The Corrupter of Boys

Sodomy, Scandal, and the Medieval Clergy

Dyan Elliott, Ruth Mazo Karras

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780812252521, 9780812252521
• eBook ISBN: 9780812297485
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In the fourth century, clerics began to distinguish themselves from members of the laity by virtue of their augmented claims to holiness. Because clerical celibacy was key to this distinction, religious authorities of all stripes—patristic authors, popes, theologians, canonists, monastic founders, and commentators—became progressively sensitive to sexual scandals that involved the clergy and developed sophisticated tactics for concealing or dispelling embarrassing lapses. According to Dyan Elliott, the fear of scandal dictated certain lines of action and inaction, the consequences of which are painfully apparent today. In The Corrupter of Boys, she demonstrates how, in conjunction with the requirement of clerical celibacy, scandal-averse policies at every conceivable level of the ecclesiastical hierarchy have enabled the widespread sexual abuse of boys and male adolescents within the Church.Elliott examines more than a millennium's worth of doctrine and practice to uncover the origins of a culture of secrecy and concealment of sin. She charts the continuities and changes, from late antiquity into the high Middle Ages, in the use of boys as sexual objects before focusing on four specific milieus in which boys and adolescents would have been especially at risk in the high and later Middle Ages: the monastery, the choir, the schools, and the episcopal court. The Corrupter of Boys is a work of stunning breadth and discomforting resonance, as Elliott concludes that the same clerical prerogatives and privileges that were formulated in late antiquity and the medieval era—and the same strategies to cover up the abuses they enable—remain very much in place.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

The Scandal of Clerical Sin

For many sinners are corrected, as was Peter, many tolerated, as was Judas, and many are not known until the Lord should come and illuminate the hidden things of the shadows and manifest the thoughts of the heart.

—Augustine, Sermon 351 (as cited in the Collectio Dacheriana)

There are many ways to write the history of the evolution of Christianity in Latin Christendom. One possible method would be to trace the growing distinction between the clergy and laity or, to put it another way, by chronicling the rising prestige of the clergy and the ever-expanding scope of clerical privilege. Nowhere is this privilege more apparent than in religious authorities’ preoccupation with clerical sin and their efforts at containment.

Sin was considered to be an offense against God that required expiation through penance. Yet how this expiation was effected at any given time in the period under question is a matter of scholarly contention.¹ The traditional narrative maintains that the only penance available to sinners in the early Christian era was public. But, according to conventional wisdom, sometime in the sixth or seventh century the shame and humiliation of public penance was believed to have taken its toll, giving way to private confession, where penance would be assigned by a confessor in private. Recent scholarship now recognizes that there were many different types of penance that coexisted in late antiquity and the Middle Ages and that public penance never entirely disappeared.² Even so, why these misconceptions first came into being is understandable. The earliest sources discuss a public ritual for penance, while the contours of private penance only begin to take shape some centuries later. And, for our purposes, it is certainly significant that the rise of this private penance is inseparable from questions surrounding clerical sin. Not only does the clerical sinner have a central role in the evolution of private penance, but it is through him that the different ramifications of public versus private penance are negotiated.

The sources suggest that public penance was reserved for someone guilty of a truly grievous sin, such as adultery, homicide, or apostasy. The sinner was first formally excommunicated, which suspended him or her from participating in communion and from contact with the faithful. Thereafter, dressed in sackcloth, the penitent would stand at the door of the church until he or she was formally reconciled by the bishop through the laying on of hands.³ Initially, this opportunity for reconciliation was perceived as a major concession on behalf of God. In the words of Tertullian (d. 220): “although the gate of forgiveness has been shut and fastened up with the bar of baptism, [God] has permitted it still to stand somewhat open. In the vestibule He has stationed the second repentance for opening to such as knock … but never more because the last time it had been in vain.”⁴ In other words, Tertullian perceived penance as a solemn undertaking that, like baptism, could not be repeated.⁵

