Pedophilia, Homosexuality, Contraception - The pan-sexualism that has marred the seamless garment of chastity in the church

During a recent interview in Rome, Cardinal Dario Castrillón Hoyos, Prefect of the Vatican's Congregation of the Clergy, linked the present problem of sexual abuse in the Church to what he called the "environment of pansexuality" that has invaded secular society and the Church in many places. This statement of Cardinal Castrillón is perhaps an indication of the kind of changes that may be coming from Rome, precisely in response to this growing scandal among the Church's clergy. These changes may also have been obliquely hinted in another recent interview at the Vatican, this time with the Pope's press secretary, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, who suggested to reporters (1) that the deeper problem behind all these recent scandals is homosexuality in the priesthood, and (2) that in his opinion homosexuality might even be an impediment to valid orders. His comments provoked a predictably strong protest from some of the very people in this country who had been quick to pummel the church and its bishops for their failures in preventing the scandals related to pedophilia, but who also seemingly want to defend the compatibility of homosexuality and priestly celibacy.

Just to take one example, a friend of mine recently called my attention to a review of a book, featured in the prestigious New York Review of Books, dealing with a particular religious order in this country. According to the authors of this new book, their study discovered that homosexual behavior and tolerance of a "gay subculture" of homosexual priests has become so deeply ingrained in certain houses of this order, that in these communities heterosexual members feel themselves a beleaguered minority in a dominant culture of homosexuality. As of this writing, there has been, as far as I can discover, no response from this order as to the accuracy or inaccuracy of these observations, and certainly no call for superiors to investigate this situation let alone correct it. I bring this up not to condemn the order or its superiors, but simply to ask why the editors of its own journal have been so quick to condemn bishops whom they judge to be negligent in these recent scandals, but have nothing to say about the issue of open homosexuality in their own community, reported by this book's authors, who are by no means hostile to the order or overly concerned by this very data they uncovered.

Why then all the concern and righteousness in relation to the recent scandals, virtually all of which, when examined carefully, involve homosexual activity by priests, and yet no apparent concern for the larger issue of homosexuality in the priesthood, and specifically in this spotlighted order? Is it simply that such an internal criticism would almost certainly cost the editors their jobs? Or could it be that these men, along with many other religious today, see no real problem with a homosexual subculture existing in their (or any) religious community, indeed that they do not see the homosexual orientation itself as a disorder? If, as appears likely, it is this latter case which explains their different responses to the recent scandals in the Church, and the silence in regard to the scandal supposedly existing in their own community, then once again comments from Rome will likely be received with some disdain by those who have been quick to offer their solutions to the Bishops, including their own resignations in some cases.

In either case, the statement by Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos demonstrates that Rome is well aware of a critical distortion contained in the media reports of these scandals, a distortion based upon the pro-homosexual attitudes of the secular press and even some of the religious press in this country. Citing a recent study on these matters, the Prefect pointed to a statistical number of 3% of priests who abuse minors,and a statistical figure of 0.3% among priests of pedophile abusers. Another study quoted by professor Philip Jenkins in his book, Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis (1996), reported that of 2200 priests studied, 40 had committed sexual misconduct with a minor but only one could be accurately classified as a pedophile. Leaving aside the debate over the exact accuracy of these numbers, what is more significant is the distinction that Rome is making between those who abuseminors, generally young to mid teenagers, and those who are strict pedophiles, i.e., those who abuse pre-adolescent children.

Yet the press in this country, for the most part, has chosen to ignore the more widespread abuse of pederasty and to lump together all of these incidents under the one category of "pedophilia." They have done so not because they fail to recognize the difference between the two, a difference which social science and psychology readily recognizes. The reason virtually all of the articles and editorials in the secular and even in religious media insist on naming the phenomenon "pedophilia" is that by doing so the author accomplishes at least two things: (1) he transforms the issue into a psychological (rather than a moral) problem, and (2) he dissociates the reviled behavior from homosexuality. The press wants to categorize this horrible abuse, criminal abuse, as pedophilia, precisely because it wants to avoid raising the issue of homosexuality within the context of scandal and abuse of children.

