SEX, SIN AND STUPIDITY
Jerry Harkins

November 26, 2002. The Archdiocese of Boston has been blundering its way through a sex scandal recently, a matter of serial pedophilia committed by multiple priests over a long period of time. As you might expect in this litigious society, people are suing for more than the church is worth and the church is trying to defend the indefensible. Among other things, it has claimed that the victims were guilty of “contributory negligence” which, in effect, means that a fair number of six year old boys seduced an impressive number of middle aged clergy. Ah, dear old Boston. For reasons that cannot be determined, this tactic isn’t going over as well as hoped so the lawyers have gone back to the library and come up with a new defense theory. Now they’re saying that these suits by victims are unconstitutional because they violate the religion clause of the First Amendment, specifically the ban on passing laws prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Pedophilia apparently has long been part of the Catholic liturgy just as human sacrifice was part of Aztec practice.

Why not? In her time, holy mother the church has engaged in some very weird rituals including the rites attendant upon the proper torture and execution of witches. To this day, it provides carefully scripted dialogues for the casting out of devils. Yes, dialogues. The exorcist enters into a conversation with the Prince of Darkness. There are some 400 exorcists in Italy alone and Pope John Paul II himself has been known to dabble in the ritual. Or consider the penance of King Henry II for the assassination of Thomas à Becket: 400 strokes with a birch rod. Ouch! But here’s the good part: the whipping was administered by 80 monks, each delivering five strokes. Why? So none would have time to get sexually aroused. The only problem was they forgot about the king. It turned out, he enjoyed the thrashing so much, he had it repeated twice.

Since the see of Boston was erected in 1808, a number of eccentric men have occupied its cathedra. [1] The incumbent is Bernard “See-no-evil” Cardinal Law, or as Jay Leno likes to call him, “Cardinal Lawless.” Bernie is not terribly bright but he is nowhere near as wicked as his enemies profess. His major problem is that he thinks being a Prince of the church entitles him to issue orders and expect unquestioning obedience. Unfortunately, he not only lacks an ounce of charisma, he is actually awkward in public, an affliction common among Catholic prelates for reasons still being investigated. This is not important because the Cardinal is toast.[2] Crisis management can be added to the long list of skills he was not burdened with, and it will eventually prove his undoing. The Vatican will find a post for him in some obscure curial ministry and he will not be heard from again. This will not, of course, solve the problem because His Eminence did not cause it. He merely treated it as standard operating procedure and, in truth, covering up the sins of the clergy has been SOP for the better part of 2,000 years. What ordinary people don’t understand is that the church must always defend priests because it worries they know too much. Actually, most but not all of them are know nothings but the hierarchy can’t tell the difference.

In the present case, the prelates, never a bunch afflicted with excessive intelligence, are confronted by a real puzzler. Human beings are sexual creatures and asexuality is very much a fringe condition. There is no way to impose celibacy or to suppress or prohibit sexual expression. You can force some individuals to re-direct its expression by imprisoning or castrating them. But sex is like breathing—natural and necessary—and one avoids it at one’s own peril. In the immortal words of Pope Leo XIII, “To take away from man the natural and primeval right of marriage, to circumscribe in any way the principal ends of marriage laid down in the beginning by God Himself in the words 'Increase and multiply,' is beyond the power of any human law." [3]

That some priests have affairs with other consenting adults is, then, normal and should be celebrated. That they sometimes commit horrendous sexual abuses is to be condemned both per se and as an abuse of authority. That the incidence of criminal sexuality may be moderately higher among priests than among men generally is a subject we will deal with elsewhere. Our concern here is the institutional hypocrisy with which the hierarchy routinely treats these matters. We need to explore just why they resort to such self-defeating absurdities as contributory negligence and freedom of religion and, more to the point, why they always seem so damned surprised every time a new revelation comes along.

Behind all the problems is the simple fact that celibacy, at best, is a tough row to hoe and, at worst, a magnet for people with certain kinds of abnormal sexual appetites. An institution seeing itself as the salvation of the human race would, therefore, be well advised not to add to its challenges by insisting on it. But the Vatican does embrace the burden of celibacy for three reasons, all of which are demonstrably foolish.

