Report: Catholic Sexual Abuse Caused by Secrecy and Mandatory Celibacy

I have followed the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal since it first exploded in Boston in 2002.  The expose broken by the Boston Globe coincidentally coincided with my coming out and my efforts to shake off the religious brainwashing of my upbringing as a Roman Catholic were all things sexual were viewed as evil and sinful except in the context of conceiving children - something that helped to increase the rolls of the Catholic Church. It goes without saying that the participants were not supposed to enjoy the conception process. Having been raised Catholic and exposed to the Church's obsession with all things sexual as well as the mandatory celibacy requirement (which historically arose because the Church leadership did not like losing revenues to the families of married priests), I always believed that much of the sexual abuse scandal traced back to the celibacy and the Church's bizarre view of sexuality not to mention the obsession with secrecy among high clergy.  Now, a new Royal Commission report out of Australia (where the scandal has been exploding for more than two years) seems to confirm that celibacy has played a significant role in the widespread sexual abuse  by priests.  The report also notes the dis-ingenuousness of Church efforts to blame the sexual abuse on gay clergy.   The Guardian looks at the report findings:

Mandatory celibacy and a culture of secrecy created by popes and bishops are major factors in why such high rates of child abuse have occurred in the Catholic church, a comprehensive study has found.

The report, which looked at the findings of 26 royal commissions and other inquiries from Australia, Ireland, the UK, Canada and the Netherlands since 1985, found that while the endangerment of children in institutions has been considerably lowered in Australia, children remained at risk in Catholic parishes and schools and Catholic residential institutions in other countries across the world, especially in the developing world where there are more than 9,000 Catholic-run orphanages, including 2,600 in India.

The patriarchal nature of Catholic institutions meant that abuse went unchallenged and, while a small number of nuns were abusers, the report found the risk of offending was much higher in institutions where priests and religious brothers had minimal contact with women. The report estimated about 7% of clergy had abused children between about 1950 and 2000.

“Their contact with women in teacher training institutions would have been carefully proscribed and then they were appointed to male-only schools where they were in charge of young boys and adolescents,” the report said.

“And they were living in all-male religious communities. They had to make do with a sacralised image of a sexless Virgin Mary. It was a recipe for a psycho-spiritual disaster.”

A Catholic priest who assisted the child sexual abuse royal commission, Prof Des Cahill, says discovering he had lived and worked with paedophile priests was part of the reason he has devoted the past five years to analysing why child abuse has plagued the church.

On Wednesday the findings from Cahill and his theologian co-author, Dr Peter Wilkinson, were released in a report, Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: An Interpretive Review of the Literature and Public Inquiry Reports, published by the Centre for Global Research at RMIT University.

The findings explore why the Catholic church and its priests and religious brothers, more than any other religious denomination, have become synonymous with the historical sexual abuse of children.
 I began wondering: ‘Why did this happen?’,” Cahill told Guardian Australia. “I knew some of the priest perpetrators and I studied with them and I lived with one of them. And yet I was never aware while I was in the church. You have to understand, a priest offender is very secretive and doesn’t want to be found out.”

His and Wilkinson’s findings were made after examining reports from royal commissions, academic studies, police reports and church reports from around the world since 1985. Among the findings was that mandatory celibacy was and remains “the major precipitating risk factor for child sexual abuse” and that popes and bishops created a culture of secrecy, leading to a series of gross failures in transparency, accountability, openness and trust.

The issue of confession was also examined. Last month, Australia’s child sex abuse royal commission called for clergy who refused to report child sexual abuse to police because the information was received during a religious confession to face criminal charges.
 The recommendation prompted an angry response from the archbishop of the archdiocese of Melbourne, Denis Hart, who said he would risk going to jail rather than report allegations of child sexual abuse raised during confession, and that the sacredness of communication with God during confession should be above the law.
 The report states that “young and vulnerable Catholic children, especially boys, were in danger and at risk in the presence of psychosexually immature, psychosexually maldeveloped and sexually deprived and deeply frustrated male priests and male religious, particularly those who had not satisfactorily resolved their own sexual identity”.

“This was especially so if these priests and religious were confused or in denial about their homosexual orientation while training and operating in a profoundly homophobic Church environment,” the report found.

Courtin said that the evidence was “absolutely clear” that sexual crimes involving children and paedophilia “have nothing to do with homosexuality at all”.

And homosexuality is one of the reasons or excuses that the church has used for a long time and it’s wrong, inappropriate and inaccurate of them,” she said. “Paedophilia does not equate with homosexuality.” 

After several years of therapy, I finally resolved the psychological damage from my Catholic upbringing. I also left the Catholic Church and after a brief interlude as an Episcopalian, I remain technically a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America ("ELCA") which liturgically is like the Catholic Church liturgy prior to the break between Martin Luther and the Catholic Church and which does not have the self-perpetuating Church hierarchy of the Catholic Church ( ELCA bishops must be reviewed and reappointed and local pastors are not imposed by remote and out of touch bishops).

Meanwhile, The Atlantic is reporting on the child pornography charges against a member of the Vatican diplomatic corps in Washington, D.C. (note that the Vatican refused to waive diplomatic immunity which would have allowed prosecution):

The Holy See announced on Friday that a priest who is part of its diplomatic corps has been recalled to Rome following allegations that he violated child-pornography laws. The official had been accredited to serve in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Department of State notified Catholic Church leaders about the alleged crime through diplomatic channels. The Vatican has opened an investigation and is keeping the name of the accused priest confidential. The AP reported that the U.S. government requested that the official’s diplomatic immunity be lifted. The request was denied.

The moral bankruptcy at the Vatican continues despite Pope Francis' improved PR efforts.