Thursday, October 23, 2003
(11:19 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Rethinking sexual abuse
Apparently the Diocese of Joliet has decided that the best way to deal with the priest sexual abuse scandals is to require all church volunteers (such as me) to sit through a three-hour presentation on sexual abuse. After the presentation, I'm still ambivalent on the issue. The more I think about it, the wiser it seems to have all people involved in the church on the lookout for sexual abuse, because as they pointed out, the rate of sexual abuse among priests is not higher than among lay people. The problem is not priests per se, but rather sexual abuse as such, and educating lay people can help to prevent sexual abuse by priests and lay church people alike.
One person at the table made the obvious "point" that this problem might go away if priests could marry. Let's investigate this claim, though. Isn't it safe to say that having sex with a child would be a very different experience from having sex with one's wife? The emotional and power dynamics would be very different, in addition to the difference in the partner's body. Being a straight male, I'd have to say that if heterosexual intercourse with adult women were disallowed, I doubt that a real "solution" would be to allow me to have sex with men -- obviously those are different things, and I think it's misleading to lump them all together under the category of "sex." A lot of child molestors do have adult sexual outlets, but they also desire sex with children. They don't necessarily want children as such -- one child molestor in the presentation tonight was married with his own children, but he didn't abuse his own children. There are all kinds of other preferential issues, too; for instance, a person who's attracted to underaged teenagers is a very different creature from one who is attracted to actual grade-school children. Child sexual abuse is a disturbing and terrible thing, but that doesn't stop it from being a complex issue worthy of careful consideration.
That said, there does need to be investigation of the kinds of attitudes toward sex that might lead one to seek out priesthood. Some people might view the vow of celibacy as a kind of defense against sexual urges they know are wrong -- for instance, in The Seven-Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton talks about how he thought that the celibacy vow would free him from his burning desires for women. That is obviously a naive attitude, and I'm sure that once people like that get into a situation where they have very little accountability and they can basically get away with it, they are obviously going to find it very difficult to control themselves.
The church as a whole should be held accountable for creating this kind of situation, especially through its excessively negative attitudes toward sex. The very idea that sexual expression absolutely must be submitted to some utilitarian purpose (i.e., reproduction) makes it very difficult to view sex as anything but a necessary evil. As Aquinas (reportedly) says, one can only give up something good -- if sex isn't good, if it's something that must be given up unless you plan to use it to produce as many children as possible, then giving it up doesn't make any damn sense. It's like making priests take a vow not to murder anyone. I think celibacy has a place in the church, but when paired with attitudes toward sex that produce pathological behavior, it can create terribly destructive situations.
I'm glad that the diocese is going beyond a simple reaction to the media scandal. It would be easy for them to make priests' lives more difficult in some superficial way, to claim they were doing something. By getting the lay people involved, I think the church is taking a very valuable step to keep children safe from sexual assault -- and it's also good to see them granting such responsibilities to the laity. Still, I think that this is basically a band-aid solution. The priest scandal showed very graphically what the sexual attitudes of the church are doing to people. Perhaps the laity needs to take the responsibility of ignoring those particular teachings in practice and refusing to pass them down to their children. In the same way that the laity should be responsible for catching sexually abusive priests before they start, they should also be responsible for helping to break other vicious cycles of abuse.