First, celibacy is said to facilitate devotion to Christ by leaving the heart undivided. But there is absolutely no evidence that love is a zero sum game. It is pure stupidity to say that a person cannot love a wife, children, God and the church simultaneously and without diminution. You can’t slice and dice love just as you cannot say your love of chocolate ice cream diminishes your love of rare roast beef. On the contrary, like knowledge, the expression or experience of love is likely to enhance and increase its store. The love of a wife and children is so rewarding that it can only increase one’s love of others, including Jesus. Nor can it be said that Catholic priests are any more Christ-like than their married Eastern Orthodox or Protestant counterparts If anything, the evidence is that they are a lot less so when it comes to children. Among the world’s major religions, only Roman Catholics forbid clerical marriage. Judaism and Islam virtually require it.

Second, the church argues that celibacy increases the availability of the priest for the complete service of the Gospel. In other words, a colicky child will not distract him from the preparation of Sunday’s homily. This is a trivial issue but, to the extent it is true, it is true for the whole world, an inherent part of the human condition. Kids especially are distracting but God should have thought of that when he told Adam and Eve to increase and multiply. It should also be said that the experience of having a family is certain to improve the quality of homilies. In all candor, it must be noted that the quality of Catholic homilies could not get a lot worse than it already is.

Finally, it is said that celibacy enhances the spiritual fruitfulness of the priest's ministry. Don’t you love that phrase? What does “spiritual fruitfulness” mean? Does it have anything to do with nurturing the spiritual lives of the faithful? If so, the celibate church is making a terrible mess of things not only with all its pedophilia, but also with its gaga teachings about sex in general which have driven away the vast majority of educated Catholics all over the world.

No. Let the truth be told. When the church instituted celibacy in the twelfth century, it did so to prevent clerics from having families that might inherit wealth that would otherwise go to the church. They had tried other means such as insisting that the wives and children of priests were slaves but for some reason that didn’t work. In other words, the original rationale had nothing to do with the bullshit they proclaim today. So why don’t they change the rule? Because it’s cheaper to support an unmarried priest than to be burdened with a family that does not practice birth control. It also dovetails nicely with their historic aversion to sex as a general principle. Reflecting this aversion, the Pope thinks that God invented sex to punish Adam and Eve but did not foresee the unintended consequences.

It should be stressed that celibacy itself can be an admirable modus vivendi increasing the world’s capacity for love, service and creativity. The same thing is true of any number of life styles. The problem is compulsion, the power to impose a life style on someone else. The danger is choosing a life style for reasons that have nothing to do with love, service or creativity. One should not become a soldier because one is attracted to rape and pillage or a fire fighter because one is attracted to arson. Armies and fire departments are aware of these problems and screen for them in their selection processes. Seminaries should be equally careful about the reasons candidates opt for celibacy. The rest of us must constantly remind ourselves that history is replete with the lives of celibate men and women who are ornaments of civilization. It is in the nature of perversion to attract only a small minority. Having said that, we should also acknowledge that the theology of priestly celibacy is riddled with hypocrisy and superstition.

Notes

1. The beloved Richard Cardinal Cushing led the archdiocese between 1944 and 1970 and did so with humility, grace and an occasional jar of the creature. Americans of a certain age will never forget the eulogy he delivered at the funeral of JFK in 1963. Nonetheless, he was an eccentric of a very high order. Preaching in the slums of Lima, Peru in 1964, he said, “We read in the New Testament that our blessed Lord rode on an ass in triumph into the city of Jerusalem. Today the Lord rides on another ass: I myself.” He became very progressive on most issues facing the church but admitted that the ordination of women was not something he could support. Confessing his sins to a woman, he said, would be like doing so on television.

2. The Pope accepted Law’s resignation on December 13, 2002. Shortly thereafter he became chaplain of the Sisters of Mercy of Alma convent in Clinton, Maryland. Eighteen months later, the Vatican found a new job for him as Archpriest of Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica in Rome. This is the church that houses the original crib in which Jesus was laid after he was born. Quick now, who was Law’s predecessor as Archpriest? Give up? He was Cardinal Carlo Furno who was also the Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre between 1995 and his retirement in 2007. Law holds no such prestigious appointment.

3. Arcanum divinae sapientiae, June 24, 1888. The title means “The hidden design of divine wisdom,” and the letter is essentially a tirade against divorce. In this excerpt, Leo is saying that it is beyond the capacity of the state to become involved in any way with Christian marriage. The church, of course, is another story entirely. The church, as a divine institution, is perfectly able “to circumscribe in any way the principal ends of marriage laid down in the beginning by God Himself.”