To define all the abuse as pedophilia is to remove from debate the issue of homosexuality, including homosexual priests. Secondly, it permits one to define the wrongness of the behavior in such a way as to exonerate homosexual behavior completely. Notice that the struggle for these commentators is to name exactly what is wrong with the behavior in question. It is significant that most never get around to saying what exactly it is that is wrong. Most end up locating it in the abuse of minors, i.e., child abuse. This means that the nature of the act itself can be affirmed, while the priests' behavior (and the Church's response) can be forthrightly condemned. The unspoken assumption in all this is that the same acts performed between consenting adults carries no moral opprobrium. Such an approach protects the set of underlying presuppositions that define the modern liberal understanding of things: that the core social and personal good is choice, and that acts freely chosen are harmful only if they violate another person's freedom to choose acts that seem pleasurable or useful to him or her. By naming the priests' misconduct "pedophilia," one is able by definition to establish a lack of consent in one of the parties -- the child who as child is incapable of consenting to the act. The scandal is thus defined as an adult priest abusing his position of authority and trust in order to have his way with a child too young to freely consent to the actions proposed. The moral status of the acts temselves is conveniently left out of the discussion.

This ideologically driven effort to separate homosexuality from the abuse of minors is ludicrous and dangerous, and the's Church highest authorities are having none of it. In the previously mentioned work, Jenkins, an Episcopalian and a respected professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, forcefully argues that the idea that pedophilia is more endemic to the celibate priesthood of Catholicism than to other clergy or other professions is largely myth. In his studies of clergy sexual abuse most victims were in their middle teens, and this seems also to be the case in reports of these recent scandals. As Jenkins notes, this does not in any way downplay the gravity of the abuse, but it does introduce a significant difference which is not merely semantic. If we are to begin to solve the problem, as everyone from the secular media to the Catholic hierarchy agrees we must, then we must begin by identifying the whole problem, and facing it honestly and directly. And perhaps it is precisely because the press and liberal opinion generally does not want to face the real issue that it continues to insist on naming it "pedophilia."

The truth is that there are homosexual pedophiles and heterosexual pedophiles, but almost all of the victims of clerical sexual abuse are minor boys, and the perpetrators are men. We can readily agree that most homosexuals do not abuse children, and can also agree that some heterosexual men abuse children. However, the fact that in the current scandal most victims are minor boys abused by adult men cannot be overlooked, and is not without its roots in the general disorder of homosexuality. In saying this, I recognize that the application of the term "disorder" in relation to homosexuality is never found in the secular and liberal press, because the homosexual world has been able successfully to assert its self-justifying principle, that there is no such thing as normality, no true order in the area of sexual inclination or activity. For this world, homosexuality and heterosexuality (and logically every other form of sexual inclination) are just different but equally normal forms of sexuality.

Thus lumping all these sexual abuse cases into one category indirectly legitimizes homosexuality by separating and insulating the homosexual subculture in the broader society, and also existing to some degree in the Church and its clergy, from any criticism in connection with this abuse. Indeed to call this criminality "pedophilia" is to insist that this scandal has absolutely nothing to do with homosexuality as such, and that these priests are in no way understood as homosexuals but simply as pedophile priests. Thus two rather progressive goals are achieved at once: (1) homosexuality is preserved in its only recently attained status as a form of sexuality that is equally as normal as heterosexuality, and (2) another cause such as mandatory celibacy, antiquated positions on sexual ethics, or insistence on a male priesthood is assserted to be the real cause of the perversion. The first serves the homosexual, social and political agenda, and the second serves the agendas of those who want to discredit the Church as a moral authority, as well as Catholics who want the priesthood opened to married men and to women.

Furthermore, does anyone notice the incongruity of the position that identifies what is wrong with the priests' behavior as the abuse of young teenagers who lack the ability to fully consent with the contemporary liberal position that ascribes the ability of young teens to fully consent when it comes to procurement of abortions without parental permission or to openly express their homosexuality by forming homosexual relationships? Are the public high schools that permit and even encourage the establishment of administratively approved clubs for "gay and lesbian" students, some as young as 12 or 13, acknowledging the ability of these young people to consent to acts that only a few years ago were virtually universally condemned by society and proscribed under criminal law? Is anyone asking how it can be that a fourteen year old has a legal right to engage in homosexual acts, to legally identify himself as a homosexual, whereas a man who engages in homosexual acts with him is designated a pedophile rather than a homosexual engaging in illegal homosexual acts with a minor?

This may pass for sanity in secular society today, but the Vatican is buying none of this, regardless of the power of the press to spread this world view of the homosexual subculture. The statements of the Cardinal and the Press Secretary of the Pope are evidence that the call for changes in the Church by the secular press and their religious clones are not being ignored, but will bring changes, serious changes, quite different from the ones they seek. What these changes will be can be predicted if we truly understand what the Church has always taught regarding the virtue of chastity. It is chastity, not consent, that is the critical issue here since chastity has a unique meaning in mind and body when it is lived out in the priesthood, religious, married, and single lives.

