Some wrong ways to think about abusing priests

Way back in the early '90's, I attended a community college in Northern California.  During the course of studies there, I attended a "health consciousness" talk given by a guest lecturer: a gay man talking about living with AIDS.  When he told us his life story, he mentioned (almost in passing) that he had been a seminarian at a Catholic seminary for a while, and had seriously considered continuing on to become a priest before he ultimately to leave.

During the Q&A portion of the lecture, an incredulous student asked him about that: "why on earth would an active gay man want to be in a Catholic seminary, given the Church's stance on homosexuality?"

The way he answered the question was very illuminating for me, and it has stuck with me over the years.  As he answered the question, I realized that he was perfectly sincere, and that the reasons he listed that made him consider staying in the seminary and becoming a priest where--in at least some sense--good reasons.  He mentioned some aspects of spirituality he was attracted to--but the biggest reason that weighed on his mind was the respect of his friends and family.  He was still "in the closet" at the time, and he mentioned that his parents were already suspicious that he had never had a girlfriend.  Becoming a priest would have meant having a permanent excuse for this; it would have meant never having to disappoint his parents, and turning their suspicion, shame, and possible condemnation into pride and joy.

This is a very "good" reason for a closeted gay man to want to become a priest--"good" in the sense of powerful and cogent rather than in the sense of "worthy".  Looking at the thing from his perspective, it was an attractive prospect.  Ultimately, he decided that this would be lying to himself, so he left the seminary and starting living openly with his boyfriend instead.

The lesson that I drew from this is that the reasons that any particular person may have to join an organization or to seek a position do not necessarily relate to the natural purpose of that organization or that position.  You can't assume that because someone wants to be a teacher, he therefore loves teaching; he might simply love being in a position of authority over weaker and vulnerable people.  You can't assume that because a person wants to be a policeman that he loves justice; he might come from a line of policemen and want to fit in with his family history.

Pedophile priests: guilty until proven innocent?

This is all context that I wanted to setup for my main purpose: which is to (partially) evaluate this online article: Are priests guilty until proven innocent?

In this article, Eric Sammons raises some legitimate points about the rush to condemn a priest, Fr. James Jackson, FSSP, who has been accused of a sexual crime.  At least at the time of the publication of that article, the news-consuming public had little in the way of concrete information about this evidence behind these accusations, so I think it was certainly appropriate to caution against rash judgment. And I do not intend to challenge this primary point.

However, along the way towards cautioning against rash judgment, Mr. Sammons has made some dangerous errors which I believe ought to be corrected.  I would like to look at two related errors, both of which are contained in this sentence from the article:

Yet being slow to believe that a beloved priest—who is beloved precisely because he publicly adheres faithfully to Catholic doctrine—is guilty of such crimes is natural. After all, if a Catholic didn’t think being faithful to the Church gives at least some help to avoid committing such actions, why bother being Catholic? If you believe that Fr. Jackson is a faithful priest, you should find it hard to believe he did these things.

These are the two types of errors Mr. Sammons is committing in this statement, as I see them:

I. How easily we should believe that a priest has fallen into this type of sin.

It may seem logical and even necessary that the holiness of the priesthood should predispose us to doubt that a priest could be capable of such infamous sins.  But there are two problems with this logic:

1. Grace and the life of Faith do not work like magic incantations.  

Going through the physical motions of prayer and the Sacramental life do nothing good for your soul if you are not properly interiorly disposed to receive the graces of the Sacraments.  In fact, it is the opposite.  St. Paul says of people who receive the Sacraments unworthily:

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. (1 Cor 11: 28-30)

Grace and the gifts of the Sacraments are awesome, incredible things--but they are not safe.  This is why we prohibit those people in mortal sin from approaching the Sacraments (aside from Penance)--it's not because we are afraid of sullying the purity of Our Lord (who indeed plunged Himself into crowds of sinners).  It is because without repentance, the Sacraments are perilously dangerous to those who dare to grasp them unworthily.

So what should we expect, theoretically, for a priest who has joined the priesthood while hiding from his spiritual directors a sexual aberration such as arousal from viewing children?  Should we expect that a man who has dared to put himself forward as an alter Christus in order to hide a shameful sin from the world, will receive "at least some help to avoid committing such actions"?  No.  This is not a reasonable expectation.

Now, Mr. Sammons did couch his statement in the terms "If you believe that Fr. Jackson is a faithful priest", which would preclude the scenario that I just brought up.  But this is, quite simply, to beg the question.  How do you know that someone is, in fact, a faithful priest? (More on this a bit later).

2. Pedophilia is not just a vice to be worked on; it is a deep-seated psychological problem.

To hold, as Mr. Sammons is, that priests in general, should be less prone to fall into these types of scandalous sin because they are living a life designed to make one more holy is to fundamentally misunderstand the developmental order of these types of sexual deviancy.  It is not as if it is typical for a person to join the priesthood as an adult and only afterwards to start becoming tempted by deviant sexual thoughts.  In fact, it is pretty much universally the case for people who have these kinds of psycho-sexual disturbances, that they are clearly present already at least by the early post-pubescent years.  Very commonly, the roots of the problem can be found even earlier, often caused by some kind of childhood abuse.

Whether or not a priest will fall into these sorts of sin, then, depends not nearly so much on what sort of life he was living as a priest, but rather on the conditions that existed already when he was admitted into the seminary as a candidate.  There are really no circumstances I can think of in which it is a reasonable decision for a person to seek the priesthood if he knows he is subject to pedophiliac tendencies, nor would it be a reasonable decision at all for a seminary to accept such a candidate if such a serious sexual issue is known.

