DOVER (DE)
Delaware News Journal/My Delaware Online [New Castle DE]
February 12, 2022
By Edward F. Palm
The Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal is back in the news again. Back when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Munich, retired Pope Benedict XVI allegedly discounted allegations of sexual abuse by four priests and merely shuffled them from parish to parish.
This is just the latest in a series of scandals that have cost the church millions of dollars in legal settlements and have highlighted a pervasive problem the church has finally had to acknowledge. It is important to note, however, that most of the reported abuses have involved older priests, many of whom have since died. As a Catholic apostate of a certain age, I think I know why this is so.
Back at the Catholic grade school I attended — Holy Spirit School in the New Castle area — our eighth-grade nun, Sister Mary Norberta, had us engage in a kind of meditation widely practiced by Catholic grade schoolers in those days. We were told to put our heads down on our desks and to ask ourselves, “Do I have a vocation?”
In other words, a calling for the priesthood or the convent.
“You will never be happy,” Sister warned, “if you have a vocation and are ignoring the call.”
Sister was putting on the full-court press because, in those days, some of the major religious orders and the larger dioceses ran residential seminary and convent highs schools for kids who thought they had vocations. The church wanted to put kids on track to the religious life after the eighth grade — when they were still young and impressionable and could be somewhat sheltered from the distractions and temptations of secular life.
Aside from pressuring kids to make a major life decision at too early an age, this system has always impressed me as the perfect plan for creating schools for scandal, especially for the boys. The average eighth-grade boy is 13, the age at which most boys begin feeling the first full-flush and embarrassing stirrings of puberty.
It’s also the age at which most boys start having what the good sister used to call “impure thoughts” about girls. Think about how easy it was for a boy who wasn’t having those same thoughts to take that as a sign of special election — as proof that he was being called to the celibate life of the priesthood. And then think about how many of these boys in later life, after being ordained, may have had to admit to themselves the reason they weren’t attracted to girls is because they were attracted to men or even to children.
The counter argument, of course, is, wouldn’t that sort of attraction be felt during puberty? Perhaps, but the church I grew up in seemed to hold the sort of pre-adolescent sexual experimentation often engaged in by boys to be not nearly as serious as the things bad girls tempt boys to do.
To its credit, the church no longer aggressively recruits seminarians and novices out of the eighth grade. I’d like to think church officials finally realized how wrong this age-old system was. As Robert Browning’s errant priest, Fra Lippo Lippi, complains, you should not take a young boy “and make him swear to never kiss the girls.
There are only a few high-school level seminaries left in the United States. According to the Catholic Answers website, pragmatic concerns have forced most to close. By the 1960s, the dropout rate was making these schools very expensive to maintain, and of the graduates who went on to be ordained, many left the priesthood to get married. Also, the church found that “isolation from normal high school” was not conducive to forming mature pastoral relationships with women. I can understand that.
As for my eighth-grade class, no boys heard the call. Two girls did, but one left the convent short of taking her vows, and the other left in later life.
Sister Norberta tried, but it was 1961, and in the words of the bard of my generation, “The times, they [were] a-changin’.”
Edward F. Palm, a Delaware native and Vietnam veteran, retired from the U.S. Marine Corps as a major. He is a resident of Forest, Virginia, and can be contacted at majorpalm@gmail.com.