Chastity, in the Catholic moral and spiritual tradition, is the virtue that regulates sexuality within every state of life in the Church, including the married state of life, and it does so by recognizing the truth that human sexual inclination is naturally ordered, by God, through the natural law, to the unifying and procreative love that is proper to marriage. Thus any form of sexual activity ( when it is genital in nature) that takes place outside marriage is understood to be disordered to some degree or another. Some activities, such as fornication or adultery, are disordered only because sexual union, and the natural sexual accompaniments leading to this union, belong properly to man and woman in marriage. Others are more radically disordered, unnatural in the moral sense (as contrasted with normalcy in a sociological definition), because they have no true relation to conjugal love, and are simply various forms of sexual self-gratification, including masturbation, homosexuality, bestiality, etc., in ascending order of unnatural sexual behavior.

The Church understands that chastity is essential for single people whose Christian vocation calls them to remain faithful to the Lord in His Kingdom, and to enjoy the freedom of the children of God, a freedom that is severely compromised by sexual disorder in any state of life. In addition to these fruits of chastity, it is essential for married partners in order to protect the love and life-long commitment of the partners, and it is essential to religious life and priesthood in order to safeguard the purity of mind and heart that is necessary to serve all God's people in genuine self-giving charity,

It is within this perspective of chastity that we must see the importance ofCardinal Dario Castrillóón Hoyos' statement about the "environment of pansexuality" being at the root of this scandal, and see what the changes are that will inevitably have to come about in the Church, if she is to deal properly with the scandals that have shaken Catholics and everyone who truly loves children and values purity.

The Roman Prelate who is in charge of the congregation that oversees the Catholic clergy throughout the world understands what hopefully many church leaders in this country will recognize. Common sense recognizes that there is a connection between the growing acceptance of a homosexual subculture in the church and the scandals that have recently come to our attention. In the first place, most of the cases are straightforward incidents of homosexual clergy abusing adolescent minors. Almost all of the cases of strict pedophilia are also homosexual in nature. Regardless of our inability to establish the precise links between homosexuality as such and pedophilia, the connection is at least established to the pansexualism that has resulted in the acceptance of the homosexual orientation being as normal as the heterosexual, and the acceptance of a homosexual subculture within seminaries and religious institutes. This acceptance was at its greatest during the 70's and 80's, and it should not surprise anyone who knew anything about this then that we are now suffering the penalty for allowing increasing numbers of men with sexual disorders into the priesthood and religious life.

But the pansexualism, which spawned the acceptance of a homosexual subculture, and which in turn laid the ground for this sexual abuse of children and minors - which includes growing child pornography and child prostitution in the broader society - has an even more profound root than the increase of and acceptance of homosexuality among the clergy. Moreover, this deeper root is even more resistant to recognition on the part of most Catholics and some Church leaders. Nonetheless, what we will have to recognize, as a Church, sooner or later, is that the "environment of pansexualism," the social setting which supports sexual deviation in whatever forms, has its roots deep within the contraceptive culture we now live within, that is, had its beginnings in the widespread acceptance of contraception on the part of Catholics in huge numbers, including doubtlessly some members of the hierarchy.

It is this issue, contraception, that has become the "silent" issue, and its relation to today's public scandals is something that not many people in the Church, including not many of her leaders, are even now ready to face, even just to ask whether it might be connected to the scandals among clergy today. How many Catholics today will accept or even begin to understand the Church's teaching that contraception is itself adisordered form of sexuality, a truth that virtually all Christians at one time recognized prior to 1930?

Today, The Catholic Church stands almost alone in condemning unequivocally the evil of contraception as a fundamental moral disorder which undermines not only marriage, but chastity across the board. Yet, until the Anglican Church broke ranks by aproving its use by married couples in 1930, contraceptive sex was universally condemned by all Christian communities, and was universally taught by all these church's authorities to be a perversion of married love, and of human sexuality as such, and as an open invitation to infidelity and to deliberately sterile sex in whatever form. The logic of pansexualism followed inevitably: if married partners could engage in sex which they rendered deliberately sterile, then why would sterile sexual activity of any kind be morally objectionable. By this acceptance of contraception as morally acceptable for married couples, sex was first morally dissociated only from procreation, but it inevitably followed that it would be dissociated from marriage, and then from heterosexuality, and finally from morality altogether. Contraception is the original root of the sexual revolution and the pan-sexualism that we have today, not the ideology and rebellion of the young people in the 60's onward, but the moral rebellion of their elders beginning in the 30's, and only culminating in the 60's with the new form of easy contraception, the magic "pill," which became the poison pill for sexual morality.

Today this all sounds like the antiquarianism of someone who is hopelessly out of tune with modern wisdom, and yet in the early 30's one could still read this very analysis in a secular paper like The Washington Post, whose editor was so disturbed by the acceptance by the Federal Council of Churches in this country of the Anglican Church's departure from the moral tradition on contraception that he wrote about it in a lead editorial. This is what he foresaw lie ahead once the these churchmen approved contraception and severed the link between sex and its natural ordering to procreation within marriage:

It is impossible to reconcile the doctrine of the divine institution of marriage with any modernistic plan for the mechanical regulation of or suppression of human life. The Church must either reject the plain teachings of the Bible, or reject schemes for the "scientific" production of human souls. Carried to its logical conclusion, the committee's report, if carried into effect, would sound the death knell of marriage as a holy institution by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be "careful and restrained" is preposterous.

How ironic that the Editor-in-Chief of the Post, a Methodist layman, would have been so close in his analysis to a future Pope who would be pilloried for making similar warnings in the encyclical in which he simply reaffirmed the constant Christian (not just Catholic but Christian) tradition which had always rejected contraception as a perversion of married love. And how ironic that the pill which was embraced as the liberation of women from nature, is in fact turning out to be the poison pill that is destroying western cultures in at least two ways, demographically, as populations fall increasingly below even replacement levels, and morally and spiritually as they fall beneath the power of this unleashed pansexualism, and lose their religious faith which, according to Romans, is intimately linked with sexual perversion.

What blindness is there in our society to insist quite rightly that pedophilia is a sexual perversion which does tremendous harm to children and discredits for many the celibate life, and yet not to be able to see at all how contraception likewise does tremendous harm to married couples' love, undermines marital commitment, ultimately justifies any form of sexual activity solely as a means to pleasure including homosexuality, bestiality, self-abuse, etc., and finally leads to suicidal depopulation? How deep the blindness that keeps modern society from perceiving any connection at all between the rampant divorce which leaves millions of children without a normal home life and family, and the introduction of sterile sex through contraception into the heart of married life. Nor can it see any connection between contraception as a way of life in marriage, and the severe birth decline which poses significant survival problems for whole cultures, and for social safety-nets in most countries, in the not too distant future? What will it take to enable the leaders of public opinion today to even be open to examining the proposition that once sexual activity is divorced form its unitive and procreative functions, any form of sexual expression is in principle equal to any other?

And these same tough questions have to be addressed within the Church as a whole, for none of us are perfectly immune from the world view that surrounds us when it comes to these powerfully propagandized issues. Real reform demands honest self-criticism, and this would include the recognition that at least part of this terrible problem caused by priests was the acceptance of the new sexual morality, beginning with contraception, and not just by many laity but by many in the Catholic clergy, including some who administered and taught in seminaries from the 1960's on, and perhaps by some who continue to minister in these institutions to this day. This new sexual morality surely provided a ready means of self-justification to those priests who were struggling with the demons of their own sexual proclivities. For these "enlightened" teachings on human sexuality characteristic of the "new theology," if they did not actually encourage satisfaction of the inclinations, at least discouraged those struggling to control them from undertaking the kinds of spiritual self-mortification that were common in the past and that in at least some cases may have permitted those with non-pathological, but still real tendencies to overcome them and serve the church well.

The Church's leadership in Rome, and increasingly elsewhere, sees the connections in all these things, and understands that there have to be changes in the way that seminaries are operated, the Gospel is preached, and chastity is promoted in every state of life in the Church. After all, the Church herself is greying and shrinking in most places in the west, including in the U.S. when we look at actual belief and practice and not just at numbers of baptized. Acceptance of contraception has rendered the Church's birthrate about as low as the rest of society, and it has at times created a climate within certain of her institutions of sexual permissiveness and pansexualism, the environment which is the breeding ground for sexual exploitation all kinds, and in all the states of life. While there is plenty of evidence, for those who are honest enough to recognize it, that most of the Church's leaders in this country, who have been catching most of the flack these days, had in fact put more stringent sexual abuse policies in place in the early nineties, and hopefully they also understand that there will be no easy fix by simply tightening up administrative policies. It is a much deeper renewal that is needed, a renewal of chastity throughout the church, and that effort at reform is yet to come.

