Originally appeared March 20, 2002, in the Chicago Free Press.
The recent disclosure of improper sexual contacts between Catholic youths and Catholic priests in the Boston archdiocese and elsewhere is what journalists call a "developing story" - one that is still unfolding, in which new information can be expected on a weekly if not daily basis, and whose implications have not yet fully been grasped.
Yet even at this early stage it seems worthwhile to try to separate out some of the basic issues involved, if only to avoid succumbing to the enormous amounts of "spin" promoted by the archdiocese, the Vatican and various interest groups.
Sexual contacts between priests and young people seem improper for at least three reasons:
1. Priests, as priests, promise to live a life of celibacy, commonly understood by laymen to mean abstinence from sexual relations or sexually arousing contacts.
Sexual contacts with young people seem to violate the very letter of that promise. In addition, they seem to do so in a clandestine, even secretive fashion, targeting those who are not only the most pliant and suggestible, but also the easiest to intimidate, shame or bribe into silence. More than one accuser has told of a priest blessing him after their sexual contacts.
To be sure, we all know of Catholic clerics who interpret the promise of celibacy more narrowly to mean abstinence from sexual intercourse proper, or abstinence from intercourse with women or simply remaining unmarried. And, to be sure, clerical celibacy was originally imposed primarily to prevent priests from having (legitimate) children they might wish to pass on property to.
But to the extent that the church promotes or allows a sharp divergence between lay and clerical understanding - on this as on so many other matters - instances where priestly behavior publicly contradicts popular understanding are an understandable cause for that gravest of all clerical sins, "scandalizing the faithful."
2. Priests are in a position of responsibility, delegated by parents, when dealing with young people.
Catholic parents often teach their children to trust and obey the priest, confident that priests have their children's interests at heart as much as the parents do, will treat the youths with respect and dignity, and will do their best to guide and protect them.
When parents find that priests' behavior with youths are for their own benefit - viz. erotic gratification of whatever sort - rather than for the children's benefit, parents justifiably feel that priests have betrayed their trust, the more offensively so because the parents taught it to the youths, never thinking that they needed to warn or caution their children about priests.
3. Priests are in a position of authority when dealing with all parishioners, but especially young people in their charge.
Many Catholic youths are taught that the priest is the person who can teach them what is right and moral, perhaps even more reliably than their parents, and who is obligated in his own conduct to exemplify those virtues, even more reliably than their parents. We might say that that is pretty much the basic job description for a priest; the rest is ritual and ceremony.
If young people feel a priest's conduct toward them violates that assumption, then their whole idea of who and what is a valid source of moral and ethical information seems falsified, in fact, completely reversed. Either the authority of the teachers or the teaching is called into question, perhaps both in a mutually destructive contradiction.
Specifically, just as parents resent their children being imposed upon, so too young people must find it deeply disturbing to realize - either gradually or in a sudden realization - that the priest is not treating them as a person for whom he has concern but as a means for his own gratification. This can hardly fit with the view of a priest as caring and benevolent.
In addition, people such as priests can, merely by virtue of their authority but also because of their greater age, be felt as applying great pressure to do as they say even against a younger, more vulnerable person's better judgment and personal inclination. That perceived pressure to violate one's own judgment and inclination is what can harm young people psychologically.
If we turn to various explanations of how these incidents come about and how to prevent them, we face a babel of opinions.
Pope John Paul II's personal spokesperson Joaquin Navarro-Valls has tried to place the blame on homosexual priests, claiming that gay men should not be priests at all. But if estimates of the large proportion of homosexuals in the American priesthood are anywhere near correct, even if "homosexual" priests were involved, it would be only a small proportion who behaved improperly.
But more to the point, and contrary to Navarro-Valls, it seems likely that priests who are attracted to other adult men, to say nothing of priests actually involved with other adult men, are not likely to seek involvement with immature males.
Some liberal critics suggest that an (ostensibly) celibate priesthood is somehow responsible. That may be true but not because self-aware, self-accepting robustly heterosexual youths are unlikely to volunteer for a celibate priesthood. After all, self-aware, self-accepting homosexual youths would seem no more likely to be drawn to a celibate priesthood.
The Catholic church will have to search wider and deeper into its doctrines and its history for the sources of its current troubles.