Catholic Scandals: A Crisis for Celibacy?
The Real Story Behind Clerical “Pedophilia” & What It Means for Clerical Celibacy
by Leon J. Podles
The Catholic Church has been the object of much unwanted attention, some of which it has brought upon itself. Dozens of cases involving clerical “pedophilia” have been tried in the courts, several priests have gone to jail, and various dioceses have had to pay out tens or perhaps even hundreds of millions of dollars (the exact sums are often in sealed settlements) to the victims.
There have been some high-profile cases: Bishop Symons of Palm Beach resigned after he admitted his sins with teenage boys. The archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Groer, was forced to resign after several seminarians complained that he had molested them. The diocese of Dallas had to pay out $23.5 million in a case involving Rudolph Kos. The bishop of Bayeaux is being prosecuted for not reporting to the police child molestation by one of his priests. And most recently a media storm has raged around the archdiocese of Boston since it became public that a pedophile priest, John Geoghan, was transferred from parish to parish in the 1980s, with the knowledge of the archbishop, Cardinal Law.
In view of this, a long-suffering public often wonders whether the Church would not be better off with a married clergy. Of course, the Latin tradition of clerical celibacy has been under attack for a long time for various reasons (celibacy is never exactly what one would call popular), and the latest scandals have only served to make the question more pressing in the minds of many Catholics.
True Pedophilia Is Rare
Philip Jenkins in his book Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis (Oxford University Press, 1996) tries to look at the problem objectively and dispassionately. According to Jenkins (who is not a Catholic), true pedophilia is extremely rare, is perhaps more common among Protestant clergy than among Catholic priests, and is even more common among married laymen. There is certainly a problem in the Catholic Church (and other churches), but it is not exactly what the media make it out to be.
First, as to the nature of clerical misbehavior: Pedophilia refers to sexual desire for pre-pubescent children. This is extremely rare, and only a handful of cases in several decades have involved priests who are true pedophiles.
Almost all the cases reported in the media as pedophilia actually involve an attraction (which a priest has acted on) to adolescent boys who are sexually mature but under the age of consent, which is 18 in civil law and 16 in canon law. This behavior is a variety of homosexuality. Homosexuals are often attracted to very young men because they combine the charm of boyishness with sexual maturity. Such sexual attraction is called ephebophilia, which the ancient Greeks cultivated to some extent but which rapidly fell out of favor as Christianity transformed classical culture.
In the 1960s and 1970s the Catholic Church followed secular psychological advice that sexual involvement with minors should be dealt with quietly and privately, that the youth involved were more likely to be hurt by a public fuss than by the sexual involvement, and that sexual interest in minors could be disciplined and cured.
This opinion changed in the mid-1980s, when many of the cases that had occurred from the mid-1960s onward came to light. In this period of about 20 years, about 150,000 men had served as Catholic priests and religious in the United States. There were about 500 reported (not all proved) cases of sexual involvement with minors, thus involving 0.3 percent of the clergy and religious, and most of the cases involved fifteen- to seventeen-year-old boys. Since not all allegations were substantiated, Jenkins says the evidence “suggests an offence rate of 0.2 percent.” The archdiocese of Chicago did a survey of all its clergy files from the years 1951–1991, and found allegations against 2.6 percent of priests, allegations that may have been justified against 1.7 percent of them. Moreover, it found only one true case of pedophilia, which involved a priest and his small niece.
Leon J. Podles holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, has worked as a teacher and a federal investigator, and is president of the Crossland Foundation. He is the author of The Church Impotent (Spence), Sacrilege (Crossland Press), and Losing the Good Portion: Why Men Are Alienated from Christianity (St. Augustine Press). Dr. Podles and his wife have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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