What’s Really Behind the Catholic Church’s Sexual Abuse Problem?, AlterNet, May 19, 2010, by Harriet Fraad of Tikkun Magazine, excerpt quoted verbatim:

Why has the Church been plagued by so much pedophilia – predominantly homosexual? And why has a scandal regarding this situation erupted only now?

The global Catholic Church is confronting an extraordinary crisis not faced since the Reformation, which began with sharp criticisms of the Church and ended with a schism out of which emerged the establishment of a separate Protestant Church.

Today, sexual abuse allegations against priests are surging in a startling array of nations: the United States and Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, Italy, Austria, Germany, The Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Belgium, Bolivia, Mexico, Brazil and Chile. New abuse scandals erupt daily. The John Jay School of Criminal Justice estimates that, in the U.S. alone between 1950 and 2002 hundreds of thousands of children have been sexually abused by Catholic Clergy.

In fact, the Catholic Church has a 2,000 year history of sex abuse. In their acclaimed book, Sex, Priests and Secret Codes (2006), Father Thomas Doyle, with former monks Richard Sipes and Patrick Wall, used its own documents to confirm the Church’s 2,000-year problem with clerical sex abuse.

Why has the Church been plagued by so much pedophilia – predominantly homosexual? And why has a scandal regarding this situation erupted only now?

Why Pedophilia?

As to the first question, the sheer extent of homosexual pedophilic abuse within the Church prompts my speculation that an extremely patriarchal institution, combined with the all-male hierarchy’s repudiation of women as equal partners in service and governance, perhaps engenders a homoerotic internal culture that attracts homosexual men to the priesthood. However, those factors alone cannot explain the predominance of homosexual pedophilia. After all, a high proportion of nuns operating in Catholic all-female environments tend to be lesbians — but not lesbian pedophiles (See Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence by Rosemary Curb, LibraryThing).

A therapist who treats abuser priests, Leslie Lothstein, proffers another possible explanation. Lothstein implicates the sexual immaturity of priests, who by entering the seminary often as young as 14, miss a critical passage of maturation — first-time sexual experimentation — that is accessible to their non-seminarian peers. Caught in a bind of stunted sexual growth, such men may be driven emotionally to claim and possess their past unexplored adolescent territory that the rules of a celibate priesthood had placed out of bounds.

My own complementary explanation derives from working with two active priests, two former priests, and several ex-seminarians, who quit their studies partly out of disgust with the sexual abuse to which their teachers subjected them. My work demonstrated, sadly, that sexual abuse at the seminary can simultaneously initiate youngsters into homosexual pedophilia and impart the lesson that Catholic institutions tolerate pedophilia. Moreover, such abuse can also cause a victim to later appropriate his former abuser’s predatory/aggressive behavior as psychological compensation for the shame he had felt during the time he was being abused at the seminary.

Let us take note, however, as we consider these issues, that, yes, homosexual pedophilia predominates behind the Church’s walls. Priests do have greater access to males than to females within Catholicism’s sex-segregated communities — there are no altar girls. Priests take boys, not girls, on retreats and camping trips. And yes, solid evidence invites speculation that the generational reproduction of homosexual pedophilia within the Church is partly attributable to a role-reversal syndrome playing out among officials — from priests to bishops — who themselves had been child victims of abuse. All that being as it may, equally solid documentation exists to show that female children, too, are sometimes the victims of sexual abuse within the Church. In fact girls are one quarter of the victims and they are disproportionately under eight years old.

Why Now?

The second and, I think, more crucial question, is why has this long history of a major church’s institutional practice of pedophilia been exposed only now? Why has silence about an explosive open secret persisted for millennia among a leading church’s Faithful, yet been fully exposed within a single decade? What is happening in the world that is prompting Catholics to expose the criminal behavior of numerous “Godly” and “infallible” custodians of their faith?

1. Feudal relationships under attack by the Reformation and capitalism

For an answer, we must return to Christianity’s last great rupture — the Reformation — which ensued as the economic system known as feudalism began to crumble. Under feudalism, serfs labored on the estates of lords, keeping no more than meager amounts of the food and goods needed for their subsistence and reproduction of the next serf generation. Lords of the Manor were entitled to appropriate almost all of the fruits of their serfs’ labor. Both lords and serfs swore love and fealty to each other, but the one party in power — the lords — determined the content of, and enforced, this commitment.