Yet public penance was not for everyone. As Mayke de Jong has suggested, public penance constituted a spectacle in which the performers were invariably people of rank—whether by virtue of birth or office. In other words, it was centered around individuals who had reputations to lose.⁶ A cleric was certainly believed to be possessed of this kind of visibility in early Christian communities. But this very visibility ensured that his relationship to penance was a vexed one. The complexity surrounding clerical penance is already apparent at the Spanish Council of Elvira in the fourth century. Elvira is believed to be the first convocation of bishops which ever articulated a series of canons, and clerical sin is already a prominent concern. Canon 18 maintains that “bishops, priests, and deacons, if—once placed in the ministry—they are discovered [detecti fuerint]to be sexual offenders [sint moechati], shall not receive communion, not even at the end.”⁷ Essentially, what is being mandated is deposition for the errant cleric with no hope of being admitted to penance and, hence, no hope for reconciliation. Sexual misdemeanors further bar a cleric from advancing in orders: young men guilty of sexual indiscretion are not to be ordained as subdeacons “inasmuch as they might afterwards be promoted by deception to a higher order.” Furthermore, anyone guilty of a grave sin that only came to light after ordination was to be removed from office.⁸ Yet the canons are not entirely intractable when it comes to the quotient of sin committed before entrance to the clergy. Canon 76 determined that a deacon who was discovered to have committed a mortal sin prior to his ordination and confessed voluntarily was assigned three years penance, but fifteen years penance if he were denounced.⁹ The deacon whose sin was revealed through denunciation, moreover, was only readmitted to communion alongside members of the laity, which, in this period, represented a form of clerical degradation.¹⁰

Admittedly, Elvira presents a problem in any discussion of historical precedent because so many details involving the council remain mysterious. For instance, although the council was believed to have occurred in the first decade of the fourth century, it eludes precise dating. Furthermore, Maurice Meigne has recently argued that only the first twenty-one canons pertain to the original proceedings of the council, and that the rest represent a compilation of later conciliar action taken in the Iberian Peninsula.¹¹ Nor is there much evidence that Elvira was widely known before it was incorporated into canonical collections in the ninth century. Even so, canon 18, one of the canons that Meigne judges authentic, advances the stern view that a bishop cannot be admitted to penance, while the other canons extend parallel sanctions to the lower clergy.

In canon 18, the following rationale is provided for excommunicating bishops who were public sex offenders: “because of the scandal and the heinousness of the crime.” Yet a crime that predates the individual’s entrance into the clergy was clearly not considered as damaging—either to the reputation of the clergy or to the “little ones” who might be scandalized by his behavior. This relative tolerance for a sin that was committed prior to ordination was sustained at the Council of Neocaesarea (315), which argued that ordination itself effaces earlier sins. The individual in question could retain his office, but not preside at Mass.¹² Over the course of the century, however, there is a new initiative to put the cleric beyond reproach that reaches into his past. There was no toleration for errors committed before ordination at the Council of Nicaea (325), which specified deposition for anyone already ordained who confessed to a mortal sin prior to ordination. Even if the unfortunate cleric had managed to procure penance and absolution through the laying on of hands, this illicit act would not ameliorate the situation: “for the catholic church vindicates only what is above reproach.”¹³ By the same token, anyone who had lapsed during the persecution and had subsequently been ordained by error was likewise deposed.¹⁴

Mum’s the Word

Despite the epoch-making status of Nicaea as the first ecumenical council, its canons did not circulate in the West until sometime after 545.¹⁵ Yet any link between the clergy and public penance, even if undertaken prior to ordination, was eradicated in the fourth century during the course of the Donatist crisis. From a Donatist perspective, priests who had succumbed during the time of the persecutions, whether through handing over holy books to the secular authorities or full-scale apostasy, were no longer priests. Their sacraments were invalid, and they should be made to do public penance.¹⁶ Optatus, bishop of Milevis (d. 397), the most important orthodox exponent against the Donatists, described what he perceived as their mistreatment of the priesthood in vivid terms: “You have found boys; you have wounded them with penance so that none could be ordained…. You have found deacons, presbyters, bishops; you have made them laics; acknowledge that you have ruined their souls.”¹⁷ The clerics in question “lived on after this as human beings, but as priests who held God’s honours they were killed by you.” This was an extreme position. Not only did Optatus perceive canonical penance as a discipline incompatible with the clerical state, but he attempted to place the clergy above human tribunals altogether, arguing: “You shall not touch, [God] says, my anointed ones…. God has reserved his own property for his own judgment.”¹⁸ Optatus’s anti-Donatist writings were destined to leave a deep impression on Augustine, who would argue that ordination, like baptism, was indelible. For this very reason “the hand [of reconciliation] should not be imposed on them in public—lest an injury be done the Sacrament, not the man.”¹⁹ So although Augustine never said that a priest was beyond human judgment, and hence ineligible for penance, his deference to the sacrament of ordination elicited the same results.

