RATZINGER AND NEW YORK TIMES AGREE The New York Times labored mightily to bring forth a mountain of priest abusers in its recent census and produced only a mouse as it admitted in the 12th paragraph of its sensationalist prose. The Times reported a percent of American priests abusers, not greatly different from that Cardinal Ratzinger obtained in the rarified airs where voices speak to German theologians - 1% for the Cardinal and 1.8% for the Times. Yet the Times used this very low proportion to launch yet another attack on the Catholic Church and the celibate priesthood. I have, for the record, been warning Church leadership since 1985 that was "sitting on an atom bomb" created by the reassignment of abusing priests. One victim of a priest is one too many. One reassigned abuser is one too many. The number of abusing priests (1205) and victims (4268), is horrific. However, if the Ratzinger/NYT estimates are anything near the reality, 98% of American priests are not abusers, a point the Times neglects to make and which ought to have been the lead in an unbiased news report. I suspect that the Ratzinger/Times estimates are too low, but double the number to 4% -- which I suspect is closer to the truth -- and one still finds that 96% of priests are not abusers. The horror is doubled but the picture is not nearly as bleak as the Times and other media have hinted through the last year. The Times writer, however, proved remarkably ingenious in keeping the feeding frenzy alive. There is evidence in the data, she suggests, to support both those who blame the abuse problem on celibacy and those who blame it on the breakdown of sexual morality during the sixties. |
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read the padre
read the padre |
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This is simply not so. The numbers
prove nothing at all. Most experts in sexual abuse of minors and children attribute it to
a deep and incurable syndrome acquired early in life. Marriage won't cure it. An abuser
who marries is a married abuser. Moreover it is contemptuous of women to suggest that a
man can cure his attraction to minors simply by sleeping with a woman. The fact that most
of the abusers were ordained in the sixties can just as well be attributed to the fact
that there were large ordination classes in those years. Nonetheless, the Times writer ignores the clinical evidence about the personalities of abusers and uses the debate between the two sides to create havoc, and let loose again the furies of the talking heads who have pontificated about priests for the last twelve months. She thus deftly shifts the frame of her article from abusers to all priests. Led by Father Robert Silva of the National Federation of
Priests Councils, the talking heads denounced sexual education in the seminaries. I will
yield to no one in my contempt for what passed as a seminary education in those days -
about sexuality and everything else. Yet the argument which blames the seminaries for sex
abuse fails the test of the scholastic dictum qui nimis probat nihil probat : she
who proves too much, proves nothing. If seminary training turned out hordes of
sexual predators, then there should be a lot more than there are. Maybe a lot of us were
sexually immature at the time of ordination --like most young men are sexually immature at
the time of marriage and many remain so for the rest of their lives. Maybe we could
have benefited from better sexual education - though I'm at a loss to know what that would
have been like. Indeed what kind of sexual education will change the personality of
someone with, in Dr. John Money's words, a "vandalized love map"? Citing the comments of resigned priests, the Times writer also asserts quite gratuitously that "healthy" priests began to "jump ship" in sixties and seventies. She really doesn't prove that assertion, but rather quotes the study conducted by Eugene Cullen Kennedy and Victor Heckler (whom she does not mention) of Loyola/Chicago as part of the 1970 research the American bishops commissioned of the priesthood. Fifty seven percent of priests, according to their report, were "psychologically underdeveloped." However, she apparently did not read the introduction to the report in which Kennedy and Heckler say that priests were "ordinary," not very different from other men. Apparently, then, 57% of American males were psychologically underdeveloped. As a woman theologian remarked to me skeptically, "is that all?" One
must also wonder whether it is a sign of "psychological development" for men who
left the priesthood to proclaim themselves as "healthy" and those who stayed as
"unhealthy?" Such carelessness about data sources on priests from a lesser writer would be considered gross journalistic incompetence. In these days that kind of shoddy, sloppy journalism apparently is "all the news that's fit to print." As I will argue in my forthcoming book Priests in the Pressure Cooker, all the comparative evidence available suggests that, despite the New York Times, most priests are reasonably mature, happy men. They are not the crowd of cowering, craven, sexually frustrated, "unhealthy" males that the media have portrayed this past year. Priests have their faults and failings: in general they are miserable homilists, do not administer "user-friendly" parishes, and still do not take the abuse crisis seriously, but the media have calumniated them. I do not want to become a media basher (like most priests in the L.A. Times surveys). If it had not been for media pressure, the hierarchy would not have been forced to end their reassignments of abusive priests. No media outlet ever sent a known abuser back into a parish. Yet the sexual abuse crisis has become an occasion for Catholic bashing and celibate-priest bashing, an old custom dating to the 19th Century which is as American as cherry pie - with the addition these days of a few self-serving resigned priests joining in the game. Because some African Americans are brutal rapists it does not follow that all or most African Americans are. Because some CEOs are crooks, it does not follow that all or most are. Because some priests are creepy predators, it does not follow that all or most priests are. Except in the New York Times. The Times writer concludes her article with the gratuitous suggestion that abuse cases were down in the nineteen nineties because bishops might still be covering up. She does not seem to realize that her article covers up the truth that most priests are reasonably healthy males who are happy in their work and are not lusting for little boys. I
also wonder why the two honest and intelligent articles on the subject by Peter
Steinfels, (who works for the Times), appeared in The Commonwealth and the London Tablet,
and not in the Times. Did the Times editors ban Catholics from reporting on the sex
abuse problem? Maria Monk
lives! |
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