Medieval Catholicism justified this system, holding that God had decreed the lord/serf arrangement. Not coincidentally, the feudal model was compatible with the interests of the Church itself, which was in effect a feudal lordship that owned vast lands.

The Catholic monk, Martin Luther, counted himself among the many who saw and abhorred the extensive corruption existing within the Church. Particularly offensive were the Church’s sale of religious pardons, called “indulgences,” whereby a sinner could purchase exemption from specific penalties and, thus, gain entry into Heaven. Indulgences amounted to the proverbial last straw of corruption that inspired Martin Luther to nail his writ of protest and demands for reform on the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. Luther’s example spurred the mobilization of a Protestant movement, which grew in spite of the Pope’s excommunication of Luther and attempt to belittle and suppress his criticisms.

This rise of Protestantism was integral with the emergence of new capitalist formations that would spell the beginning of the end of feudalism. The Protestant Church dismissed the concept that salvation depended on obedience to a Catholic hierarchy. And it disdained the feudal laws of birth on which social position and the near enslavement of serfs were predicated.

Consonant with the needs of an ascendant capitalism and its emerging elite, whose status was based on making money, not on birth, an ideology of personal, individual communion with God arose to replace feudalism’s more cumbersome, hierarchical, and expensive constructs.

Historically, turbulence marks periods of momentous change, and the period under discussion here is no exception. As capitalism pressed its economic reorganization of the production of goods and services in the larger economy, pressure came to bear on the rigidly patriarchal extended families that still populated the feudal estates but would not remain there for much longer. As the lords converted to more profitable forms of production, such as sheepherding, evictions of serfs from the lands their families had farmed for centuries accelerated. Other serfs ran away and migrated to cities in search of employment.

The customs and laws of the past could not hold. Families were falling apart. Pregnant women were left unprotected in suddenly undefined and unproscribed circumstances. Children were abandoned. Faced with various social and economic dislocations, people organized and began to make revolutionary demands — demands that proved frightening to both the new elites and the old church.

2. Feudalism resurrected as a model for the family under capitalism

What happened in France just after the French Revolution illustrates the problem. The most radical and youngest elements among the rebels were demanding state assistance to families, including financial support for all children. The new capitalists strongly opposed such state support for the public since they, the remnants of the aristocracy and the Catholic Church, were the only sectors of society wealthy enough to be taxed to pay the bill.

How, then, to lighten the burden of the commoners’ devastated lives and, thus, hold at bay the threat of more revolution? Ironically, feudalism would provide the solution. The French historian, Jacques Donzelot, documents the invention of the “nuclear” household: how a feudalism-inspired model for the organization of household labor and family relationships was facilitated and reinforced.

In the world of serfdom, the father was the autocratic head of the family, who controlled the lives of his wife, his children and his children’s families. The eldest son was second in command, heir to the father’s rigidly patriarchal role. Replication of this model in the world of nascent capitalism elevated the importance of every married man. It conferred upon an ex-serf the role of feudal lord, a wielder of absolute power over his own home — his castle — wife and children. Women enjoyed the “protection,” in pregnancy and child rearing, of a wage-earning male dictator.

The French nation born of the 1789 revolution reinforced “nuclear” families by giving employment and benefits exclusively to men with dependent wives and children. For eligible families, that state support spelled survival — but survival at a price. The new nuclear model reinforced lines of dominance and subordination, teaching children and women alike absolute obedience to a male paternal authority. Birth control in the 17- and early 1800s included abandoning or killing children one did not want. See The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance: By John Boswell. The children who survived learned absolute obedience, as well as many other strategies for pleasing their parents.

In sum, power elites forged, out of feudal concepts of domination, submission, authority and obedience, instruments of social control that have served them well to this day in sustaining their elite power and wealth. Largely ignoring people’s cries for help from the state, they shifted onto the nuclear family the cost of raising future generations.

….

(Skipping about 5 pages): Examples Worldwide

Similar examples, far too numerous to cite, exist wherever officials of the Catholic Church have had unfettered access to children, whether in orphanages, programs for troubled youngsters, small group homes, parochial schools, choir academies, etc. Currently, there are cases of sexual abuse in Ireland, Malta, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, Poland, France, Belgium, Italy, Chile, Mexico and Spain. These cases are marked by the same sordid program of protection for the abusing Church official, and lifelong torment for the victims.

