The Abuse of Minors in the Catholic Church

Dismantling the Culture of Cover Ups

Anthony J. Blasi, Lluis Oviedo, Anthony J. Blasi, Lluis Oviedo

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367433451
• eBook ISBN: 9781000064926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Canon & Ecclesiastical Law

This book offers an academically rigorous examination of the biological, psychological, social and ecclesiastical processes that allowed sexual abuse in the Catholic Church to happen and then be covered up. The collected essays provide a means to better assess systemic wrongdoing in religious institutions, so that they can be more effectively held to account.

An international team of contributors apply a necessarily multi-disciplinary approach to this difficult subject. Chapters look closely at the sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic clerics, explaining the complexity of this issue, which cannot be reduced to simple misconduct, sexual deviation, or a management failure alone. The book will help the reader to better understand the social, organizational, and cultural processes in the Church over recent decades, as well as the intricate world of beliefs, moral rules, and behaviours. It concludes with some strategies for change at the individual and corporate levels that will better ensure safeguarding within the Catholic Church and its affiliate institutions.

This multifaceted study gives a nuanced analysis of this huge organizational failure and offers recommendations for effective ways of preventing it in the future. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Sociology of Religion, Psychology, Psychiatry, Legal Studies, Ethics, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, History, and Theology.

1 Sexual abuse of young boys in the Roman Catholic Church

An insider clinician’s academic perspective

Jay R. Feierman

Introduction

The chapter will first lay a foundation regarding what is known scientifically about the development and later expression of both average and variant male age attractions and sexual orientations. Second, the chapter will focus on the age attractions and sexual orientations of a subset of priests and religious brothers that, when acted out, have been responsible for almost all of the current sexual abuse scandals of the Roman Catholic Church. These men have interest in and arousal to peri-pubescent boys. They are (homosexual) pederasts. The main aim of the chapter is to dispel misinformation about these issues. The chapter will conclude with some recommendations for reducing the chances of these sorts of behaviors resurfacing in the long-term to supplement what the Church is already doing, the long-term effects of which are unknown.

Priests and religious brothers are putative religious celibates, a term that will be used to cover both celibacy (one can’t get married) and chastity (sex only with one’s lawfully wedded wife). Diocesan priests are required to be celibate and chaste. Religious order priests and religious brothers, who do not marry, take a vow of chastity.

Many of the earliest Christian clerics were married (Kowalski 2004). Clerical “marital continence” (you cannot have sexual intercourse with your lawfully wedded wife) crept in incrementally over the first millennium. Mandatory celibacy for Latin Rite clerics was finally instituted in the 12th century (Phipps 2004). Rationales for celibacy include the “gift” (Selin 2016), apostolic origins (Cochini 1990), an alternative to marriage (Boswell 1989, 9), children of clerics inheriting church property (Heid 2000), and Jewish ritual Purity Laws once mass began being celebrated daily: “The semen-emitter himself suffers a one-day uncleanliness” (Maccoby 1999, 64).

One of the controversies surrounding the sexual abuse of peri-pubescent boys, on whom this chapter will concentrate, is whether or not these unmarried men of the cloth are homosexual. Statements such as these make the claim: “almost all the priests who abuse children are homosexual” (Donohue 2004), “this scandal is about a form of homosexuality” (Groeschel 2002), and “80 percent of cases of abuse in the church environment affected male adolescents, not children … and it was also ‘statistically proven’ that there is a link between abuse and homosexuality”(Brandmüller 2019). If children means pre-pubertal in Cardinal Brandmüller’s remarks, all of these statements are true. However, it is not so simple (Feierman 2010a, 2010b). In this chapter, child or children will always mean pre-pubertal; adolescent will always mean from peri-pubertal (ages 11–14) to just post-pubertal (ages 15–17). The term male will always refer to all ages and man only to an adult male. “Boy” and “girl” will refer to biological sex, not to gender.