The problem of clerical sin was picked up by the bishops of Rome, who were gradually asserting their authority over the other bishops in the western half of the Roman Empire and its aftermath. In 384, the same year that Optatus was revising his treatise, Siricius became pope. Under Siricius, the prohibition against a cleric doing penance would become still more categorical. In the course of his letter to Bishop Himerius of Tarragona, he writes: “Just as it is not conceded to a cleric to do penance, so also after penance and reconciliation it is not permitted for any layman to obtain the honor of the clergy.” Though acknowledging that these former sinners were now “purified of all the contagion of sin,” nevertheless, as “former vessels of sin,” it was inappropriate for them to be bearers of the sacrament.²⁰ Siricius’s two-part interdict is both old and new. The prohibition against a former penitent being admitted to the clergy was implicit in conciliar bans against anyone formerly guilty of a mortal sin entering the clergy. But the pope’s injunction against clerical penance is more equivocal. While denying atonement for a cleric’s past transgressions, a possibility still available at Elvira, Siricius does not say explicitly that the guilty cleric should be deposed. It is possible that Siricius was attempting to hold the priesthood to a higher standard and that his prohibition against clerical penance should be taken to imply that a cleric who is guilty of so grave a misdemeanor as to require public penance would automatically be deposed. But the prohibition against clerical penance could also suggest a similar view to that of his contemporaries Optatus and Augustine, with their concern for the dignity of the priesthood. Perhaps Siricius wished to spare the clergy the kind of constrained and career-ending penance associated with Donatist circles.

Siricius’s injunction against clerical penance received additional ballast from Pope Leo I (d. 461) in his response to a series of questions posed by Bishop Rusticus of Narbonne concerning disciplinary matters—many of which were penitential. When Rusticus asked whether a priest or deacon who acknowledged his crime could seek public penance through the laying on of hands, Leo responded: “It is contrary to the custom of the Church that they who have been dedicated to the dignity of the presbyterate or the rank of the diaconate, should receive the remedy of penitence by the laying on of hands for any crime; which doubtless descends from the Apostles’ tradition, according to what is written, ‘If a priest shall have sinned, who shall pray for him?’ And hence such men when they have lapsed in order to obtain God’s mercy must seek private retirement, where their atonement may be profitable as well as adequate.”²¹ Thus Leo reiterates Siricius’s ban on a cleric doing public penance, tracing it (erroneously) to apostolic times and attempting to ground it in scripture. He also points to a potential solution for the dilemma presented by the sinful cleric that, arguably, requires neither deposition nor public penance, but a less shameful expiation in private.²²

Again, it is possible that the scenario Leo sketches presupposes deposition and that the reference to a “private retirement” betokens a monastery, where the disgraced cleric may undertake penance in private.²³ Yet Leo’s response could also be applied to the situation of a priest whose transgression was concealed, and his reference to a private retreat carried with it a recommendation for performing penance in secret.²⁴ The rationale would be to spare the priest, not to mention the priesthood, the humiliation, and to avoid scandalizing the community. Similar motives seem to have informed Leo’s censorious letter to several bishops, whom he had recently learned were insisting that prospective penitents confess their sins in public—something that Leo perceived as unprecedented. According to Leo’s assessment, although their penance was public, penitents should be permitted to confess their sins privately. To do otherwise was to i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Conclusion
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments