Correspondence
Correspondence THE ELEPHANT REVISITED IN HER ARTICLE "The Elephant in the Sacristy" (June 17), Mary Eberstadt suggests that I was trying to minimize the abuse crisis in the catholic church by...
...We are, however, born with a sex drive, which, like our hunger for food, can cause real physical and emotional discomfort when denied...
...To acknowledge the homosexual factor would wreck three decades of liberal promotion of gay pride and rights...
...Any institution that pretends otherwise is simply rolling the dice toward the moral, financial, and—not least—actuarial disasters lately visited on the American Catholic church...
...Indeed, the only way to argue that gay priests are not largely responsible for the Church's man-boy sex crisis is to choke the life out of ordinary language itself...
...How about the admission by a Jesuit priest and psychologist, quoted in the Washington Post some weeks after my essay appeared, saying that of some 400 clerical offenders he had treated, "most were gay...
...Thus one writer complains of "the grotesque proposition, unsupported by any data whatsoever, that gay men are responsible for the pedophilia scandal...
...She writes, "But 'intergenerational sex,' with its inevitable elements of adult power and coercion, is not something children gravitate toward intuitively...
...Call the acts "genocide" if you like, but it must be acknowledged that to do so is to engage in spurious rhetoric, and to twist the meaning of words beyond recognition...
...How about Maureen Orth's blood-curdling examination of the Paul Shanley case in the August issue of Vanity Fair...
...Eberstadt is correct that research on pedophilia must proceed without fear of political correctness...
...If there is a single, extra-Catholic meaning to the Church's current disgrace, it is that the gay-rights dogma of our time—the notion that homosexually active men can be placed in close contact with adolescents and young boys without some significant portion of those men feeling and acting upon sexual attraction to those boys—has been toppled by the facts of the priest scandals...
...However, I stand by the distinction I make in the severity of the acts, depending on the age of the young person involved...
...I will nonetheless try to have compassion for poor, objectively disordered Mary Eberstadt, as the Church advocates...
...Humans are not born with an "alcohol drive...
...Many psychologists believe, or believed at one time, that this was at the root of pedophilia, at least at the psychological level...
...That is why it is sexual immaturity...
...While I have no idea whether any of these studies are valid, only free dis-course—the kind The Weekly Standard so often advocates—will help us address this terrible problem...
...Does Eberstadt really believe intergenerational sex and obsessions with youth and beauty are desires limited to homosexuals...
...To put the contrast most sharply, as Duane R. Pierson does in his admirable letter, "if a significant percentage of the children assaulted had been female adolescents abused by heterosexual men, these men would be in prison now and the outcry in the press would have been massive beyond comprehension...
...When I have spoken with survivors, they almost never blame "homosexuals" or "gay culture" per se for what happened to them: They blame the perpetrators, and the perpetrators' bosses for not listening to the victims or doing enough to help them...
...Yet I've never seen a single one that bashes gay priests (though we would certainly protest such cartoons if they did appear), even though homosexuals are responsible for almost all the cases of child sexual molestation in the Church...
...If Catholicism had dared to admit its sexual agenda was archaic and hypocritical, gay priests would today be openly accepted and supported by their superiors—a number already are by their parishioners—and those superiors, no longer terrified from hiding (among other things) years of hushed-up cases and the overwhelming homosexuality of their clergy (including, through sheer statistical probability, many bishops and cardinals themselves), would have reacted to each and every charge the way we now sorely wish they had: by picking up the phone and calling the cops...
...In the 1980s, party-line research about recovered memories of childhood abuse led to a witch-hunt resulting in the phony daycare center Satanic abuse cases involving Margaret Kelly Michaels, the Amiraults, and others...
...And in 1998, the U.S...
...DUANE R. PIERSON Portland, ME PERHAPS A COMPANION PIECE to Mary Eberstadt's article "The Elephant in the Sacristy" might be titled "The Elephant in the campsite...
...To extend the very specific medical label "pedophile" to these other acts is simply inaccurate...
