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	Celibacy and Child Abuse By Andrew Brown The Guardian March 19, 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2010/mar/19/religion-catholicism-celibacy-ireland What role did celibacy play in the Catholic crisis? The most popular argument seems to be that it played a simple and direct part, by producing sexual frustration which then found inappropriate outlets. But that has to be wrong. If paedophilia and the abuse of adolescents were solely a response to sexual frustration, it wouldn't be perpetrated mostly people who are free to find sexual gratification elsewhere. And even in Ireland, it mostly was. The best figures I can find for this come from a 2002 government-sponsored report which says that 5.8% of all boys sexually abused were abused by clergy or religious. The corresponding figure for girls was 1.4%. So the overwhelming majority of child abuse in Ireland was carried out by people who were not bound to celibacy. To some extent paedophilia and ephebephilia are the expressions of a preference for sex with children and adolescents even when adults are available. They aren't just a matter of settling for the nearest and most vulnerable candidate, as some forms of the argument blaming celibacy suggest. This line of argument can be taken too far: in particular, conservative Catholics have argued that the problem is entirely down to homosexuality in the priesthood. Their reasoning is that since 80% of the victims (at least in the USA) were male, this proves that most of the perpetrators were gay men. However, the most recent John Jay research explicitly disputed this. It claimed that much of the imbalance was accounted for by the much greater availability of boys to priests and religious. Homosexual acts are not always an expression of homosexual preference, otherwise there would be no straight men in US jails. To think about this properly, we would need to know the number of priests in sexual relationships with consenting adults: unfortunately these figures are nowhere collected, though the psychologist and former Dominican Richard Sipe suggests in one of his books that in the Western world about 50% of all priests are in a sexual relationship (in the developing world the figure is generally agree to be much higher). Obviously, celibacy is impossible for some people, and well-adjusted celibacy is extremely rare and difficult. But it does exist. The official Catholic claim is that all priests are capable of it, although they are a tiny minority of believers, and the evidence suggests that some are; of those who don't, the majority clearly prefer adult women as partners. So I don't think that celibacy, by itself, explains the original offences, though it did make the priesthood as a profession more attractive to men who were confused or in denial about their own sexuality. But I do think that celibacy played an important role in the cover-up. The point about celibate brotherhoods is that they become just that – brotherhoods, in which your primary affectionate bonds are with your brothers. The institutional loyalty is rooted in this, and will not last without it. That is what will give you a sense that no one outside really understands, something which so easily modulates into a belief that the outside world is just wrong. This kind of groupthink isn't of course unique to Catholics, or even to religions in general. Shared hardship will always tend to weld together more closely any group it does not blow apart. But I think that corporate celibacy is a very powerful generator of group thinking, probably quite as powerful as bonobo-style corporate orgies would be. The obvious danger of celibacy is that it forces lust into obscure and terrible channels. But the subtle danger is that it diverts love, affection and trust away from the dangerous inhabitants of the sexually active world around you and into your safe and fellow-celibate family. I know that the standard justification of a celibate priesthood is that it frees its members from particular and specific loyalties and enables them to serve and love all their parishioners equally. This isn't nonsense: as any clergy spouse will tell you, a proper vocation does tend to squeeze out family life, and vice versa. But celibacy does not so much solve that problem as displace it. To live without any particular and specific group loyalties is almost impossible. If it's hard not to put your family ahead of your parishioners, it must be even harder, deprived of a family, not to put your fellow celibates ahead of them. All organisations and all institutions tend to cover up their own wrongdoing and to punish perceived disloyalty. There's nothing unique to the Catholic priesthood about that. But the bonds of affection and of institutional loyalty which the celibacy of the priesthood engenders must have strengthened those tendencies to the point where they sometimes became pathological.
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