UNITED STATES
Crisis Magazine
by R.J. Stove
The story of Boston’s Father Gerald Fitzgerald (1894-1969), who founded the Servants of the Paraclete congregation, has been told before. For example, it appears in the National Catholic Reporter of March 30, 2009; in the Dallas Morning News a day later; and was reported by news services like the Associated Press. But most readers outside (and indeed within) the U.S.A. might well be unaware of it, as, for that matter, the writer of these words was until recent months.
To summarize: in the 1950s, Fr. Fitzgerald constituted a rare voice—often, it would seem, a lone voice—on the subject of sexual immorality, and above all pederasty, in the priesthood. This was at a time when such Molochs as Freudianism and the Kinsey Report still exercised such tyrannical rule over the American public culture, that their despotism was conceded (and applauded) by old-fashioned buttoned-up liberals like Lionel Trilling, quite as much as new-fashioned monsters like Allen Ginsberg. Against this despotism, even such classic admonitions as Fulton Sheen’s Peace of Soul proved almost useless.
Fr. Fitzgerald had a different view to Trilling’s. It was not a view based on caprice. Rather, it derived from personal and alarmed observation. Like everybody else, Fr. Fitzgerald had noticed the extraordinary upsurge in vocations which occurred following 1945: perhaps the only time in post-Appomattox American history when full seminaries and an economic boom have coincided. Catholicism’s Panglosses, both lay and clerical, regarded this development as an unmixed blessing. Fr. Fitzgerald had other ideas.
He found himself noticing how few priests in the years immediately after the Second World War had been guilty of homosexual behavior with adults, let alone with children. Priests molesting under-age girls had been equally rare. (Fr. Fitzgerald also manifested a particular pastoral concern with priests suffering from alcoholism.) Within fewer than 10 years, this happy circumstance had changed. Pederasty, which in 1945 had been as alien to Fr. Fitzgerald’s experience as was bestiality, had by 1955 forced itself upon his unwilling attention.
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