Clergy sexual assault is not about homosexuality; it is about power.

ome­where I read a plea that we not say “they sex­u­al­ly abused” or “they molest­ed” or “they are pedophiles.” These are “san­i­tary” words of many syl­la­bles. “No! They fucked, they raped, they groped, they grabbed, they snatched.” Even in my title, “sex­u­al assault” is san­i­tary. Can we stip­u­late that what went on is rape, or at least the list of verbs that approach it? The Grand Jury Report describes a wide range of them:

Most of the vic­tims were boys; but there were girls too. Some were teens; many were pre-pubes­cent. Some were manip­ulated with alco­hol or porno­graphy. Some were made to mas­tur­bate their assailants; or they were groped by them. Some were raped oral­ly, some vagi­nal­ly, some anal­ly.

In my view, taxonomy—was this real­ly rape? pedophil­ia is only pre-pre­pu­bes­cent, you know—is a dis­traction and fuzzes up the real point: All these verbs are not about sex­ual attrac­tion. These verbs are about using sex as a weapon—to con­trol, to intim­i­date, to sub­ju­gate, to ter­ror­ize. These verbs are about pow­er, and noth­ing more, and noth­ing less.

Well, I will give you an obvi­ous exam­ple. Male sol­diers will often rape male POWs. Both sol­dier and POW are adult. But no one real­ly thinks, do they, that the solid­er must be gay and this is a homo­sex­u­al act. It is an act of tor­ture, of sub­ju­gat­ing an ene­my. It is an act of hate.

I’ll give you anoth­er. I know this sto­ry. This hap­pened in Cin­cinnati. A man in his twen­ties is work­ing in a nurs­ing home and rapes a woman in her eight­ies. She is in a wheel­chair and only mar­ginally aware of what goes on around her. He does this not be­cause he is some­how sex­u­al­ly attract­ed to her; he does it only because she is help­less and unaware, and he can assert pow­er and con­trol with­out any resis­tance. The ugli­ness goes far beyond a sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion we might dis­ap­prove of.

BLAMING GAY CATHOLICS, SOME CALL FOR HATE

Nev­er­the­less, there has been a rush to blame all the verbs detailed in the GJR on a “homo­sex­u­al subcul­ture” in the Church. This feeds a stereo­type about gay men: that they rape boys at a dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly high­er rate than het­ero­sex­u­als rape. You can find on YouTube PSAs from the 1950s warn­ing boys not to take rides from strangers because they might be homosex­uals who will rape you, and then you too will catch The Gay. Old big­otries die hard.

Thus Matt Walsh blames a “gay cabal” and sug­gests, weird­ly, that the Church defrock Fr. James Mar­tin. (He’s a favorite scape­goat.) Mr. Walsh, who sings the prais­es of the apt­ly-named Fr. Richard Heil­man, is par­ticularly piqued by “effem­i­nate priests,” a bogey­man that has its ori­gin in gen­der stereo­types and yearn­ings for tru­ly man­ly male mas­culin­i­ty, com­plete with mil­i­ta­rized rosaries with bul­lets for beads, or some­thing like that.

Car­di­nal Burke, whose vast and flam­boy­ant wardrobe seems to have been donat­ed to him by Lib­er­ace, says we need to “puri­fy” the Church of gay cler­gy. He does not say how, so we must guess. By lai­ciz­ing them? By dous­ing them with holy water and gar­lic, like they’re vam­pires? He even says that the “anti-life cul­ture” and “con­tra­cep­tive cul­ture” are some­how to blame, though he does not explain pre­cise­ly how he has dis­cerned this.

Msgr. Charles Pope, at the Nation­al Catholic Reg­is­ter, blames “active homo­sex­u­al­i­ty”. There are no sep­a­rate rules for gay priests! Pope says, as though any­one thought there were.

