report documented 1,000 children abused by 300 priests in the state of Pennsylvania alone over seven decades.

The new wave of revelations in 2018 was disturbing not only because it exposed the persistence of abuse but also because it implicated high level church officials in the abuse and its cover-up. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, resigned from the College of Cardinals in July when credible accusations came to light that he had sexually abused a minor and harassed seminarians he supervised. The McCarrick revelations were particularly troubling because the former archbishop had played a leadership role in the Catholic Church’s response to the last U.S. clerical sexual abuse scandal in 2002. In late August, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former papal diplomat, had published a letteraccusing Pope Francis of knowing about McCarrick’s sexual abuses for years and helping to cover them up. Viganò concluded by calling on the pope to resign.

The two-year investigation by a grand jury into all but two Pennsylvania, USA dioceses turned up dozens of witnesses and half a million pages of church records containing “credible allegations against over three hundred predator priests.” 

More than 1,000 child victims were identifiable, but the “real number” was “in the thousands,” the grand jury estimated, given those children whose records were lost or who were afraid to ever come forward.

Victims were often traumatized for life, driven to drugs, alcohol and suicide, the grand jury said. The only recourse was to recommend changes to the law and expose what had happened to make sure such widespread abuse was never repeated.

One cleric raped a seven-year-old girl in hospital after she had her tonsils out, the report said. Another child drank juice, only to wake up the next morning bleeding from his rectum and unable to remember what had happened. The jury said that “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God (bishops) who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades.” 

Church elders were instead promoted and predator priests allowed to remain in ministries for 10, 20 even 40 years after leaders learned of their crimes as the list of victims got longer and longer. 2 days ago it was reported that nearly 400 Catholic clergy members in Illinois have been accused of sexual misconduct, but church officials have only informed congregants of a fraction of those who have faced allegations.

 In Australia, Cardinal Pell was found guilty in December 2018 of one count of sexual penetration of a child under the age of 16 and four counts of an indecent act with a child under the age of 16. 

At that trial the complainant, now 35, said he and the other choirboy had separated from the choir procession as it exited the church building. He and the other boy sneaked back into the church corridors and entered the priest’s sacristy, a place they knew they should not be. There they found some sacramental wine and began to drink. The complainant alleged that Pell had walked in on them. Pell then manoeuvred his robes to expose his penis. He stepped forward, grabbed the other boy by the back of his head, and forced the boy’s head on to his penis, the complainant told the court. Pell then did the same thing to the complainant, orally raping him. Once he had finished, he ordered the complainant to remove his pants, before fondling the complainant’s penis and masturbating himself. A few weeks later Pell attacked the complainant again as he passed him in the church corridor, pushing him against the wall and squeezing his genitals hard through his choir robes, before walking off. Cardinal Pell has been sentenced to six years in prison.

What is the public perception of the scandal? First, that a large number of priests have been viciously preying on minors. Second, that church authorities have been facilitating these crimes by reassigning molesters to parish after parish despite complaints. Third, that the church has been rebuffing victims with courtroom tactics instead of offering pastoral care. Fourth, that the Catholic Church has been engaging in a massive cover-up, hiding cases from legal authorities and settling suits on the sly. The phrases summing up these charges run like mantras through the news stories: "shuttling pedophile priests from parish to parish," "stonewalling the victims," "paying hush money."

Meeting on Clerical Sex Abuse

Pope Francis opened a historic summit on child protection and the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse crisis. The meeting was potentially a consequential moment for this papacy and the most visible step taken by the Vatican to impress upon bishops and other church leaders — some of them still skeptical — the enormity of a crisis that has shaken the faithful.

About 190 bishops and cardinals attended the four-day summit (21^st Feb 2019), during which they heard traumatic testimony from those who had been raped and molested by priests, and about the indifference that the Catholic church’s hierarchy has shown towards them.

One woman from Africa told the summit that the priest who began raping her at age 15 forced her to have three abortions, and beat her when she refused him sex. A survivor from Chile told the bishops and religious superiors they had inflicted even more pain on victims by discrediting them and protecting the priests who abused.

Expectations for action were amplified by victims and victim advocates, who converged in Rome to apply pressure from outside the meeting, which took place in a Holy See conference hall. Pope Francis ended the landmark meeting on clerical sexual abuse by calling “for an all-out battle against the abuse of minors” and insisting that the church needed to protect children “from ravenous wolves.”

But for all the vivid language and the vow “to combat this evil that strikes at the very heart of our mission,” the pope’s speech was short on the sort of detailed battle plan demanded by many Catholics around the world.

Strangely,Pope Francis has said that those who constantly criticise the Catholic church are “friends of the devil”. Speaking to pilgrims from southern Italy, the pontiff said that defects of the church needed to be denounced so they could be corrected, but that those who condemned “without love” were linked to the devil.“One cannot live a whole life accusing, accusing, accusing, the church,” he said. People who did, he said, were “the friends, cousins and relatives of the devil”.

While we can see the problem as too deepset to be able to be solved, it behoves all of us who can attempt to empathise with the many thousands of victims to demand stronger actions from the Catholic church.

The  global Catholic population has grown, and today records show there are 1.4 billion baptised Catholics. The total number of Bishops in the world increased by 49 units, to 5,353. The total number of priests in the world is around 415,000.

Celibacy and the Catholic Church: Will the Hypocrisy Ever End?

In 1039, Pope Leo IX imposed celibacy on all clergy, a decision that contributed to the Great Schism of 1054, when the Catholic Church split. The priests who formed the Eastern Orthodox Church have always maintained that the Catholic celibacy rule is man-made, as opposed to Divine law.

On October 20, 2009, the Catholic Church reversed nearly two thousand years of doctrinal (although not actual) celibacy.  The truth is that the Vatican is relaxing the rule in order to poach priests from the Anglican Church, which permits its priests to marry. The Vatican is hoping to capture some of the 80 million Anglicans worldwide, including 3.2 million members of the U.S. Episcopal Church.

Catholic religious orders are full of people who are repressing their sexuality. Only people with no sexual drive at all, or people who are dismayed by their sexual drive and determined to try to repress it, would voluntarily enter a regime that demanded celibacy. Most people, even those with a deepseated religious commitment, take only a moment to realise that they could not possibly go without sex for their entire lives. Celibacy in the church, and failures of celibacy in the church, are part of the one inhumane system.

For hundreds of years, the Catholic Church has required members of its religious orders to be celibate. During the Middle Ages, when membership of the church was one of the more secure routes to power, recruitment to the church was strong, but adherence to celibacy was notoriously weak. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the church’s insistence on celibacy (or at least a rigorous pretence of celibacy) has been strong, and recruitment has been declining.

Why? One reason is that the importance of the church as a source of power and careers has been declining. There are fewer poor people inclined to join the church as a way of escaping their class.

We now know that many in the Catholic priesthood have broken their celibacy to commit sexual abuses of minors or people of diminished capacity. It is impossible to know how much pretense there is about celibacy in the Catholic Church — not only pretense about abuse, but also pretense about consensual sexual activity between priests, or priests and nuns, priests and laity, nuns and laity. Any such sexual activity has an overlay of hypocrisy.

But I think my main point is that there is a kind of hypocrisy and psychological corruption among many of the celibate members of the Catholic Church, in that it is based on denial of something within them that would be better expressed by breaking with the doctrines of their religion. The Catholic Church’s repression of homosexuality is prosecuted in large part by an army of repressed homosexuals incapable of honesty about their own sexuality.

The dishonesty and absurdity of this is increasingly apparent. “Celibate priests, it’s a sham,” said the woman from a devout family who was in her 20s when Discalced Carmelite head Father John Venard Smith* requested she “pleasure” him while he “reverenced” her body during spiritual sessions at the order’s Varroville priory. The late Father Smith was in his 70s when he singled her out for attention as she trained to join the Carmelite secular order in the early 1990s, when she believed Carmelite priests were “about as close to heaven as you’re going to get”.

Priestly celibacy is an unnatural and impossible demand dreamed up by the church centuries after Christ died.

The answer to all this is now obvious. The Catholic Church needs to fundamentally change its life-denying, repressive attitude towards celibacy. It needs to accept that sex is a part of what we are, married or not, embrace that part of our humanity and change its teaching to reflect that.

Once it does so there will be no reason not to have married priests, women priests, gay priests. And the repressed sexuality that warped so many priests in the past will end -- and with it the abuse.

There is universal agreement that those who have sex with minors should be prosecuted as criminals and expelled from the priesthood. But what about violations with adults? Are there other sexual violations that should be treated by the church with zero tolerance?

Rape or other criminal violations should, of course, receive zero tolerance. These violations should be reported to the police and prosecuted under the law. There is no place in the priesthood for such criminals. Many factors underlie the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. Here is an extremely brief (and therefore incomplete) summary. First, improper screening of candidates for seminaries led to some psychologically sick men being ordained as priests. When some bishops received reports of sexual abuse, the reports were tragically downplayed, dismissed or ignored. Second, the crimes of sexual abuse often went unreported to civil authorities, out of a misguided concern among church officials for “avoiding scandal,” the fear of litigation, or an unwillingness to confront the abusive priest. Third, grossly misunderstanding the severity of the effects of abuse, overly relying on advice from psychologists regarding rehabilitation, and privileging the concerns of priests over the pastoral care for victims, some bishops moved abusive priests from one parish to another where they repeatedly offended.

One of the many goals of celibacy is to love people as freely as possible and as profoundly as possible. That may seem strange to those used to defining religious chastity negatively—that is, as not having sex. But this has long been the tradition of the church. Besides its other roots, religious chastity was meant as another way to love others and serve the community. As such, it may have something to teach everyone, not just priests, brothers, and sisters.

Obviously, celibacy is not for everyone. (If it were, the world would be a much smaller place.) The overwhelming majority of people are called to romantic love, marriage, sexual intimacy, children, and family life. Their primary way of loving is through their spouses and children. It is a more focused, more exclusive, loving. That is not to say that married couples and parents do not love others outside their families. Rather, the main focus of their love is their family.

The priests who committed acts of abuse also took advantage of situational opportunities to groom their victims. According to the VAC (Violence Against Children) surveys, priests would begin grooming the potential victims once they became altar boys or otherwise served a role in the church. The grooming would take place over a period of time, and priests would often create opportunities for the abuse to take place, for example, taking the victims on a retreat. At the same time, the priests would build relationships with the families of the victims in order to gain their trust.

Some of the priests interviewed justified their actions by diminishing the wrongfulness of the behavior, deflecting the harmfulness of their actions, or placing the responsibility of the deviance on others. The priests minimized harm by downplaying what actually occurred or by using positive language surrounding the “relationship” between themselves and the victim. They viewed the sexual behavior as consensual, not harmful, and they viewed any behavior short of intercourse as not wrong because it was not sex. They often did not acknowledge that a single incident of sexual behavior constituted abuse, insinuating that it was the repetitive nature of abuse that is harmful rather than the act itself. Lastly, the priest-abusers’ claims that the event(s) occurred long ago implied that the harm should be forgotten because there was temporal distance between the incident(s) and the accusation. The priests rationalized that if there had been harm, the abuse would have been reported sooner. Another technique of minimizing harm employed by some of the accused priests was to call the interaction between the accuser and the accused something other than an abusive interaction. The language suggested that the interaction occurred as a part of a friendship or relationship, be it romantic or even a relationship with the family

Church Sees No Link

The Catholic Church maintains there is no link between the vow of celibacy and pedophilia. But Eugene Kennedy, a former priest who left the priesthood 25 years ago to get married, says celibacy can aid and abet pedophiles. "For them, celibacy is a wonderful cover," he says.

Many Catholic priests agree it is time to reconsider the celibacy requirement — especially at a time when the church is having difficulty recruiting new priests. But officially, within the Catholic Church, it's not even up for discussion.

It is interesting to note that Anglican clerics who convert to Roman Catholicism and become Catholic priests bring their families with them, so a precedent to allow married Roman Catholic priests already exists.
As to the homosexual cabal that infects the Roman Catholic priesthood, it started when the Catholic hierarchy, attempting to alleviate a severe priest shortage, allowed homosexuals to enter the priesthood, with the "promise" that they would refrain from acting out their homosexual "urges". (We know how that worked out). Once a few homosexuals established their presence as priests and bishops, the floodgates were opened to homosexuals as priests.

So where do we go from here? Can we honestly say the problem can be solved after the landmark meeting of February 2019?  I have no confidence that this problem will ever be solved as long as the church remains stuck in the traditonal frame of mind.