Therefore, when a priest falls into such a sin, it is no use looking at the purported sincerity or faithfulness of that person's life as a priest.  More than likely, the whole thing was built up on a lie: a foundation of sand rather than stone.  We should expect such a thing to come crashing down.

So then the question becomes, how much should Catholics expect that people with such fundamental sexual issues would seek to become priests and successfully accomplish it?  And here, I return to the story with which I started this post: there are "good," cogent reasons for such people to seek out the priesthood.  Even more so than homosexuality, pedophilia is an extremely shameful fault, and those who are unfortunate to have it get very good at hiding it, sometimes even from themselves. Furthermore, pedophiles--almost universally--have great difficulty in establishing normal romantic relationships with adults, and will therefore naturally see a life of honored celibacy as a relief to their discomfort and a cover for their shame.

It is also a well known fact that pedophiles seek out positions of trust in order to gain access to children.  This phenomenon is not restricted to the priesthood, by any means!  The one pedophile I know best personally, for example, set up shop as a family counselor at one point.   Schools must be vigilant about this, too, because pedophiles tend to seek out positions as teachers.  Single mothers looking to date also need to be vigilant about this, for the same reason: their children are an unfortunate attractor for a certain type of person.

To think, therefore, that "the priesthood is a holy institution, and therefore we can typically expect people who achieve it to be more holy" is to completely misunderstand the problem.  It is a holy institution, but in its accidents, it has some other properties as well which make it an attractive goal for people for whom holiness is not the first objective. 

I'd like to note also, that this error is the mirror image of an error often made by those of a liberal or anti-Traditionalist persuasion, which is to think that these sorts of sexual abuses by priests are due to the life of celibacy.  Again, this is to miss the real problem, which is how these people came to become priests in the first place.  I don't know of a single incident where it can be plausibly held that a priest started without sexual desires towards children, but then developed such a taste after too much time in poorly tolerated celibacy.  These sexual deviancies develop too early in life for that to ever really be the case.

II. How can a man who does [x] good thing, also be unfaithful?

Mr. Sammon's second major error is encapsulated in the first sentence: "being slow to believe that a beloved priest—who is beloved precisely because he publicly adheres faithfully to Catholic doctrine—is guilty of such crimes is natural".  The error here is to equate external adherence to the formal intellectual teachings of the Catholic faith with actual faithfulness, as in adherence of the mind and will to Christ.

Here is what is important to understand: not only is the Catholic Faith true, it is also (in the technical theological meaning) glorious.  Glory--understood as a theological concept--refers to all of those things that radiate out from the fundamental goodness and beauty of a thing.  The Catholic Faith is the saving doctrine revealed by God to man, and that is what is fundamental about it, but there are many, many, things about the Catholic faith that are beautiful to behold in addition to that.  Catholicism has a 2000 year history of glorious culture, brilliant philosophy, and attractive heroic lives.  It is a family in which one may find friendship and comfort, a school in which one may be taught the deepest truths, and a political institution which can inspire the most loyal fealty.

In other words--and this is the important part--you do not need to be a truly faithful Catholic in order to be enthusiastic about Catholicism.  You can understand and even preach enthusiastically about Catholic dogma merely from an appreciation of its impressive intellectual consistency or its aesthetic beauty.

It is therefore a very dangerous thing to simply assume from outward consistency of teaching with the dogmas of the faith, that a person is therefore a holy person, or a "faithful priest", in the truest meaning of the word "faithful".

This error, I think, is especially dangerous because it can not only blind us in truly evaluating a priest's true moral character, but it is also an easy way by which conservative Catholics can deceive themselves.  Am I a good Catholic, we ask?  There are a lot of ways to answer this question that dodge around the true way of answering this, which is to ask: "Am I really striving to do my Lord's will every moment of every day?" 

Here are some common ways of answering this question that are really false shortcuts: "Do I love traditional Catholic liturgy?"  "Am I loyal to the Bishops that teach orthodoxy?"  "Do I proudly and loudly reject modern errors?"  "Do I identify as a Traditionalist?" Etc.

None of these things get to the heart of true Fidelity, which is a life that cleaves to Christ with as much will as it is given the Grace to have.

Conclusion

It is (very fortunately!) not usually the job of most of us to evaluate whether a priest accused of sexual sins is guilty or innocent, or even if it is likely that a priest is guilty or innocent.  Most of the time, on this basis, we should maintain a healthy skepticism about the guilt or innocence of a particular priest who has fallen into scandal.  This has, unfortunately, been made more difficult for the lay Catholic, who nowadays feels the burden of making these kinds of judgement in the absence of the truly responsible parties doing a good job of making them--we feel the need to hold our Bishops' feet to the fire on this topic, lest more abusing priests be allowed to continue in their abuse.  

To the extent, however, that it is our moral responsibility to evaluate the possibility that a particular priest is guilty of sins of this sort, I believe it is very important to avoid falling into certain intellectual traps.  Do not think that the holiness of the state itself will act as some sort of magical repellant that will deter sinful men from seeking the priesthood--almost the opposite is the case.  Likewise, do not make the mistake of confusing intellectual adherence to a system of doctrine with true faithfulness to Christ.  This is not true even of our own interior lives, let alone the lives of preachers who get respect and even reverence for their orthodoxy.

For those who have the care of keeping safe the flock of Christ, perpetual vigilance is therefore necessary.