...There is, of course, widespread and belligerent resistance to just such reviews...
...With every news story, every day and week that the formerly seduced and assaulted step forward, the enormity of the thing increases, and so also does the mental and moral effort of overlooking it...
...There is a failure to connect, as adults, with other adults...
...Gays and straights have the same low rate of pedophilia in the outside world, so there must be something in the environment of the priesthood that disproportionately attracts pedophiles...
...For some reason this mistake is made quite frequently—perhaps the thinking is that only a Jesuit could write novels as racy as Greeley's...
...If our Church did not deck itself out in a mystique of power so impregnable, priestly abusers would not find so many ready victims among young Catholics trained to obey men of the cloth...
...Perhaps the celibacy requirement drives away heterosexual men who in other denominations act on their religious vocations because they are able to marry...
...What does society think of a man who acts on his sexual interest in underage girls...
...If so, let us stipulate it here...
...Correspondence THE ELEPHANT REVISITED IN HER ARTICLE "The Elephant in the Sacristy" (June 17), Mary Eberstadt suggests that I was trying to minimize the abuse crisis in the catholic church by stressing that most of the acts involved are "ephebophilia" (acts with older teenagers), and therefore less damaging than true pedophilia...
...The immaturity concept does not stipulate that boys gravitate towards adults, but that boys gravitate towards other boys...
...Bad as all this is for the Church, it is worse for the contemporary ideology of gay rights...
...The organization, of course, is the Boy Scouts of America...
...Men want to molest boys because they cannot find satisfaction within their own cohort...
...This explanation renders the exploitation of children even more awful than previously argued since the molester knows that the child is afraid and confused, just as he was in his youth...
...The horrors unfolding in the catholic church bring to mind a heated debate that recently got similar attention in the press...
...Has she never done a Web search for "Live Nude Girls...
...Data...
...However, I take issue with her dismissal of clerical celibacy as a red herring...
...The record shows otherwise...
...But this is uncomfortably like arguing that the solution to wife-beating is to outlaw marriage, or that compulsory sterilization will diminish infanticide...
...It has nothing to do with "intergenerational" sex...
...Republican Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota House of Representatives majority leader, called for the university to cancel the book...
...I did not suggest—nor would I argue—that Philip Jenkins was "trying to minimize the abuse crisis...
...Such widely shared responses lead me to suggest that to stigmatize homosexuals via this situation would be, to put it gently, short-sighted and opportunistic...
...To cite one example, we have collected scores of despicable cartoons that generalize from the individual to the collective, painting all priests as pedophiles...
...Far from being an attempt to turn this horror into a "simple" medical problem, it is an explanation consonant with the deviancy itself...
...Durham, NC I AGREE WITH MARY EBERSTADT that homosexuality in the priesthood is the root cause of the Catholic church's molestation scandal...
...Second, most parishioners want the problem to disappear, since their major concern is a ticket to heaven...
...He can only be deemed, likewise and comparably, a homosexual who has done the same...
...If the recidivism rate for clerical drunk driving was anywhere near that of gay priests seducing teenage boys, all drinking priests would have been stripped of their licenses, keys, and vehicles decades ago...
...The answer is no one...
...But if you believe the actions of sexual abusers within a group are indicative of the activities, even the nature, of that entire group, then why (we may legitimately ask Eberstadt) does not opposite-sex abuse by priests also tell us terrible things about heterosexuals...
...The degree of intellectual dishonesty that has colored this issue is astonishing...
...Has she never read a copy of Barely Legal...
...Perhaps the Catholic teaching that homosexuality is sinful draws to the priesthood some sexually conflicted men, who don't want to get married to women, can't deal with their attraction to men, and vainly hope that celibacy will eliminate it...
...Otherwise, I thought Eberstadt presented a fair and effective argument...
...MELISSA HECHT Vienna, VA MARY EBERSTADT ENDORSES the grotesque proposition, unsupported by any data whatsoever, that gay men are responsible for the pedophilia scandal in the Roman catholic church...
