Would Scrapping Catholic Priest Celibacy Reduce Child Sex Abuse?

Triple Hack
February 8, 2017

http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/would-scrapping-catholic-priest-celibacy-reduce-child-sex-abuse/8251856

After they are ordained, Catholic priests can't have sex or get married. This week the Royal Commission asked the question: could the tradition of celibacy have partly led to the high rates of sex abuse in the Church?

Here are the church's own figures:

40 per cent of the members of the brothers of St John of God had allegations of abuse made against them between 1950 and 2010

That's compared with 20 per cent of Marist brothers and 22 per cent of Christian brothers

Between January 1980 and February 2015, 4,444 people alleged incidents of child sexual abuse

1,880 people holding positions in the Catholic Church, including priests, were identified as alleged perpetrators

The same day these figures were released, Dr Michael Whelan, a Marist priest, told the inquiry that the church's law of celibacy was misguided and should not be in place. He said celibacy was "a huge issue for the Catholic Church and we have to deal with it".

The argument usually runs like this - on one side are those who say that celibacy produces sexual frustration which then finds outlets in pedophilia or some other deviant sexuality. Alongside this is the related argument that paedophiles are harder to detect among celibate men, and for this reason the tradition of celibacy draws paedophiles to the priesthood.

The counter-argument is that not all celibate men or women abuse children. Most of this abuse happens within the family. Blaming celibacy distracts from the real causes of child abuse. This is basically the official view of the Church, though there are dissenting voices.

"I think it is unjust, actually," Dr Michael Whelan told the inquiry on Monday.

"And I think there were a lot of people who came into religious life... but they weren't really called to celibacy and they should never have been there."

Versions of these arguments go way back - at least as far back as Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation. In the sixteenth century he warned that celibacy led to masturbation (Protestantism and Anglecanism in general does not require celibacy):

"Nature never lets up," Luther warned. "We are all driven to the secret sin. To say it crudely but honestly, if it doesn't go into a woman, it goes into your shirt."

Have Catholic priests always had to be celibate?

No.

The Church was over a thousand years old before celibacy became law in the twelfth century. Part of the reason for the change, according to Newcastle University historian Hilary Carey, was a power struggle between the Church and the state - made up the aristocratic families and the monarchy. By keeping priests celibate, the Church made sure its property wasn't lost through marriage.

The ban on marriage also lifted the status of priests. Celibacy is now considered an important part of the Roman Catholic priesthood, a sign of commitment to God.

What do the priests say?

It's not easy.

In 2005, Dr Jane Power surveyed more than 300 Australian priests for her doctoral thesis at the Australian Catholic University. She found that 70 per cent of them didn't agree with mandatory celibacy, and they listed celibacy as one of the major reasons for wanting to leave. Eighty-two per cent had thought about leaving. That's important because lack of young priests is a problem for the Church.

It's possible fewer would leave, and more would give the priesthood a go, if they are able to marry. The average age of priests in Australia is above 60, and a big chunk are about to retire.

"If a person is going to be able to live a celibate lifestyle they may have to be very emotionally mature and, unfortunately, the development in seminaries often comes from people who have not experienced a normal psycho-sexual development," Dr Power told Hack in 2011.

This makes it difficult for these young priests. It's almost as if their sexual development is arrested when they go into seminaries.

The argument about compulsory celibacy is happening within the Church. In 2014, the Truth, Justice and Healing Council advising the Australian Catholic Church dropped a bombshell. It stated in a report. "Obligatory celibacy may also have contributed to abuse in some circumstances." No other Catholic officials worldwide had explicitly linked sexual abuse with celibacy - a thousand-year-old tradition of their religion.

It was quickly dismissed by the Vatican.

A Catholic worshiper prays.

Getty: Tim Boyle

At the centre of the debate are the priests themselves - the men who know best what it's like to be celibate. Back in 2011, Hack met up with a 29-year-old in his third year of training to be a priest. He was celibate. "In a way, you feel like something's missing," Stephen Varney said at the time.

"There's no denying that the call to celibacy is hard."

"But I said to one of my mates, no-one is ever fully sexually satisfied. And he had to concede that no-one is.. and there is more to [personal] development than being with someone else and experiencing every possible scenario there is."

He's now been ordained for 18 months and serves the Wollongong diocese.

"Personally I find celibacy, despite its difficulties, it really gives me the capacity to be a minister to people with 100 per cent commitment," he told Hack this week.

"I don't know if I could give that full commitment to the Church and my wife and children at the same time. I think I would be doing both jobs poorly."

'It's not about lack of sex, it's about a lack of intimacy'

The argument over celibacy is partly about ideal versus reality - and that's a question that goes to the heart of religion, and the idea of sin and transcendence. By being celibate, a priest is providing an example of a life that is free of earthly desires. They are supposed to be living a more spiritual existence. Celibacy is not just about saving time. The struggle of resisting desire is key.

But the toll this takes on the priest may be too much, according to Dr Michael Whelan, the Marist priest who gave evidence at the Royal Commission.

He told the inquiry that the trying to live up to being an idealised person produced "enormous conflict between what I was discovering in myself and what I was supposed to be."

The problem was not simply celibacy, but the culture it created. To this end, he said the Church should get rid of the training colleges for priests. "Seminaries are like boarding schools and I don't think they are healthy environments for maturation to take place."

A similar idea was put in evidence by Broken Bay diocese priest Dr David Ranson, who said the Catholic tradition had an "unrealistic expectation that life is lived perfectly".

This is very dangerous because it means then that people's vulnerability and their struggle goes subterranean.

Dr Ranson said the problem was a lack of intimacy, and not just a lack of sex. One of the commissioners, Justice Peter McClellan, asked Dr Ranson how a celibate person could maintain a healthy personality while resisting normal sexual urges.

"Because sexual expression doesn't exhaust the ways of being intimate. It's linked to the way we imagine intimacy," Dr Ranson answered.

"It would be a disaster if one's life was not open to the possibility of intimacy - and sexual relationships are only one form of intimacy.

"Every encounter holds the possibility of intimacy.

"To work together closely on a project is an expression of intimacy, to enter into another's pain with empathy and with presence is a way of expressing intimacy.

"Intimacy as I understand it is a decision to be present to another."

There have been reports Pope Francis is open to the idea of dropping the centuries-old ban on priests getting married, but the change is unlikely to come anytime soon. The 2018 Synod, when bishops get together to advise the Pope, will not discuss priestly celibacy.