Pederasts, Not Paedophiles, Malta Independent, August 4, 2011

Pederasts, Not Paedophiles

Malta Independent
August 4, 2011

http://www.independent.com.mt/news.asp?newsitemid=129839

They are priests no longer, and paedophiles are sexually attracted to children, not to adolescents. Once a child reaches puberty after the age of 12, paedophiles are just not interested. These men are textbook pederasts: older men who cultivate adolescent boys for sex and who, unable to obtain what they want within the law or by consent, violate both the boy and the law.

The distinction is an important one, not least because it is ridiculous to describe sex with a 16-year-old as a paedophile act. Pulis's and Scerri's crimes are no less abhorrent for that, but they are of a different order.

It is a shame that the proceedings were conducted behind closed doors because there are many aspects on which we need clarity. I do not mean the testimony of the victims, because I had the privilege – if you can call it that; it was anything but – of hearing it first hand, and I couldn't sleep properly for weeks afterwards. I still feel sick when I think about it and no, I really don't think much of it was fit for publication. What struck me most, what upset me most, was not the sexual perversity and depredation as such, but the utter and callous cruelty to boys who had been deprived of material comfort and starved of love, cut adrift by their parents, from birth or just a few years old. Was it the rape that got me most? No, it was the cruel manipulation that preceded it: Godwin Scerri returning from Canada and calling up to his room a boy he knew had been placed in an orphanage at birth, who had never received a present or an ounce of love or attention in his life, and telling him: "I've brought you a present from Canada". And then, when the boy runs eagerly to his room ("I was so excited," he told me. "I had never had a present before."), he goes for him and afterwards gives him the present – a piece of chocolate.

I haven't yet read the 100-page judgement and so don't know whether it contains any recommendations for the psychiatric treatment of these men or what should be done about them once they have served their sentence. I don't know whether psychiatrists examined the men and submitted their expert reports to the court, though I would assume that this was a necessary part of the exercise. But I did note that the magistrate made specific reference to Charles Pulis's testimony, when he actually made a point of saying that he was raised with hatred for homosexuals but learned to accept them because that's what the priesthood taught him, but he continued to be suspicious of homosexuals and even warned the boys to be careful of a homosexual man who came to help out at the home.

People have accused the two of becoming priests to gain access to children. I think they are wrong, not least because Pulis and Scerri are interested in adolescent and pubescent boys and not in children. My own view is that they entered the priesthood because celibacy gave them an excuse – or so they mistakenly believed - to avoid having to confront their own sexuality and their burgeoning interest in men. Raised to hate homosexuals, in a Catholic village society that regarded that sort of thing as the worst sort of abomination, they would have been unable to admit even to themselves that they are homosexual. Forcing themselves on adolescent boys, who had all the necessary attributes of men while not being men yet, would have allowed Pulis – the self-confessed hater of homosexuals – to fool himself into thinking that he wasn't homosexual himself, because it wasn't technically another man he was having sex with.

If we look at these sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church right across the world, it quickly becomes obvious that the vast majority of the priests involved are old or have reached the end of middle age. They grew up in a very different world, and took their socially unacceptable sexuality, or their sexuality which had been warped by their upbringing, into the priesthood as a form of refuge. That refuge of theirs became a living hell for thousands of children and adolescents. It is not just changes in the way candidates for the priesthood are recruited and assessed which have put an end to this state of affairs – when was the last time a priest in his 20s or 30s was accused of inappropriate behaviour towards his charges? – but the changes in society. Homosexual adolescents no longer shunt themselves into the priesthood as a way of escaping what is happening to them, there to grow into adult men who, because they cannot countenance a one-to-one equal relationship with another man, force themselves on their adolescent charges instead.

Paedophiles, meanwhile, have no need to go to the great extreme of taking holy orders to gain access to children because satisfying the urges of paedophiles has become a lucrative international industry that defeats the best efforts of governments and police forces to defeat it.

With this ground-breaking case, the days are now gone when Maltese society accepted a situation in which abusive priests were reported to the bishop rather than to the police commissioner. But it wasn't that long ago when we took just such a state of affairs for granted as normal.