UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
A resource I’d like to recommend to you: Stephen Edward de Weger’s master’s thesis (pdf) in the School of Justice of Queensland University of Technology’s Faculty of Law. It’s entitled “Clerical Sexual Misconduct Involving Adults within the Roman Catholic Church.” Stephen’s outstanding thesis draws on interviews with adults sexually abused by Roman Catholic authority figures, notably priests.
I’m particularly taken by the chapter in the thesis (chapter 7, pp. 119-150) entitled “Power and Vulnerability.” In this chapter, Stephen shows how the widespread abuse of lay members of the church by clerics depends on an inbuilt “God-factor” within the Catholic system. Because the Catholic governing system proposes that priests stand in the place of Christ within the Catholic community — and that they do so in a unique way, one lay Catholics cannot rival in any way — and because it holds that a priest experiences an “ontological” change on ordination that elevates his humanity to a level above that of lay members of the church, a “positional” vulnerability for all lay members of the church is built right into the Catholic system’s understanding of priesthood.
The sexual abuse of lay members of the church by priests depends on this “God-factor” and on the positional vulnerability of all lay members of the church. To serve their own personal needs, some clerics take advantage of their “higher” standing within the Catholic community to target vulnerable adults who have sought them out for spiritual counsel, and who are vulnerable precisely because they are going through life experiences that make them feel needy.
Stephen shows that a significant proportion of the abuse of adults by Catholic priests occurs in such a ministerial context, and depends on grooming and entrapment techniques that priests adroit at exploiting lay members of the church have learned to develop in the context of their ministry — and especially in the context of the sacrament of reconciliation and spiritual counsel. What makes this abuse difficult to combat in the Catholic context, he also concludes, is precisely that “positional” factor by which the Catholic system defines the priest as “above” and “ontologically superior” to lay members of the church.
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