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	Catholic Church Blames Abuse on the Devil in the Sixties By Susan Jacoby Washington Post May 25, 2011 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/spirited-atheist/post/catholic-church-blames-abuse-on-the-devil-in-the-sixties/2011/05/25/AGP5KPBH_blog.html In this column, I am speaking both as an atheist and as someone raised a Roman Catholic in the 1950s. The atheist is never surprised or shocked at anything done by an organization based on the premise that its head on earth is endowed by God Himself with infallible insight on faith and morals. But the former Catholic, who personally knows men molested by priests in the Fifties—only one of whom reported the event to his parents when he was a boy—is enraged by the church’s shameless, latest attempt to blame the whole pedophile priest horror on the expanded sexual freedom of the 1960s. Yes, blame it on the Sixties. What a convenient dodge for hypocritical old men who still refuse to look in the mirror and take responsibility for what happened to children on their watch under cover of what Catholics used to call The Faith with a capital “T” and a capital “F.” The study, conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York at a cost of $1.8 million (mainly borne by the church and Catholic organizations) relied heavily on data provided by the church. The report suggests that Catholic priests who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s were unprepared for the sexual revolution of the 1960s, lost their ethical moorings and violated children because of the confusion and stress created by an altered social and sexual climate. I’ll buy just one part of that theory—the part about priests being unprepared not only for the greater sexual openness of the Sixties but also for any understanding of the importance of pleasurable, consensual sex in adult life. Karen Terry, the report’s principal investigator and dean of research and strategic partnerships at John Jay College, said in an interview that although the number of abuse cases rose in the Sixties, she could not say with any certainty whether many cases from the 1920s through the 1950s went unreported. “Was there more abuse in the 50s than we reported in our graph? She asked. “No doubt. However, there is still an increase in the 1960s. That’s been shown each year the data has come in.” “No doubt” is the understatement of this century and the last. John Jay College also has something to answer for, because researchers gave their institution’s prestigious imprimatur to a report based on data supplied by the organization that did everything possible to protect the perpetrators. Anyone who went to parochial school in the 1950s knows that for a child to raise questions about the propriety of behavior by priests or nuns was almost unthinkable in the Catholic setting of that era. As the professional criminologists at John Jay know well, sex crimes of all kinds increased in the 1960s and 1970s, but there is no way to tell how much of that increase simply represented a rise in reporting. Certainly, it took the feminist movement, and feminist demands for changes in hostile police treatment of victims, to increase the reporting of adult heterosexual rape. If, as most criminologists believe, rape and child molestation are still underreported crimes, how much more true that was six, seven and eight decades ago. If this was true of society as a whole, it was certainly true within the church. In one of the report’s most tragicomic findings, the researchers conclude that it is inaccurate to describe abusers as “pedophile priests” because only 22 percent of the priests’ victims were prepubescent. The catch: The report defines “prepubescent” as age 10 or under. According to the American Psychiatric Association, a prepubescent child is generally classified as age 13 or under. Thus, priests abusing 11- and 12-year-old altar boys—prime age for interaction between priests and boys when I was in school—are not considered pedophiles in this report. Somehow, I don’t think it matters much to an abuse survivor whether he was molested at age 10 or age 12. The report also suggests that priests tended to molest boys mainly because they had more opportunities for contact with boys than with girls. In this view, priests weren’t expressing a sexual preference for either boys or children but were simply taking advantage of the the most convenient sexual targets—like men in prison who rape other prisoners. All right, then, let’s just call them perverted priests instead of pedophile priests. What this report does not do—and what the church has always been anxious to avoid—is address the basic issue of whether a culture that exalts and demands priestly celibacy attracted a disproportionate number of men who, for whatever reason, had an utterly twisted concept of sexuality. In those days, most candidates for the priesthood entered seminaries no later than age 18. How could they possibly have understood what a lifelong commitment to celibacy meant? How could they possibly have understood anything about their own bodies or desires when they were raised on religious beliefs that confuse sex with sin? Here is what really happened to the Catholic Church in the 1960s. The Second Vatican Council, which began in 1962 and ended in 1965, created a climate that encouraged questioning of long-established doctrines and rituals—one of them priestly celibacy—that shook the certitudes of many Catholics inside and outside the clergy. During that time, it also became easier for young priests to obtain a release from their vows and leave the priesthood while remaining in the church. A great many men who left the priesthood in the late 1960s and early 1970s—I personally know dozens of them—did so to because they no longer believed celibacy made a man uniquely holy and because they wished to lead an active sexual life, marry, and have children. Many of them would have remained in the priesthood if the liberating effect of Vatican II had survived the death of Pope John XXIII and if priests had been allowed to marry. Leaving the priesthood would, however, have been much more psychologically difficult at that time for a homosexual (gay was not yet used by most Americans in the Sixties) because a normal homosexual life was not a concept accepted by most people inside or outside the church. Before the gay rights movement, I think it would have taken far more self-awareness and psychological insight than most young people possess for, say, a 25-year-old priest to tell himself in 1968, “I want to lead a homosexual life and find a loving partner.” So my guess is, with the departure of many heterosexual priests who wished to marry, that a disproportionate number of those who remained behind—whether gay or straight—were tormented men who, corrupted by their church’s repressive and restrictive notion of sexuality, were unable to to reconcile what they had been taught with their desires. Remembering the unconditional, unquestioning deference to priests practiced by devout Catholics in the 1950s, however, I am not convinced in the least that molestation was any less common than it would become over the next two decades. I know both men and women who were molested by priests in the 1950s, although as children, they didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what was happening. The savvier, tougher kids simply avoided “Father” after their first encounter with roving hands. The more vulnerable, deferential children—often those who were believed most deeply in the faith—were the ones who stayed, who listened to father’s voice telling them it was all right, and who paid the price in guilt, rage, and sorrow. Most of the survivors I know are now in their 60s and 70s, and they did not come forward when younger men began seeking speaking up in the 1990s. They were men whose lives were not permanently scarred, who quietly came to terms with what happened to them long ago—often after telling their partners. The same is true of the smaller number of women of my acqaintance who had sexual relations with priests when they were in high school. Most of the survivors I know are no longer practicing Catholics. Nevertheless, it meant a good deal to them when younger survivors began to speak up—in part because they truly understood, for the first time, that they were not alone. .This report will generate renewed rage among survivors—whether they have come forward publicly or not. I am also enraged on behalf of those who lost part of their childhoods to a warped view of life perpetuated by the institution they revered. This “study” boils down to an official conclusion that a lot of those priests molesting children who trusted them were, well, just driven a little crazy by all those pictures of their contemporaries enjoying themselves in the Summer of Love. If only young men and women unconstrained by the church or vows of celibacy didn’t seem to be having so much fun, why those priests would have had the self-control to keep their hands off altar boys! The current pope just loves the old Latin liturgy. Too bad the hierarchy, which paid for this responsibility-shifting report, doesn’t like saying, Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. Oh, wait, it’s really the fault of the Pill and miniskirts and pot-smoking hippies and Stonewall. The culture made made me do it.
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