Sex & Abuse by Catholic Clergy

Richard Sipe
August 12, 2013

http://www.awrsipe.com/Lectures/SNAP/SNAP%202013%20PLENARY.pdf

[all document]

SIPE ON THE PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE

PAST: Putting sexual abuse in perspective.

Sexual abuse of minors is not a recent phenomenon; the reality of clergy sexual activity has existed, as long as there have been priests and bishops.

Church documents from the earliest centuries record the ideal of religious celibacy and its violations. (Cf. Doyle, Sipe & Wall 2006) There is an element of basic asceticism in the practice of religious celibacy—the imitation of Jesus in having nothing: not a place “to lay his head”; poverty by choice; and forsaking all-family relationships in order to be like Jesus. Treating others as Jesus did was the object of the discipline.

This ideal was found especially in the earliest monks of the desert.

But the other side of the coin is the corruption of the ideal. In our time, publicity about abuse has refocused our knowledge of the frequency of sexual violations by clergy and the horrendous and long

lasting damage done to victims.

Purity was thought to be the source of clerical power.

Sexual abuse of minors does not stand alone within clerical culture. It is a symptom—and always has been—of a corrupt system of double lives and duplicity that reaches from local parishes to the

Vatican; it destroys the myth of clerical purity.The whole idea that clergy practice celibacy has imploded.