Sex Scandals in the Church
8 April 2002
A friend of mine was in a high school seminary of a Catholic religious order in the late 1960s. Years later he told me about how one of the older priests had tried to deal with some of the new attitudes in the Church following Vatican II: "I used to say that sex is bad. But now I have to say that sex is good. So I say: Sex is good. But it is not good for you, and it is not good for me."
Now, over thirty years later, the revelation that some priests, especially in the United States, have sexually abused boys at various times over the years has become an acute and grave scandal in the Church and the larger society. Various pundits—Catholics, lapsed Catholics, concerned observers, and chronic enemies of the Church—now offer their opinions in the press. Many rebuke the Church in horror that such a thing could happen. Many blame the celibacy of the clergy practiced in the Western Church or "the Catholic attitude toward human sexuality." I believe they have got the wrong end of the stick.
Celibacy is not the problem. Ordaining married men would not eliminate the possibility that a few of those ordained might be child molesters. The newspapers are full enough of reports of husbands and fathers who abuse their own and their neighbors’ children to demonstrate this proposition. While it is perhaps heartening to see that the world retains enough vestigial reverence to hold priests to a higher standard than teachers, say, or men in general—or else they might be angry, but not shocked—priests are not more likely to commit this crime than anyone else. Nor is the Catholic attitude toward sex at fault, if by this is meant the moral teaching and standards accepted by Catholics (and most everyone else) for centuries up to the last one.
The problem is not celibacy, but lack of chastity. Scandal has erupted over sexual acts with children because that is the last offense against chastity that the culture is still willing to consider wrong. Offenses against chastity are nothing new, nor are they limited to Catholic clergy; but it is getting harder and harder to avoid them, whether one is attracted to women, men, children, or dumb animals. The cries of opposition to celibacy are actually part of the campaign against chastity; of this campaign sexual abuse of children is only the most poisonous fruit.
The principle of chastity is not the belief that sex is bad. It is the belief that sexual acts have their proper place within a committed relationship of marriage in which children can be conceived and raised. Chastity is a virtue which everyone needs to practice, and which anyone can violate. The opposition to chastity is the belief that sexual acts are located not in the context of a relationship and in a natural biological purpose, but in the experience of the individual subject. In this view, their purpose is the fulfillment of the subject, and therefore any restriction on them is in the long run arbitrary.
It should be evident on a moment’s reflection that these views of sexuality are but a part of a much larger opposition in philosophy. Historically, the divergence in Western thought goes back to Descartes if not further, and is based so thoroughly on different views of the nature of reality that it is probably impossible for the conclusions of one side to be reached based on the principles of the other. Fascinating as it would be to plumb the depths of this philosophical gulf, I will restrict myself to discussing its implications for sexual behavior at the turn of the twenty-first century.
While ignoring the virtue of chastity, even scoffing at it, is as old as history, until the last hundred years or so, the intellectual leaders in cultures both Eastern and Western at least professed belief in it. This began to change in the twentieth century with the widespread popularization (and misunderstanding) of Freud’s psychoanalysis. Wilhelm Reich’s dubious theories and Margaret Sanger’s campaigns for birth control during the first half of the century led to the real campaigners for sexual liberation in the second half. By the 1960s, the work of Alfred Kinsey, Hugh Hefner, and Helen Gurley Brown had thoroughly indoctrinated the ideological ruling class in America and throughout the West in the new principles of morality. Sexual activity was no longer considered primarily as the basis of family relations, but as an expression of individual need. No exercise of the sexual faculty could be considered wrong; indeed, it was considered unhealthy and dangerous to exercise any restraint in sexual matters whatever.
Undermining the permanence of marriage in favor of self-fulfillment was the first step in the campaign. The legitimization of fornication and adultery followed, with the acceptance of pornography, and most recently, homosexual activity. While in fact not everyone has accepted these changes, they have prevailed among those who rank as the makers of opinion: writers, intellectuals, educators, and those who support them. Sexual self-control, like other forms of self-control, has never been easy; but the new morality is that it is somewhere between unnecessary and destructive. Teachers can tell teenagers not to smoke or drink, but if they tell them not to fornicate they are likely to lose their jobs.
While the rulers of our culture are prepared to encourage sexual activity among teenagers, we still officially draw the line at sex between adults and children. There have been those who challenge this line, like the North American Man-Boy Love Association or the 1970s cult known as the Children of God, but the law has so far not caught up with their advanced views. But once the ideology of sexual liberation has taken hold, drawing lines becomes difficult, or even arbitrary. Sexual activity as an expression of individual need quickly becomes an individual right. Why then should someone who is attracted to young children not have the same rights as someone attracted to adults of either sex? The principle of what is natural is a part of the old morality; and the pederast can very easily convince himself that he is doing his partner, not harm, but a great favor. And if it’s all subjective, who is to say that he is not?
Of course, I think it’s evil, but then I am one of those oldthinkers who believe in an objective right and wrong.
In theory, the Catholic Church should be a solid bastion of objective morality. However, Catholic intellectuals and educators are susceptible to the ideas of their non-Catholic peers, as the mass of Catholics have been subject to the social repercussions of the new sexual morality. When the means of discourse in controlled by those who hold a contrary ideology, it is difficult to make an argument, or even voice a teaching, outside its realm of principles. Catholic leaders trying to defend traditional moral teachings have felt compelled to do so in the epistemological terms of the prevailing intellectual culture, an enterprise doomed to failure. You cannot teach the principles of chastity in the language of sexual self-expression.
Nor can you defend it; that is the problem the Church faces in the present crisis. In the terms of discourse that prevail in contemporary culture, chastity is an atavistic standard and celibacy an arbitrary imposition. When commentators attack the practice of ordaining celibate men to the priesthood, it is not because they uphold the sanctity of marriage in the way Catholics understand it. Chastity as applied to marriage, demanding lifelong faithfulness and openness to children, is almost as great a burden in modern terms as celibate chastity. If the ability to seek sexual fulfillment through meaningful relationships that satisfy one’s inner sexual identity is essential to being a complete human person, then why stop with one wife—or with women—or with adults—or even with human beings, if something else turns you on? And yet they profess to be shocked when people act on the logic of their philosophy.
Celibacy is not a universal practice, or one essential to Catholic doctrine. While Catholics East and West, as well as the Orthodox Churches, agree that men should not marry once ordained, and choose bishops only from the ranks of the unmarried, only the Western Church has restricted the priesthood to celibates, and that rule has not always been well enforced. (I have heard it asserted that celibacy began in the Western Church about the year 1000. As a historian, I know that this is not true, but that it was only about the year 1000 that Church authorities began to make a concerted effort to enforce the policy.)
While celibacy is not necessary, I would agree with the present Holy Father that it is a valuable gift, a first line of defense as it were against the spirit of the age. When Pope Gregory and his associates began the enforcement of celibacy in the 11th century, one of the motivations was that it counteracted the prevailing tendency for all positions in society to become hereditary possessions. Today it is also a contradiction, but to the tendency to sexualize all human relationships and activities. The committed celibate, who forswears sexual relations for the sake of the service of God, proclaims that there is a purpose to human life beyond the material, beyond the temporal, beyond the self. It is a life that would not make sense if there were no God; therefore merely to accept it is a proclamation of God’s existence and sovereignty.