Holy Fathers have appropriated unto themselves the rights of lords in a feudal world, a world of their — not God’s — creation. As in olden days, the rights of serf-children in their custody within this world are non-existent.

What are the effects on children of crimes committed against them by “men of the cloth”? Priests tend to elicit from the faithful the love, trust and respect one associates with family. And like family, they have special access to children, including the opportunity to influence children’s development. In residential facilities, authorized by the state, they are substitute parents. Perceived as messengers of God whose duties supposedly include hearing confessions, giving advice, giving comfort, moral support and a hand of friendship — priests enjoy power rivaling that of biological fathers. And priests, too, are called “father.”

The sexual crimes committed against children by men addressed officially as “father” are crimes of incest, betrayal, emotional and physical harm. When a child is confronted with the invisibility of his suffering to the protector/abuser, or the man’s indifference to that suffering, the wounds inflicted are as deep as the ocean. The scars left — emotional, relational and sexual scars — never heal completely in the victim’s lifetime. Because children’s egos, intellects and personalities are still in formation, they tend to feel they have perpetrated the crimes of which they are actually the victims. They feel guilty, ashamed, unprotected and helpless, especially if and when they summon the courage to report the abuse and nothing is done. They are vulnerable to repeated abuse because they’re afraid to recognize what happened to them. Feeling powerless to stop it, they dissociate if and when the abuse repeats. They psychologically refuse conscious knowledge of their own experience. Their sex abuse remains as an unconscious, guilty wound. They are prone to depression. They are disproportionately dysfunctional and, as they grow up, may not be able to enjoy their sexuality. They are disproportionately suicidal The Dark Life-Altering Effects of Incest – Associated Content… Impact of child sexual abuse: A review of the research.

The Church long ago ceded to secular government the realms of foreign policy and corporate business practices. The Church has no comment on the practice of usury with regard to credit card bills, or on the fact that the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” exempts governments from its reach. The Church’s influence has noticeably shrunk. The last, bastion it can claim is a personal/family life paradigm of medieval design. But even in that realm, although feudalism lives with the blessing and encouragement of the Holy Fathers, the days of their rule may be numbered.

An end in sight

The oppressed faithful — male and female — have found their voices, which are blending with voices outside the walls of institutional Catholicism. For example, a new generation of reflexively feminist women, who seem to have come by their self-assurance and determination via a different route than the feminist movement of yesterday, are challenging their partners to renegotiate domestic contracts — and a lot of partners are “getting it.”

Perhaps when more people in the U.S. recognize that their “American dream” has been robbed; that vast wealth is accumulating every minute at their expense; that they are being used and abused; that they are not personally to blame for the disintegration of life in their homeland …. perhaps, they too, will lose their shame and call for justice. The men and women whose adolescence and human rights were violated by callous and hypocritical men may show us the way.

Read the whole article, here.

See Church in worst credibility crisis since Reformation, theologian tells bishops, Irish Times, April 16, 2010, by Hans Kung, author of On Being a Christian, excerpt quoted verbatim:

Pope Benedict has made worse just about everything that is wrong with the Roman Catholic Church and is directly responsible for engineering the global cover-up of child rape perpetrated by priests, according to this open letter to all Catholic bishops.

See Pope Ratzinger and the Bushes: Two Peas In a Pedophile Protection Pod, Evans Liberal Politics, April 5, 2010, by Lori Price and with additional reading by Paul Evans, excerpt quoted verbatim:

A Newsday article from 2005 details the dirtbags, including Neil Bush, who served on Pope Ratzinger’s ‘ecumenical foundation’ — all protected from on ‘High.’ Also in 2005, Pope Rat(zinger) asked US President [sic] George W. Bush to ‘declare the pontiff immune from liability’ in a lawsuit that accused him of conspiring to cover up the molestation of three boys by a seminarian in Texas. In September 2005, the U.S. asserted that the lawsuit should be dismissed, as the Pope enjoys immunity as head of state of the Holy See.

See Pope Implicated in Cover-Up Of Wisconsin Sex Abuse Case, Huffington Post on Evans Liberal Politics, March 24, 2010, by Huffington Post/AP.

Visit Tikkun Magazine

Harriet Fraad is a psychotherapist-hypnotherapist in practice in New York City. She is a founding member of the feminist movement and the journal Rethinking Marxism. For forty years, she has been a radical committed to transforming U.S. personal and political life.

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ABC: Pope still protecting pedophile bishops

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