The Sexual Revolution Made Them Do It!?, The Catholica, July 7, 2011

The Sexual Revolution Made Them Do It!?

The Catholica
July 7, 2011

http://www.catholica.com.au/gc2/occ2/069_occ2_050711.php

Richard McBrien

As usual, Notre Dame theology professor Richard McBrien had it right, this time on the recent John Jay Report on the causes of the Roman Catholic sex-abuse scandal. In the National Catholic Reporter (June 27), McBrien unequivocally agreed with a newspaper cartoon showing a pie-eyed bishop smoking a water pipe, labeled "rationalization," and blaming everything on the '60s culture of permissiveness.

Indeed, the John Jay Report, the result of five years of study and an expenditure of $1.8 million, brought a reaction of damning disbelief, of caustic criticism and even of cartoons, like the one that caught McBrien's attention, treating it as something of a joke.

Rather than offer a credible explanation of what caused this worst crisis in the modern history of the church, the study would have us believe that the American "sexual revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s prompted thousands of priests to feel free to rape and molest many thousands of children and young teenagers. Free to violate the trust of these children in the representatives of God. Free to damage the victims for life.

How could that be? The researchers of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice concluded that a loosening of sexual morality caused a huge increase in abuse cases during that time. But there are good reasons to question whether the coincidence of these two events was cause and effect. First, a dramatic public exposure of the sex-abuse problem in the 2000s, fed by lawsuits and media attention, led to increased reporting of cases by adults abused in those earlier two decades. They had the strength of numbers to come out of hiding. Second, reports of a startling amount of abuse in Ireland and, more recently, in Western Europe, cannot be explained by any sexual revolution. That is the most compelling challenge of all to the John Jay conclusions.

Interestingly, the John Jay explanation, shifting blame from the bishops for tolerating the abuse, to outside influences, was hardly new. The Vatican had offered the same abuse rationale in 1993, as though free love made the priests do it. (Pope Benedict XVI later would say that the devil made them do it.)

The authors of the study insist that they came to their conclusion from their own research, free of any influence from the bishops who ordered it. That may be, but many a study produces findings in accordance with the views of its sponsors. This one should have been otherwise, considering it was done by the independent and highly credible John Jay College.

Can the celibacy issue be brushed aside?

Yet there is something else in the John Jay Report that raises doubt about the findings. That is the way the report brushes aside the no-sex rule of priestly celibacy as a factor in the abuse. Because celibacy has been constant in the church since the 11th century, the report says, it could not account for the rise and subsequent decline in abuses cases from the 1960s thought the 1980s. That's it; end of discussion. It's as though the bishops, who financed much of the cost of the study, told the researchers that the celibacy issue was out of bounds, period. ("Bureaucratic bullying," is how one prominent Catholic critic has described the refusal of church leaders to allow any church study of celibacy.)

But it is reasonable to look to celibacy as at least one cause of the abuse, which has been a problem in the church since the ban on sex was imposed those many centuries ago. And Ireland, the citadel of the Catholic church, offers compelling evidence of why celibacy should have been a relevant issue worth discussion in the John Jay study. It's relevant because a poverty-driven cultural celibacy for many decades in that country was accompanied by an unusually high rate of sexual abuse of boys in the general population, in defiance of a strict morality enforced by the priests. In other words, the sexual repression of celibacy — not the loose morals cited by John Jay — seems to have led to criminal sexual expression in the population and the priesthood. Irish priests, some of whom had been abused themselves as boys, engaged in widespread sexual abuse of children for many decades, not because of any sexual revolution, as in America.

While the John Jay researchers blithely rejected celibacy as an issue, an expert panel in a government study of sex abuse by priests in southeastern Ireland agreed unanimously that mandatory celibacy contributed to the abuse problem. And some Irish religious authorities say that the repression of natural sexual activity can lead to the expression of that sexual desire in undesirable ways. As it apparently did in Ireland.

So until the American bishops own up to their part in adding to the sexual abuse crisis, by tolerating and covering it up, the issue is not likely to go away, regardless of how their study seemingly took them off the hook.