Lovemaps

Men have romantic love feelings only for someone whose physical and behavioral features match their “lovemap,” defined as “a developmental representation or template in your mind/brain, and is dependent on input through the special senses. It depicts your idealized lover and what, as a pair, you do together in the idealized, romantic, erotic, and sexualized relationship” (Money 1986, xvi). Men are also capable of feeling lust and being sexual with individuals toward whom there are no romantic love feelings, as long as the other individual has some features of their idealized lovemap. The majority of men’s lovemaps contain someone of nubile age, feminine gender, and the ideal 0.7 waist to hip ratio (Singh et al. 2010), as seen in the two beauty pageant contestants in Figure 1.1. For a minority of men, many of whom will be the subject of this chapter, their lovemap is different.

The lovemap differentiates romantic from parental love (Fisher 2005; Money 1986). Pedophiles claim to distinguish love of a child, the actual meaning of “pedophilia,” from pedosexual behavior (Sandfort 1981). Love is complex because of the differences between parental and romantic love. Anyone who is not a pedophile and who has experienced both knows the difference.

Observations and measurements of adult male human sexuality

Interest (viewing time) and arousal (physiological) are observable and measurable. Viewing time of erotic images correlates positively with results from the gold standard, penile plethysmography (Laws and Gress 2010), which directly measures sexual arousal (penile circumference). In the to-be-discussed population of priests and religious brothers studied by the author, a less specific alternative to the penile plethysmograph was used—sympathetic nervous system arousal. The amount of sympathetic arousal to specific types of stimuli can be measured and quantified (Adamson et al. 1972; Davis and Buchwald 1957; Roland and Crawford 2011).

Figure 1.1 Beauty pageant contestants Beauty pageant contestants.

Source: Photo courtesy of Vicky Wong Ying Wuen (Singapore).

The organization of the male fetus’s brain in the third trimester of pregnancy

Male (XY) embryos start out in utero with their brains feminized and un-masculinized. In the majority of males, during the third trimester of pregnancy, under the influence of steroid sex hormones, the organizing processes of masculinization add to the brain what will eventually become masculine adult features. The organizing processes of defeminization remove from the brain what would have remained as feminine adult features. By contrast, the shape of the external genitals sexually differentiates as female or male in the first trimester of pregnancy. When there is concordance between the sexual differentiation of the genitals and the brain, the adult is cis-gendered. When there is discordance, the adult is trans-gendered (see Balthazart 2012; Diamond 1995, 2009; Morris and Breedlove 2004; Swift-Gallant 2018).

Male age and gender preferences

Age and gender preferences are present when an adolescent boy or man knows, in the absence of immediate sensory stimuli, what age and gender features of another person causes interest and arousal in him. Preferences are unobservable, unmeasurable, and undetectable through interviews and psychological tests.

Mood and “social releasers”

As applied to human sexuality, “mood” can be defined as “a specific readiness to act” (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1975, 1989), recognized by a reduced threshold to respond to specific social releasers, which are any bodily features or behavior patterns of another person that elicit a specific response in the perceiver (Immelmann and Beer 1989).

Adolescent boys and men have many moods, only a few of which, like romantic or sexual, lower the threshold for interest in and arousal to another person’s age and gender features. If an adolescent boy or man is in another mood that has priority, the age and gender features of other person might be ignored.

Untangling sex (male and female) from gender (masculine and feminine)

Sex

A feature is male or female if it is present in one biological sex (i.e., a born-with penis or vagina) and not in the other. One’s sex (male or female) is determined by having an XX (female) or XY (male) set of sex chromosomes. Since the embryo’s default is female, the presence of SRY genes on the Y chromosome initiate the development of maleness (She and Yang 2017).

Gender

A feature is masculine or feminine if it is present in both biological sexes (male and female) but it is sex-skewed and present in one biological sex more than the other as the result of biological or cultural influences. Sex is biologically fixed. Gender is not.

Male age interest and arousal

A male’s (pre-, peri-, or post-pubertal) age interest and arousal can be observed and measured when the male views still images or moving videos of other persons of different ages whose other features are at least similar to those in his lovemap.

There are dimensional terms for the ages of other persons that create primary and persistent interest and arousal: pedophilia for pre-pubertal children with no secondary sexual characteristics; hebephilia to peri-pubescent children, roughly age 11 to 14; ephebephilia for pubescent adolescents, roughly ages 15 to 17; teliophilia (a term rarely used) for post-pubertal adults, where the sex-specific specific terms gynephilia and androphilia are usually used. A homosexual hebephile is also called a pederast.

It is not known how variant age interests and attractions develop at the level of the whole person. The following quotation is from a published autobiography of a pedophile:

I believe I was born a pedophile, because I have had feelings of sexual attraction towards children and love for them for as long as I can remember… . Just as homosexuals and heterosexuals discover their sexual orientation, I discovered my age orientation as I grew, and I have been aware of it from a young age.

(Silva 1990, 464)

Male gender interest and arousal

A male’s (feminine or masculine) gender interest in and arousal to sex-skewed features can be observed and measured when the male views still images or moving videos of other persons whose other features are at least similar to those in his lovemap.

Conceptualizing male age and gender interest and arousal together

Figure 1.2 shows age and gender features together on the same graph. The age features are on the horizontal masculinization X axis and the gender features are on the vertical defeminization Y axis. A male’s “SELF” is in the center where the two axes intersect. The X and Y axes are represented as arrows with the tips of the arrows at the top (north) of the Y axis and the right (east) side of the X axis. A male fetus’s brain becomes more organizationally masculinized or defeminized closer to the tips of the two arrows.

Figure 1.2 The Four Attraction Quadrants (A, B, C, and D) based on the perceived features of someone toward whom one’s SELF (as an adult) feels sexual attraction. See text for details. Taken with permission from previous writing of the author in Antonianum LXXXV (3,4): 617–49, 451–77, 2010a, 2010b.

Source: Adapted from Feierman 1990, 1992, 1994 and influenced by Weinrich 1987.

It will be helpful to the male or female reader in understanding the rest of this chapter to put your SELF in the center of Figure 1.2. By seeing what age and gender features create a primary and persistent preference in you, it will put you in Quadrant A, B, C, or D. Except for the approximately 1% of males who are asexual (Bogaert 2004; Prause and Graham 2007), all human males (and females) have primary age and gender preferences whether they act on them or not.

Male sexual interests and arousal

After some trial and error experimentation to work out uncertainties, which is common in adolescence and early adulthood, the sum total of features of other persons that generate a male’s sexual interest and arousal becomes stable. The features cannot be changed by psychological therapy or through prayer, both of which have been tried in so called “reparative therapy” with no long-term success (Freund 1977; Spizer 2012).

In both adolescent and adult male heterosexual and homosexual relationships destined to become sexual, after an initial period of mutually reciprocating and reinforcing courtship (Grammer 1995; Moore 1985; Perper 1985; Weinrich 1987), when the relationship becomes physically intimate there is mutual interest, arousal, and approach-behavior toward the expected genitalia of the other person. In pederasts, the preliminary courtship phase is better characterized as manipulative “grooming,” about which much has been written in the child sexual abuse literature (e.g., Finkelhor 1984).

The development of sexual orientation and behavior

To understand how some priests and religious brothers develop interest a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Sexual abuse of young boys in the Roman Catholic Church: an insider clinician’s academic perspective
• 2 Clerical abuses of minors and cultural context: which link?
• 3 Does faulty theology play a role in the abuse crisis?
• 4 Social networks and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church: when priests become pirates
• 5 From causes toward stratagems and theological considerations
• 6 Canonical response to the sexual abuse crisis in the United States
• 7 Tort liability and representations of religious authority in clergy sex abuse litigation
• 8 Sexual abuse of minors and clerical homosexuality: comments on a puzzling correlation
• 9 Conclusion: trying to learn some lessons and correct past mistakes
• Index