Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Truth About Priests
The Truth About Priests
The Truth About Priests
The media is not to blame for the allegations against Bishop Lahey—or
the sins of any other priest who uses his spiritual authority to violate a
child. If parishioners assume the man saying mass is a molester, it’s
because thousands of priests actually were molesters. Law & Order did
not invent the stereotype, and neither did newspapers. Priests did.
But at the risk of downplaying decades of unspeakable abuse—or
forgiving a Church hierarchy that moved heaven and earth to suppress
scandal and protect criminal clergy—an obvious point is often ignored:
the vast, vast majority of Catholic priests are not sexual predators. In
fact, the scientific research suggests that men who target children are
no more pervasive in the priesthood (and perhaps less pervasive) than
in any other segment of society. Depending on the study, somewhere
between two and four per cent of priests have had sexual contact with
a minor. Or, to put it another way, between 96 and 98 per cent have
not.
“It’s part of that myth—the myth of the pedophile priest who can’t help
himself,” says Thomas Plante, a psychology professor at Santa Clara
University who has published dozens of studies about sexually abusive
priests. “It’s really an issue of perception rather than reality. Believe it or
not, probably the safest place for a kid to be is in a Catholic church
environment.”
That certainly wasn’t the case for John Swales and his two younger
brothers, Guy and Ed. Back in the summer of 1969, the boys attended a
summer camp for low-income kids where they met a charming, larger-
:
than-life volunteer named Father Barry Glendinning. An instructor at St.
Peter’s Seminary in London, Ont., the priest soon became a surrogate
big brother. He gained the trust of the boys’ parents, showered them
with pizzas, movies and booze, and, when opportunity knocked,
introduced them to sex. John was 10 years old when the first assault
took place. “You name it, he did it,” Swales says.
Tragically, the Swales saga is not an isolated one. The Catholic Church,
both in Canada and abroad, is rife with stories of priests who took
advantage of vulnerable kids—and bishops who, at the first sign of
trouble, simply shuffled them off to a different parish. Kevin Bennett.
Charles Sylvestre. Thomas O’Dell. Bernard Prince. John Geoghan.
Mount Cashel Orphanage. The list goes on and on.
The revelation that four out of every 100 priests were leading double
lives is hardly reassuring. And one victim—let alone 10,667—is one
victim too many. But if nothing else, the John Jay study does offer
compelling proof that priests, on average, don’t seem to be any more
dangerous than the people sitting in their pews.
Nobody knows for sure how often Boy Scout leaders or hockey
coaches or daycare workers abuse the children under their watch.
Headlines are the only indication. But consider this stat: according to
the most reliable figures, 13 per cent of men and up to 40 per cent of
women say they were sexually abused as children. The huge majority of
those crimes occur inside the home—and the culprit is usually a
relative, not the local priest. “We don’t know what the prevalence rate is
for the general population, but it has to be at least double what it is for
priests,” Plante says. “We can estimate it backwards through the lens of
the victim.”
:
We also don’t know the prevalence among other religious leaders. So
while four per cent may seem high (or low), it’s impossible to say
whether rabbis or imams or pastors are violating children at the same
pace as their Catholic counterparts. “It’s clear that the Catholic Church
has a bull’s eye on it,” says Leslie Lothstein, a Connecticut-based
psychologist who has counselled hundreds of wayward clergy. “No one
is really collecting that data systematically for all Protestant sects. The
same is true for the Jewish clergy, and while little is known about the
Muslim clergy, it’s clear that when you actually work with people who
are sexually abused, everyone seems to be part of the act.”
Even John Swales, a man who has suffered so much at the hands of
the Church, chooses his words carefully. Despite a lifetime of agony, he
also knows that every priest is not Father Glendinning. “We focus way
too much on the act and the individual,” he says. “The real problem
here is the response to the issue. We keep saying Lahey, Glendinning,
and we throw these names out, but the real failing is the institutional
response to these deviants. Every culture, every occupation has these
issues of sexual abuse. Few have the ability to conceal it like the
Church does.”
The research shows that most guilty priests are actually ephebophiles:
people attracted to post-pubescent boys, typically between 13 and 17.
For a victim, though, such a distinction is completely irrelevant.
Whether seven or 14, an altar boy is still a minor and the perpetrator
priest is still a criminal.
So why do four per cent of priests abuse children? “It would be like
asking me: ‘why does anyone sexually abuse minors?’ ” Berlin says.
“What they’ve shared in common is that they’ve acted in an improper
way sexually. But what they’re like in terms of character, personality,
temperament, the degree of remorse they may or may not be showing,
you really have to assess that on a case-by-case basis.” In other words,
what motivates one priest to steal a child’s innocence is not always the
same thing that triggers another.
One theory does stand out: the vow of celibacy. Some researchers
believe that because aspiring priests are forced to ignore any and all
carnal urges, those urges later manifest themselves as obsessions. In
the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, when many would-be abusers were studying
to be ordained, some entered the seminary as young as 13. Simply put,
their lives become a constant, adolescent struggle against
:
masturbation. “They were taught that any sexual thought, impulse or
feeling was a mortal sin, so they repressed the whole area,” says
Donald Hands, a Wisconsin psychologist who ran a treatment centre
for clergy. “This paralyzed them at an adolescent level of psychosexual
development. When they entered midlife, they began to act out delayed
sexual urges. Unfortunately, they acted out by assaulting boys of the
same age that they had been when they surrendered their sexuality at
the seminary gates.”
Richard Sipe, a former priest who has written three books about the
dark side of chastity, is much more blunt. “The system breeds abusers.
I don’t know any other way to put it. The Catholic Church, in its
management of sexuality, is corrupt. It insists on sexual deprivation
without education.”
Ask the average Catholic, and they know the solution: let priests get
married. But that assumption, Plante says, is as much of a myth as the
pedophile priest. “People will say: ‘Oh, if they weren’t celibate, the
problem goes away.’ We know that’s not true. Sexual abuse is not an
uncommon thing out there, whether you’re married or not, whether
you’re a priest or not. It’s common.”
:
Same goes for child pornography. The RCMP recently estimated that
65,000 Canadians are viewing kiddie porn online. Lahey may have been
one of them, but even if all 9,000 other priests in the country were
doing the same thing, that leaves 56,000 others—including, no doubt, a
large chunk of men wearing wedding rings. “It is simply unjustified to
say that the commitment to celibacy is somehow a major factor in the
abuse issue,” says John A. Loftus, a psychologist and Jesuit priest.
“There are so many people who live terribly productive lives as
celibates, so there is nothing about the commitment to celibacy that, in
and of itself, creates pathology.”
But why, after so much sin and deceit, should people now trust the
:
Church to do the right thing? “Simply by the way we are dealing with
things,” Weisberger answers. “I don’t know how else you can prove it.”
Philip Latimer has a different strategy. Now 47, he was an altar boy at
St. Paul’s Church in Havre Boucher, N.S., when he was raped for the
first time by Father Allan A. MacDonald. “My life was forever changed,”
Latimer says, holding back tears. “I can only describe it to you this way:
he reached into my soul, tore out everything in me that was good—
mentally, physically and emotionally—and ran me through a blender.”
What he did was opt out of the class-action settlement and file a
lawsuit of his own. If Lahey—the man supposedly looking out for
victims—was victimizing others, what else is going on behind rectory
doors? “The more and more people who commit this crime, the better
and better they are at trying to hide this crime,” Latimer says. “Their
plan is never to admit anything that they knew, and so my plan is to
reveal everything that they knew.” Beyond the statistics.
: