<< Back 6/12/02 Church scandal reveals depth of society’s sexual confusion By Jeff Minick Several years ago a friend and I were discussing the North American Man Boy Love Association, or NAMBLA, the group that frequently marches in gay pride parades. My friend had never heard of this pedophilic organization, whose informal motto is “If you wait until 8, you’re already too late.” When I told my friend that the group advocated sex for prepubescent children — that is, for children under the age of 11 or 12 — she was incredulous. “No one would ever approve of children having sex,” she said. Yet less than five minutes later, this same woman was telling me that she had begun to look for birth control for her 15-year-old daughter. Our society is confused about sexuality and love. We live in a culture without common values, a screwed-up, whacked-out, runaway monster of a culture created largely by the entertainment media and by our own roaring desires. Consider what popped up on the Internet on the day I wrote this article: ° A defense attorney for mother and murderess Andrea Yates stated that Mrs. Yates had “interrupted her children’s lives.” (Really? I thought she had murdered them. Meanwhile, Russell Yates, the piece of excrement that is her husband, was still blathering and yukking it up on the talk show circuit. Did anyone grieve the deaths of these five poor souls?) ° In Louisiana a 7-year-old boy was raped by his mother. (What do we call this act? Pedophilia? Incest? Rape? Maternal love?) ° Alvin D. Jones, 18, and a younger friend engaged in oral sex with a 14-year-old during a biology class at school (Well, hey, it was biology class. Incidentally, this incident also occurred in Louisiana: is it something in the water there?). Of course, the most prominent headliner these days in terms of sex and scandal is the Catholic Church. You can’t open a newspaper or pull up a news site without seeing more priests and even a bishop or two accused of sex scandals. Each day brings a new accusation of pedophilia, of sexual abuse of children by priests, of cover-ups by bishops and their chanceries. I am a Catholic, a convert with 10 years in a Church that I love, and I can’t tell you how sick these stories make me feel. It’s as if my mother, God rest her soul, was accused of equally heinous crimes. It doesn’t help to read statistics showing that the problem of sexual abuse of minors occurs with equal frequency among Protestant ministers. It doesn’t really help knowing that pedophilia and the sexual abuse of young people is far lower among the clergy of all faiths than among the population at large. Statistics don't mend a broken heart. What has infuriated me about the present mess, however, are the distortions of the media as this story has played out. A number of papers and television people have milked these stories for all they’re worth, stretching them out, reporting all cases of purported sexual abuse as if each of them was verified or as if each had occurred yesterday rather than 30 years ago. The media has refused to play fair with statistics and even the names of certain abuses. Did you know, for example, that the National Catholic Register studied the cases of 2,252 incidents in the Chicago diocese over a 30-year period and found only one real case of pedophilia — and that case occurred with one of the convicted priest’s nephews? Did any columnist other than the maligned Anne Coulter point out that of 45,000 active and retired priests in the United States, only 55 have actually been accused of child sexual abuse? The greatest failure in reportage of this story — and we must assume this failure is either deliberate or the result of gross ignorance — is the media’s refusal to discern the difference between pedophilia and homosexuality. According to the Merck Manual of Medicine as well as to various psychiatric textbooks, pedophilia involves the molestation of prepubescent children, and the greatest offenders are usually married males. Daily the press continues to accuse the Catholic Church of pedophilia, yet a glance at the definition of pedophilia as well as at the examples above reveal that there is much confusion regarding this word. Is that Louisiana mother a pedophile? Is Alvin Jones, 18 years old, a pedophile if he receives oral sex from a 14-year-old? Is a 16-year-old who sleeps with her 21-year-old boyfriend being abused by a pedophile? Are the 15-year-old daughters of Haywood County who perform fellatio on their 16-year-old boyfriends pedophiliacs? Probably yes to the first question, no to the next three. Why then does the news media not make the same distinction with priests who are molesting young men? One obvious explanation — and at this point in my tour of the swamp I’m going for the obvious — is that the press is afraid of referring to these acts as homosexual. To do so, to label the priests who are sleeping with teenagers as homosexuals, might raise the fear that some homosexuals do indeed prey on the young. To label these priests as homosexuals also reveals that within the Catholic Church there are many homosexual clergy. Over 90 percent of the charges of sexual misconduct between Catholic priests and young people are between gay priests and teenagers. Am I trying to excuse the priests? No. These men who have damaged the lives of young men and the faith of millions deserve to be punished. Am I trying to excuse the bishops? No. Some of these shepherds did more to protect the wolves than the sheep (To be fair here, most bishops have acted to prevent sexual abuse. Moreover, there are some reports that a few bishops have suffered blackmail from what Greeley referred to as the “lavender mafia”). Such offenders should receive due punishment. Indeed, scripture tells us that “it would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin.” But priests are not bred and reared in a vacuum. Only a handful of them live cloistered lives. What does their sordid behavior say about the rest of us? First, it says that all of us, whether we like it or not, now live in a society that is a sewer of sleaze, a sexual bog so murky that even the most basic definitions and limits have become blurred. We have forged a world of smutty television, pornographic web sites, routine divorce, and sexual rights without obligation, a sad world in which even some elementary school children dress like hookers, a topsy-turvy world in which good is bad and bad good. Is it any wonder that even our holy men are the cause of scandal? This story of infamy, dishonor, and sin also reveals that truth in our modern world is often either denied or deliberately disregarded. We fear truth and acting on truth because we are afraid of appearing intolerant, of appearing rigid, of hurting someone’s feelings. Our bishops ignored the truth about their priests. Those who run certain Catholic seminaries — dissident priests, nuns, and lay people — often ignored the truth that by accepting practicing homosexuals as candidates for the priesthood, and in some cases condoning or even encouraging homosexual behavior, they were setting the stage for scandal and abuse. Our newsmongers are now ignoring the truth about the nature of the scandals by refusing to regard them as homosexual in nature, by refusing to acknowledge that the victims of these priests were mostly teenage boys. In some respects, the Church may be regarded as fortunate in its present tribulation. The problem of clerical abuse is out in the open. The proud bishops who have tolerated or promoted immoral behavior in their clergy will be brought to their knees — if not by begging God’s mercy and forgiveness, then by paying hundreds of millions in dollars worth of lawsuits. The good and holy priests who make up the vast majority of Catholic clergy will continue to practice their vows, offer the sacraments, and inspire the laity. Often in such a crisis the Church has emerged spiritually stronger because of its suffering. That just leaves the rest of us. What will it take before we reform ourselves? (Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville and can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)