It will not be an easy fix because it seems, in the final analysis, that we are dealing here with multiple, interconnected issues: we have the denial of intrinsic evil of the act by the critics and still by most Catholics; we also have a serious abuse and betrayal of office and trust and the perversion of charity, disobedience to legitimate authority, and the violation of a solemn promise by the abusers; and we have had a breakdown in administrative discipline that has already been addressed in tougher policies undertaken by almost all bishops, and all this before the recent spate of scandals; and finally we have a confusion of the psychological and moral orders by almost everyone. Each of these issues has its own kind of remedy. That's why there are multiple right suggestions for correcting the problem.

From the Church's end, we need to declare unceasingly, unequivocally and without hesitation not only that, but why, these acts, in themselves, in every set of circumstances, are intrinsically wrong. We also need to administer discipline that is effective, and is not simply therapeutic in nature, to toughen up even more already improved policies, to clean up our own house, to reform seminaries, to re-think the role of psychological professionals in the seminaries, etc.

But even after the leaders of the Church have exercised the kind of leadership that assure the kind of administrative policies that give zero tolerance to pedophiles in the priesthood, the task of real reform is only beginning and the whole Church has to be involved. The seminaries, which nowhere tolerate pedophiles even today, have to be even further reformed. The issue of the homosexual subculture in any seminaries cannot be ignored, because this subculture is a breeding ground for deviation. And there needs to be a difference, recognized in the Church's own universal policies, between this kind of subculture, which is based upon a refusal to recognize the objective disorder in homosexual orientation and activity, and the homosexual orientation as such. Once the orientation itself is recognized as disordered, there can be a true spiritual remedy, assuming there is a desire for and proven capacity for chaste self-control. The homosexual subculture on the other hand, visible or underground, is rooted in the denial of this disorderdness, and seeks to establish the "normalicy" of this inclination, a conviction which logically leads to the refusal to seek the kinds of ascetical and spiritual aids for establishing a true chastity of mind and body. An alcoholic has to be personally convinced not only that he is an alcoholic, but that his alcoholism is a real disorder he suffers from, and only then is there hope of avoiding the kinds of mental and physical behaviors that constitute the disordered behavior of alcoholism.

The same is true for homosexuality, and it would be a total confusion of these two disorders to suggest that the kind of homosexual subculture that has emerged today is the equivalent of AA.

However, comprehensive reform in the whole church when it comes to chastity cannot come about by simply reforming seminaries and our process of selecting candidates for the priesthood. It also will demand that the laity and clergy alike come to recognize that we truly live in a sick society, sick with a culture that spawns sexual deviation and pansexuality. We have to understand first of all how our present culture legally protects pornographers who poison the minds of young men, heterosexual and homosexual alike. Pornography is not just another problem, but creates the atmosphere in which chastity becomes ever more difficult, especially for men whose minds are sunk in the filth our pornographers pour out. Pornography is a powerful seed bed of sexual deviation, and we tolerate it as a society as never before in our history.

But beyond a war against the free dispersion of pornography and other things that undermine the virtue of chastity in society, we also need to recreate a worldview and a social environment, in the Church as a whole and in society at large, which promotes and protects chastity as a foundational requirement of all healthy human sexuality, and of a healthy human society as such. It is too easy simply to point to these deviates who molest children as the whole problem, and refuse to look at the contraceptive, pornographic, and pan-sexual culture which has bred them. These predators certainly are not going to simply disappear from society once the Church gets her house in order. They will be with us, among us, and the only hope of controlling them is for society and the Church providing them the means and motivation to control themselves. We must, as a church and as a society, do our best to assist them in acquiring the virtue of chastity, and that means at a minimum cleansing our society from the things that make it difficult for them to achieve self-control, above all pornography, and simultaneously giving them the positive motivation and means to achieve it, that is, by giving them the example of the power of chaste self-control in all states of life. This means reconverting society from a contraceptive culture to a a culture which values chastity in marriage and in every state of life.

Ironically, there is only one institution today that really believes in this possibility, in spite of its members own failures, that is, believes that self-control, chastity, purity is really possible for all men and women, that faithful, life-long chastity is a realizable thing for anyone, and that institution is the Catholic Church. She believes this not because she has some automatic, easy formula for overcoming sin, but because she believes in the grace of Jesus Christ that she administers through her sacraments, believes in the power of His grace, to cure every human sin, including and beginning with the sins of her own, and believes in man's capacity through his free will to at least be open to the grace of God that can change any unchaste person into a person will self-control and self-mastery, change any sinner of any kind into a saint. Quixotic, I can understand that judgement, but do the critics of the Church have another solution?

CMN