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	Gay Priests Are Not Paedophiles Cardinal Bertone's Attempt to Blame Gay Priests for the Church's Scandals Is Foolish and Wrong Guardian April 14, 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/14/religion-bertone-homosexuality-priests Prudence is a cardinal virtue, but not a virtue always shown by cardinals in Rome. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican secretary of state, recently refuted a link between clerical sex abuse and celibacy, but then claimed "a relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia" which, he said, "many psychologists and psychiatrists have shown". His remarks were greeted with horror, as well they should have been, for they implied that homosexuals were more inclined to sex abuse of minors than heterosexuals, which is simply false. I don't know which psychologists Cardinal Bertone has been reading, but the consensus among reputable mainstream ones is that sex abuse of minors cannot be and should not be conflated with homosexuality. As Pope Benedict XVI himself said, in a mid-air news conference with reporters en route to his first trip to the United States in 2008, paedophilia was "another thing" to homosexuality. Homosexuality is about orientation – same-sex attraction. Sex abuse of minors is about malformed sexual orientation, immaturity and power. The same statistics which disprove any link between celibacy and sex abuse of minors – almost all of which takes place within the family, often by married men and women – are the same which should undermine any attempts to conflate sex abuse and homosexuality. So why are some tempted to? First, because the epidemic of clerical sex abuse in the Catholic church between the 1960s and the 1990s has coincided with the entry of very large numbers of gay men into the priesthood. When Donald Cozzens, a former seminary rector, claimed in an influential book ten years ago that about half of his seminarians were gay, it sparked shocked reactions but few denials. I was at the Tablet at the time, and phoned around seminary rectors to see if they agreed. Two did; the other two didn't want to say. Second, because the vast majority of victims of clerical sex abuse were teenage boys, not pre-pubescent children. The largest and most in-depth study of sex abuse of minors ever carried out by an institution was commissioned by the US Catholic bishops and published in 2004. The independent research carried out by John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York found that just over four per cent of Catholic clergy in America had been accused of sexual abuse between 1950 and 2002. About 80 per cent of the accusations were of abuse alleged to have occurred between the 1960s and the 1980s, after which they fell off sharply. Some 81 per cent of the alleged victims were male, and 78 per cent were between the ages of 11 and 17. In other words, the average victim of clerical sexual abuse was an adolescent male. Karen Terry, the principal researcher on the John Jay team, said it was impossible to know if the most victims were boys because of the orientation of the abuser or because "that's who they had access to". The question of orientation was therefore removed from the statistical research. The scathing 145-page report which accompanied the John Jay findings did, however, address the question over several pages, concluding that "a more searching inquiry is necessary for a homosexually oriented man by those who decide whether he is suitable for the seminary and for ministry". Hence the Vatican's November 2005 Instruction saying men with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" should not be admitted for training to the priesthood. But this document suffered from the same category error as Cardinal Bertone is making. It is not the homosexually-inclined priest who is at risk of abusing: almost all gay priests lead healthy celibate lives. The ones who are most at risk of abusing are emotionally stunted men whose psychosexual development has gone awry. That does not make them paedophiles. Only a handful of clerical abusers have been authentic paedophiles, seeking out pre-pubescent children (male or female; paedophiles don't usually care) as victims. Those that there have been have had a very large number of victims and have wreaked havoc. But most accused priests fall into a different category. Almost all the accused are alleged to have molested one minor (only three per cent of the accused in the John Jay study had more than ten alleged victims); the classic perpetrator was a priest in his thirties who spent some time, mostly less than a year, sexually involved with a boy in his early teens. That boy has usually been someone who has had his boundaries violated early in life, probably by a relative. Are those priests paedophiles? No – although the damage they cause is considerable. Are they homosexual? Possibly – but not healthy ones. And to claim that their homosexuality is a cause of their abusing is as daft as suggesting that paedophilia is linked to heterosexuality. Cardinal Bertone should be more prudent.
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