By JOHN TIERNEY, March 29, 2002, New York Times
AFTER what must be a record
amount of clerical atonement during Holy Week, preachers in
Roman Catholic churches will be seizing on the theme of rebirth this Easter
Sunday. They've
already gotten plenty of suggestions for ways to resurrect the American church.
The most obvious advice is to
take sexual misconduct seriously, which has already happened.
Parents have learned to be suspicious and challenge authority; children and
adolescents are
being warned; prosecutors are on alert; lawyers are collecting settlements and
looking for more
clients. Ambitious clerics must be starting to see that covering up sexual
misconduct is no longer
a smart career move: the cover-up is ultimately more expensive and worse public
relations.
But is there more to be done? Reformers, not surprisingly, see this scandal as
an illustration of
why their favorite reforms are necessary. They are calling for an end to the
celibacy requirement
and an end to the ban on female priests.
Freeing priests from the vow of
celibacy would make for healthier clergy, according to those
who think that some sexually troubled men now join the priesthood in the hope of
escaping their
urges. This theory sounds plausible, but it's largely untested. Sexual abuse
scandals have been
common in churches with non-celibate clergy, like the Anglican Church in Canada.
It is possible that the Catholic
Church seems to be a hotbed of illicit sex, not so much because
of its policies on celibacy but because it is such a large and newsworthy
institution. The more
people you have working with children and adolescents, the more problems you are
likely to
have. A half-dozen Catholic priests who are pedophiles might appear like a
newsworthy
epidemic, even if they're scattered across the country; a half-dozen pedophiles
at a half-dozen
different and smaller institutions may get little or no publicity, even if
they're all working in the
same city.
The image of sexually predatory
priests has been created, at least in part, because of the same
reason that New York City used to be considered America's crime capital. Because
of its size,
New York was bound to have more gruesome crimes than smaller cities, and those
crimes got
especially wide coverage in the national news media because of New York's
prominence. The
city's violent image disappeared when the news media shifted its focus from
sensational
individual crimes to the relatively low rate of crime by comparison with other
cities. But no one
has similar data for comparing sexual-abuse rates among different religious
denominations or
professions.
There is abundant research,
though, showing different rates of sexual predation between men
and women. Women rarely commit sexual assaults and are less interested in casual
sexual
encounters than men. They're also not attracted to teenagers to the extent that
heterosexual and
homosexual men are. Men typically seek younger partners; women typically don't.
How many teenagers have
complained about advances from female teachers? There have been
a few well-publicized cases of female high school teachers having sex with their
students, but
those make news because they're so unusual. In many parishes nuns spend more
time with
children than priests do, but how many nuns have been caught molesting altar
boys or choir
girls?
Allowing women to become priests
would create new temptations for adult sex in the rectory,
but it's safe to predict that there would be fewer minors having sex with
clergy.
IT is also safe to predict that many Catholics would benefit from their
listening and counseling
skills. There are many female therapists who have far more empathy with their
clients than male
priests will ever have with their parishioners.
While there are good reasons for
letting women into the priesthood, there are also reasons for
retaining some other all-male Catholic institutions: boys' schools with male
teachers. I say this
partly because of recent research showing benefits of single-sex schools for
some boys, but
mainly because of personal experience.
As a veteran of all-boys' Catholic schools (and also ones with boys and girls),
I worry that an
overreaction to the current scandal will deprive today's boys of the kind of
mentors that we
cherished — the truly celibate men with the time and the freedom to make big
differences in our
lives. I spoke with one of them yesterday, and he confirmed my fears.
"Today," he said, "I couldn't spend time alone with a kid the way
I did with you. I'd be scared
somebody would get the wrong idea."
Some boy is the poorer for it.
