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	From Jonathan Kay's Archives: Priestly 'Celibacy' Is the Root Cause of Catholic Sex Abuse By Jonathan Kay National Post September 30, 2009 http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/09/30/332088.aspx The breaking child-porn scandal regarding Raymond Lahey, former bishop of Antigonish in Nova Scotia, sent me down memory lane to this column ... Jonathan Kay National Post Friday, March 05, 2004 Canadian news outlets provided minimal coverage of last week's Catholic sex abuse bombshell in the United States. We should be paying closer attention: As scandals at orphanages, residential schools and churches here in Canada demonstrate, the molestation epidemic afflicting Catholicism knows no borders. On Feb. 27, two major reports were released documenting the extent of American priestly abuse between 1950 and 2002. The numbers are staggering. All told, 4,392 priests were alleged to have sexually abused 10,667 children. That works out to about 4% of all priests in ministry, a figure many times the rate of that for Protestant clergy. The most obvious explanation for the discrepancy is simple: Protestant ministers are allowed to take wives. Catholic priests are not. This is hardly the first time society has shone a light on priestly abuse. Nor is it the first time critics have questioned whether the Catholic Church should maintain the celibacy requirement for its clerics. But never has the data been this complete and this damning. Never has it been more obvious that the Church must reverse a millennium of dogma and permit priestly marriage. Some trace the Catholic child abuse epidemic to the disproportionately high presence of homosexuals in the ministry. There is some truth to this: Of the alleged abuse victims identified, 81% were male, just 19% female. Most pedophiles who molest young boys are heterosexuals. (What draws their interest is smooth skin, an absence of body hair and other youthful qualities shared by pre-pubescent boys and girls alike.) But the data released last week shows that roughly 40% of the males alleged to have been abused by American Catholic priests were 14 or older. The men who prey on these sexually developed, post-pubescent boys, studies show, aren't typically gender-indifferent pedophiles, but rather gay "ephebophiles." All in all, homosexuals -- who are believed to account for at least one-third of Catholic priests -- are thought to be responsible for about half of all priestly sex abuse. But even if you remove homosexuals from the equation, the data yield an abuse rate among straight priests of about 3%, which is still extremely high. Clearly, the problem spans gay and straight clerics alike. The root cause of the abuse epidemic, as a variety of researchers have concluded, is that Catholic seminaries seem to both attract and incubate sexual deviants and disturbed closet cases. Or, as Harvard Medical School associate professor Martin P. Kafka more gingerly put it in a recent report delivered to the Vatican: "The [available] data suggest that Catholic diocesan priests are a relatively distinct and atypical group of male sexual offenders. It is possible then that their motivations to engage in sexual misbehaviour are associated with their specific developmental path, psychologically determined predispositional vulnerabilities, or a pre-selection bias in their choice of profession. In addition, several unspecified factors specifically associated with Catholic clerical education and socialization could be associated with an increased risk of expressing or experimenting with socially immature but aberrant sexual behaviours." Driving all this is the formal requirement that Catholic priests be celibate. On one hand, the restriction serves to attract men who are ashamed of their sexuality for one reason or another, and are looking for a socially acceptable means to repress it. On the other hand, by insulating priests from the normalizing influence of a monogamous, adult relationship (gay or straight), it permits them to surrender to their dark fetishes unimpeded. Men who remain single through their middle-aged years often sink into a sort of self-indulgent weirdness. Typically, this manifests itself in harmless bachelor habits. But when there is a latent sexual pathology, the situation gets more serious. And those are the specimens the Church is recruiting. Writing on the subject in these pages yesterday, John O'Sullivan declared Catholic bishops must demonstrate "courage" in the face of the current scandal by "insisting that seminaries enforce the strict obligation of chastity on both heterosexuals and homosexuals despite the cries of the mob." In light of last week's news, facing down the mobs of anti-chastity critics will certainly require a lot of courage. But if it has the best interests of its flock in mind, the Vatican will realize that courage and wisdom are very different qualities. Contact: jkay@nationalpost.com
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