Bish­op Mor­li­no of the West­boro Catholic dio­cese of Madi­son has joined this cho­rus; he even goes so far as to say: “What the Church needs right now is more hatred.” (Sing with me: What the Church needs now is hate, sweet hate.) He’s a real dis­ci­ple of Christ, that one. This won’t feed stereo­types of Chris­tians as haters, at all. The name of God is def­i­nite­ly not blas­phemed among the Gen­tiles because of Mor­li­no. He’s the “gold stan­dard,” I read on Facebook—a gen­uine dou­bloon of right­eous Catholic hate.

Bill Dono­hue alone makes the nov­el claim that none of it actu­al­ly hap­pened, and if it did, it was­n’t rape.

Some, like Mr. Walsh and my stalk­er, Dea­con Jim “Sea Lion” Rus­sell, attempt to blame Fr. James Mar­tin. The aliens, the gays, the Patheos blog­gers, Fr. Mar­tin. It’s tic. On Face­book, Leila “Bub­bles” Miller went as far as to make the libelous charge that Fr. Mar­t­in’s “entire min­istry is groom­ing.”

Leila Miller is not some ran­dom per­son on Face­book, either; she writes for Catholic Answers. And “groom­ing,” if you don’t know, is the time tak­en by a sex­u­al offend­er to plan the event and manip­u­late the vic­tim to com­ply. Ms. Miller says this is what Fr. Mar­t­in’s whole min­istry is about. It’s libel.

Leila Miller aside (Matt Walsh too), when cler­gy as high rank­ing as Mon­signors and bish­ops and car­di­nals put the blame on gay men in the Church, this con­firms Catholics in the scape­goat­ing and, as a con­sequence, the fear and the hatred of LGBT peo­ple. (We need hate, says Emper­or Mor­li­no. Let the hate flow through you.) It also leads many to make a false leap, name­ly, that if Car­di­nal Lib­er­ace Burke has said this, then it must some­how be Church teach­ing. He must be speak­ing for Tru­ly-True True Catholi­cism. If you don’t accept, you’re prob­a­bly los­ing your faith, you’re in the cafe­te­ria, you’re a left­ist, you’re a heretic. But in fact, Lib­er­ace Burke and Pope and Mor­li­no are telling us their pri­vate opin­ion. Even if many peo­ple buy into it, that does not make it so.

AN ASSUMPTION IN WANT OF EVIDENCE

And in fact, this argument—that all these verbs come of hav­ing gay men in the priesthood—is only assert­ed. It is nev­er actu­al­ly proven. Peo­ple like Pope assume that, if a major­i­ty of vic­tims are male, the per­pe­tra­tors must be gay. This is called beg­ging the ques­tion: It assumes the very thing that is in dis­pute.

But the GJR does not tell us that the priests who verbed—who raped, who grabbed, who groped, who snatched—were gay. The GJR does not spec­u­late on why they verbed. It tells us their names, and what they did. It stops there. The GJR details few­er than five (of over 300) priests as hav­ing used gay porn; but apart from know­ing a great many more details, one can only spec­u­late about what that means. The GJR gives a lot of data, but draws no con­clu­sions about it—at least not in this regard.

Here’s a guess. A lot of porn, and par­tic­u­lar­ly a lot of gay porn, involves vio­lence and fan­tasies of sub­ju­ga­tion. This strikes me as, poten­tial­ly, much more about sadism than homo­sex­u­al­i­ty. There is some­thing pecu­liar­ly dark in this; it’s not just attrac­tion to peo­ple of the same sex.

But even if we assume that these par­tic­u­lar priests were gay (the ones who had the gay porn), the GJR names few­er than five of them. To assume that if they verbed they were sex­u­al­ly attract­ed is to do just that: assume. In oth­er words, to make that argument—homosexual sub­cul­ture in the Church is to blame for the verb­ing in Penn­sylvania—one would have to know a great deal more than what is in the GJR.

Msgr. Pope notes that “the vast major­i­ty of the cas­es involv­ing both the sex­u­al abuse of minors and of adults involve male vic­tims.” He seems to think this proves some­thing, but no. “If the vic­tims were male, the priests must be gay” is an assump­tion in want of evi­dence. He cites the John Jay Report, which “found that 81 per­cent of the vic­tims were male and 78 per­cent of all vic­tims were post-pubes­cent.”

