One of the nastier and more powerful ideas lurking in discussions of gay Roman Catholic clergy is the claim that the child abuse crisis was a consequence of allowing gay men into the priesthood.
This is, I think, largely an American view, and connected with the
American cult of virility.
I still remember the difficulty I had in
suppressing a fit of the giggles in a radio interview
when a leading American right wing Catholic intellectual lowered his
voice to a pitch that would make a mantelpiece quiver and told me that
what the Church needed now was manly men in the priesthood.
None
the less, it is clearly true that the great majority of "child abuse"
in the US was directed at adolescent boys or those just pre-adolescent;
girls of any age made up only one fifth of the victims.
There is a case to answer here.
The "official" answer given to US Catholic bishops' college by the independent researchers of the John Jay College,
who compiled these figures, is not an entirely convincing one.
This is
that homosexual acts and homosexual identity are not the same thing:
there are well-known situations such as prisons, and traditional public
schools in which otherwise enthusiastically heterosexual men will do
things with each other which would be gay if done by gay men.
But
this won't pacify the conservative who says that the problem is that
these people are insufficiently heterosexual, and who is in any case
unhappy with the distinction between acts and identity.
Parenthetically,
that doesn't seem to be a distinction observed by the Pope, either.
His
condemnation of homosexuality is very essentialist: to have these
desires, anywhere and at any time, would make you out has having an
orientation towards an objective moral evil.
Against this, there
are two answers. One is to point out that identity is different from
orientation.
Identity is something constructed with, or against,
society. But if orientation exists, it is something with which we are
born. It's a constituent of a personality, not the result. But this is
burnt over ground.
No one will have their minds changed there by
argument, and few people even by reflection on experience.
It's
simpler and clearer to go straight at the statistics. What they also
show is a peak in the abuses in the 70s and 80s. Since then the church
has tightened up considerably, and the attitudes of society around it
have also changed, so that it is much easier to report. But this period
of falling abuse has not been a period in which fewer gay men were
recruited to the priesthood.
It is difficult to be certain without
honest surveys which under the present regime could be neither conducted
nor published, but no one has seriously suggested that their number has
diminished since the 70s.
So the number of homosexual priests has
either remained steady or, as most people would claim, has actually
risen at the same time as the number of reported cases of abuse has
fallen dramatically.
The link between gay priests and abusive ones is
clearly a subtle one at best.
What has changed, I suspect, is
identity.
By being fairly open about orientation, as within some
seminaries is clearly possible, gay priests are able to construct an
identity in which shame and guilt does not predominate.
It can perfectly
well be a genuinely celibate identity.
To that extent, the church will
always be at odds with the world which largely denies the possibility of
celibate fulfilment.
But at least, and despite the Pope's opinions, it
will be less at odds with the truth.
SIC: TG/UK