The Priesthood’s Open Secret
Berry is waiting. “I’ve yet to see anybody explore it in depth in recent weeks,” he says. “It’s a very tough issue to confront, and it’s a minefield of political correctness.”
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“In other words,” Bowman continued, “in the RC Church we have mostly homosexual and pederastic abuse. But neither church authorities nor media want to call it that, the former because it calls attention to its gay-priest and gay-seminarian problem, the latter because media in general go easy on gay-originating criminality.”
“He really is drawing a circle around the complexities of the issue,” says Berry.
“The big problem,” says Berry, “is that the bishops will not sanction a reliable study of the sexual behavior patterns of clerical life, because they don’t want to think priests are sexual.” Berry suspects that the baby boomer generation of American priests is predominantly gay, which would give bishops all the more reason to let priests’ sexuality go unexamined. He recalls a 1986 letter from the Vatican to Catholic bishops. It declared the homosexual “inclination,” though not a sin per se, to be “more or less a strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil.” This clumsy language is “outrageous…callous…insensitive,” says Berry, “yet this is the same church that refuses to change the celibacy law and thus restricts the priesthood drastically. And a lot of men with serious sexual problems have gone into the priesthood probably thinking, ‘Oh, I’m a priest, therefore I won’t be sexual.’”
“You got me thinking,” Bowman adds in a note to me. He says he remembers looking around for a book topic several years ago and getting in touch with a woman “who wanted a book about a Jesuit who had left a string of women around the U.S., she being one of them. Others too were full of philandering-priest stories, like the sap who enjoys a woman for 20 years, then as old age approaches for them both, gets religion, confesses to his superiors, and hies himself to the monastery, safe in one world and ready for the next.”
What’s more, Kass likes Madigan’s daughter Lisa. Like a lot of the rest of us, he’s probably a sucker for spunky young women. So he supports her over Schmidt for attorney general. And that’s fine. His motives are no worse than most of the ones that drag us into the polling booth.