“Thus,” he says,

though legal­ly still minors, they were sex­u­al­ly mature in the phys­i­cal sense. So, the large major­i­ty of cas­es involved attrac­tion by homo­sex­u­als to young men who, though legal­ly minors, were phys­i­cal­ly and sex­u­al­ly mature males, not lit­tle chil­dren. This is not pedophil­ia. It is homo­sex­u­al attrac­tion.

That does not fol­low. Do some male sol­diers rape male POWS because they have a “homo­sex­u­al attrac­tion” to them? Does a man who rapes a help­less eighty-year-old in an old age home do so because he has a sex­u­al attrac­tion to eighty-year-old women?

What Msgr. is say­ing here is that, if the vic­tim is sex­u­al­ly mature, the perpe­trator must be sex­u­al­ly attract­ed to him. (Or her.) He just must. Why? Because he must. This is an asser­tion. Msgr. does not both­er to try to prove this. But it’s the same bias that makes some peo­ple believe that only attrac­tive (or slut­ty-dressed) wo­men get raped.

And two facts are incon­ve­nient for Pope here.

First: The very John Jay Report that he cites con­clud­ed that the pres­ence gay men in the priest­hood does not explain the verb­ing.

Sec­ond: The GJR tells us that “many” of the vic­tims in Penn­syl­va­nia were pre-pubes­cent. Only “some” were teens.

So the GJR and the JJR are study­ing dif­fer­ent data and inci­dents. But if the data varies so much—if in one study a major­i­ty are post-pubes­cent and in an­other a major­i­ty are pre-pubescent—then that should tell us it is im­possible to assign any sin­gle cause to verb­ing.

If it is true that rape is a crime of op­portunity rather than a crime of sex­u­al at­traction, it’s easy to dis­cern why a dispro­portionate num­ber of vic­tims of Catholic cler­gy abuse are male. Priests have dis­proportionate access to boys. Many more boys than girls are altar servers, for ex­ample. And dur­ing the time a major­i­ty of these assaults took place, pret­ty much all altar servers were boys. Priests also have dis­pro­por­tion­ate access to boys because it is boys, not girls, who dis­cern a voca­tion to the priest­hood. And they need the guid­ance of priests to do so.

JOHN JAY TO THE CONTRARY

Thus the John Jay Report, which Msgr. Pope puts such stock in (because it was com­mis­sioned by the bish­ops), con­clud­ed that verb­ing does not come of hav­ing gay men in the priest­hood. The John Jay Report says that priests raped more boys because they had more access to boys. Read any­one who says that this is a homo­sex­u­al cri­sis, and you will find that they just assert it. They just assume it. Some­times peo­ple will uti­lize data in a report like this one (crit­i­cal of the JJR) in an effort to prove that there is a homo­sex­u­al cause behind all the verbs. Fitzgib­bons and O’Leary tell us, for exam­ple, that in a 1988 study, W.D. Erick­son found that “86 per­cent of the offend­ers against males described them­selves as homo­sex­u­al or bisex­u­al.”

Now, I have known straight peo­ple—the nov­el­ist John Irv­ing is one—who have said that, when they dis­cov­ered they like anal sex, the first thing they feared was, “That’s it! I must be gay!”

And this claim is sim­ply ridicu­lous:

[M]en with homo­sex­u­al ten­den­cies find it par­tic­u­lar­ly diffi­cult to live out the de­mands of chasti­ty. The vast major­i­ty of scan­dals in the Church since 2002 involve homo­sex­u­al priests pro­foundly fail­ing in chasti­ty. This is no sur­prise to me. Chasti­ty, I’m con­vinced (and the evi­dence bears this out), is much hard­er for men with a homo­sex­u­al incli­na­tion than for oth­ers.

Actu­al­ly, the word is “celiba­cy,” and het­ero­sex­u­al men are well-known for find­ing it very easy indeed.

