National Post
March 15, 2010
http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/03/15/priestly-celibacy-and-sex-scandals-the-problem-that-will-not-just-go-away.aspx
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| Pope Benedict XVI visits Rome's Lutheran church on March 14, 2010 Photo by Gregorio Borgia/AFP/Getty Images |
Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a regular dose of international punditry at its finest. The Vatican’s response to the news is to circle the wagons, blame a Freemasons’ conspiracy and biased media — anything at all except to face up to the possibility the Roman Catholic Church’s rule about celibacy is at the root of the continuing child sex abuse scandals involving its priests and other religious figures.
More damagingly, the latest scandals in Germany come close to Pope Benedict himself, as they occurred when he was archbishop of Munich and Freising in the 1980s. His elder brother is also peripherally involved, though so far his most heinous crimes appear to have been slapping choristers and losing his false teeth in a rage.
Now a split has developed within the church itself, with Archbishop Christoph Schonborn of Vienna calling for an urgent examination of the celibate priesthood, while others insist there is no link between celibacy and pedophilia.
An editorial in the British Sunday newspaper The Observer calls on the Pope to act.
The church needs to grapple with the issue at the heart of its scandals: sex. Rome must review its position on celibacy and an all-male priesthood. When a priest is locked into a solitary lifestyle as part of his contract with his church, rather than with his God, resentment will surely follow. In a lonely and sometimes hostile environment, that resentment will fester.
It is now an open secret that many priests have live-in lovers, with parishioners sympathetically keeping quiet. Priests involved in homosexual relations have been more covert, but anonymous polls have repeatedly showed that homosexuality is common among the clergy … It is tradition that dictates that the priesthood should be celibate and all male. Pope Benedict XVI can break with that tradition. He should.
Blogging for The Atlantic magazine, Andrew Sullivan reports.
Several prominent prelates — in Germany and at the Vatican — shot down any suggestion that the celibacy rule had anything to do with the scandal, a point echoed Sunday by the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano. ‘It’s been established that there’s no link,’ said the article by Bishop Giuseppe Versaldi, an emeritus professor of canon law and psychology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. ‘First off, it’s known that sexual abuse of minors is more widespread among lay people and those who are married than in the celibate priesthood,’ he wrote. ‘Secondly, research has shown that priests guilty of abuse had long before stopped observing celibacy.’
First: blame others before taking responsibility; second: a total non-sequitur. Has it occurred to Versaldi that the repressed, contorted sexual teaching of the church leads so many priests, gay and straight, directly into dysfunctional and, yes, disordered sex lives, alone or with others? … Does he understand that straight men, denied any relationships with women their own age, can get stunted emotionally, fail to see women as equals, and are thereby less capable in many cases of proper pastoral care and sexual misconduct?
But what staggers me is once again the immediate, visceral circling of the wagons — when what is being revealed — again! — is a pattern of criminal abuse, aided and abetted by a powerful elite, led by the Pope himself. If this were a secular institution, the police would move in and shut it down.
His views get surprising support from another L’Osservatore contributor. In a front-page article, Lucetta Scaraffia writes:
[W]e would suggest that a greater female presence, not at a subordinate level, would have been able to rip the veil of masculine secrecy that in the past so often covered the reporting of these misdeeds with silence. Women, be they religious or lay, are more likely to move in defence of young people when it comes to questions of sexual abuse. That way, the church would have been spared the serious damage that this guilty behaviour (silence) procured for it.
Daniele Comboni, who was beatified and canonized by John Paul II, had already foreseen the problem back in the second half of the 19th century. This great missionary was convinced that the presence of western women alongside his missionary priests would help them to behave correctly, above all it would stop them breaking their vows of chastity.”
For editorial writers at The Tablet, a Catholic weekly review published in London:
This is proving a long, cold winter for the Catholic Church in relation to the sexual abuse of children by clergy. Hard on the heels of the devastating Murphy report into sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin, similar cases are now coming to light elsewhere in Europe, especially in Germany … These developments … mean that any simplistic assumption that the problem is confined to Ireland and the Catholic Irish diaspora, or even to Catholics in the English-speaking world, is no longer sustainable.
As the British were among the first to discover, there is one crucial step that has to be taken, around which all other measures against clerical child abuse must hinge. As recommended by the report of the commission under Lord Nolan, every allegation of sexual abuse made against a priest must be passed for investigation to the police and secular social welfare authorities, and the Church must co-operate fully with any subsequent inquiries. What contributed to the impression of a Church protecting its own, in case after case, was a refusal to adopt this fundamental principle. Indeed, when it was initially proposed as part of new measures for the Catholic Church in Ireland to combat child abuse, there was a complaint from the Vatican.
Compiled by Araminta Wordsworth
Contact: awordsworth@nationalpost.com
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