SEXUAL ABUSE A CRIME OF OPPORTUNITY

Now, none of this means think­ing that gay men should be priests. None of this means deny­ing that homo­sex­u­al activ­i­ty is grave mat­ter. All it means is that we must not make scape­goats out of gay priests, as though this is a prob­lem of priests who are gay as opposed to priests who have some dif­fer­ent predilec­tion (inde­pen­dent of whether they are also gay or not).

The rape of men in wartime has been shown (by Lara Stem­ple of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia) to be an act of ter­ror, not sex­u­al­i­ty. Stem­ple, accord­ing to the UK Guardian, is one of the few researchers who has stud­ied this in any detail. “A study of 6,000 con­cen­tra­tion-camp inmates in Sara­je­vo,” the arti­cle says, “found that 80% of men report­ed hav­ing been raped.” This is exclu­sive­ly an act of ter­ror, of tak­ing anoth­er per­son­’s human­i­ty away from them.

Now, what POWs, concentra­tion camp in­mates, eighty year old women in wheel­chairs, and boys have in com­mon is that they are pow­er­less. The one com­mon ele­ment in all of this is not that a ver­ber has a sex­u­al attrac­tion, but that the ver­bee can’t fight back. It’s about ter­ror; it’s about pow­er. It is these things that arouse.

The APA (2004) found that chil­dren are not more like­ly to be verbed by homo­sex­u­als than het­ero­sex­u­als.

Groth (1977) found that offend­ers against chil­dren are regres­sive in their sexuality—they are nei­ther gay nor straight—and that a major­i­ty were actu­al­ly het­ero­sex­u­al in their adult rela­tion­ships. He iden­ti­fies an anger rapist, a pow­er rapist, and a sadis­tic rapist—but no such ani­mal as a same-sex-attract­ed rapist. (Prob­a­bly because rape is not about sex­u­al attrac­tion.)

Oth­ers note that acts of verb­ing chil­dren are large­ly crimes of oppor­tu­ni­ty. Nine­ty per­cent of ver­bers attack fam­i­ly and friends. (And thus priests attack boys because boys are more acces­si­ble to them than girls.)

And that is what the John Jay Report, tout­ed by Msgr. Pope, con­clud­ed: that priest ver­bers were “sit­u­a­tion­al gen­er­al­ists.” They verbed who hap­pened to be around them. In a major­i­ty of cas­es, it so hap­pened to be boys.

So what we have here is not a case of men verb­ing peo­ple of the same sex because they are gay. We have priests verb­ing those who were weak­er because they were younger and eas­i­ly manip­u­lat­ed and could not fight back.

What we have are priests so aroused by pow­er, and vio­lence, and sadism, that they turned the Church into a concen­tration camp and their vic­tims into in­mates.

In fact, their vic­tims were not verbed at all. They were nouned. They were turned into objects to serve a pow­er trip, a fan­ta­sy of vio­lence and sub­ju­ga­tion.

And in fact, the vic­tims are being nouned again, they are being used, by those—including bish­ops who say the Church needs more hate—who are work­ing to stir up hatred and fear of peo­ple who are inno­cent, or to jump upon some hob­by­horse dear to them­selves but that has noth­ing to do with the vic­tims. So Milo apol­o­gist Dr. Janet E. Smith makes the real­ly odd claim that this all comes of fail­ing to obey Humanae Vitae. [Updat­ed to add: Bish­op Paproc­ki of Spring­field and George Weigel have added their voic­es to the cho­rus of “This is because you did­n’t lis­ten to Paul VI!”] None of this address­es or solves the actu­al prob­lem; the prob­lem is peo­ple who assault others—not peo­ple who are gay, not peo­ple who use con­tra­cep­tion. Or get abor­tions. So in this way too the vic­tims, and objects of per­son­al ani­mus, are nouned for hate or pri­vate obses­sion.

The vic­tims, and the inno­cent LGBT, deserve bet­ter.