...Of course, as my article reviewed in some detail, a great deal of passion and energy goes into denying just this equivalence...
...The few who do are as deviant as heterosexual pedophiles from the standard, healthy, acceptable model of adult sexual behavior...
...For a priest to have sexual contact with a 16- or 17-year-old boy is multiply wrong...
...Purging the seminaries of homosexuals will ultimately mean a priest-free Catholicism...
...By way of consolation, I hope that at least some Jesuits have been quietly pleased to find such a robust spokesman for priestly virtue credited to their ranks, even if it was by mistake...
...Note well, however: If the Church's current sex scandal were limited to cases of heterosexual abuse, it would remain just that—a scandal, as opposed to a fullblown crisis, and one whose lawsuits and trials and settlements and allegations would be reduced to a mere fraction of their current level...
...What then should we call another man who acts upon his sexual interest in teenage or younger boys...
...That clerical sexual wrongdoing is ecumenical is not in doubt...
...Her obsession with gays must be a trial for her as well...
...These days I tend rather to speak of these acts as "homosexuality...
...In the course of the scandals, as my essay documented, the majority of mainstream commentators, religious and secular both, have outdone each other in declaring that black is in fact white, up is indeed down, and—to switch metaphors—that the fat gray pachyderm with the trunk and tusks is something (anything...
...All the psychiatric evidence, however, indicates that this behavior is still vastly less damaging than contact with a 6- or 7-year-old child...
...Most gay priests are not molesters, yet most molesting priests are gay...
...If they instead become happy homosexual adults, it is not because their parents have "led" them there but because a significant percentage of all normal human beings gravitate toward homosexual, rather than heterosexual, orientation...
...I think she is exactly right in suggesting that we should move away from the overly technical term "ephebophilia," which I have indeed used in the past, though I now believe that the word frankly communicates nothing to most well-informed readers...
...If not, why not...
...It is sad that a person of sufficient education and intelligence to be one of its research fellows should produce such a bigoted and narrow-minded article and that The Weekly Standard should not only print it but also give it pride of place on the cover...
...Conclusions considerably less prejudicial than Eberstadt's are drawn by so many laity that they seem to be prevalent even among victims themselves...
...Eberstadt's article is most objectionable because it leaves us stuck in this abysmal situation with no real hope of solutions...
...Writer Melissa Hecht—like several other correspondents—questions whether a married priesthood would ameliorate today's abuse crisis...
...There is nothing homophobic about such an observation...
...Several gay couples that I count among my friends are raising daughters and one a son who have every statistical chance of becoming happy heterosexual adults...
...Like children, they are intimidated by "adults...
...By enforcing celibacy on its priesthood, the catholic church turns away heterosexual men who admit that they are not able or willing to sublimate their need for sexual intimacy...
...The showcasing at their Dallas conference of a female victim—as if she were in any numerical or historical sense representative of the Church's current criminal caseload—was a marvel of implied duplicity...
...Because of a firm stance on an issue related to what the catholic church faces today, one organization saw its funding disappear, its meeting places taken away, and its young members booed during a presentation of the American flag at the 2000 Democratic national convention...
...While this concept may not be correct, and while this understanding does not make such activities less sinful, it is a characterization that holds within it a reasonable approach to understanding this affliction...
...When you are a child, "telling on" an authority figure—priest or parent—is unbearably hard...
...House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution condemning an article published by the American Psychological Association concluding, after a review of 59 prior studies, that the effects of childhood sexual abuse encounters were "neither pervasive nor typically intense...
...the other 77 or 78 (the numbers differ depending on who I talk to) were homosexuals who have been accused of seducing male teenagers...
...That is not to say there is any shortage of volunteers flexing their fingers for just that purpose...
...WARREN SAUNDERS JR...
...It's just a matter of fact...
...Support...
...But this has nothing whatever to do with their sexual orientation...
...JUDITH GREEN Allentown, PA IN HER OTHERWISE WELL-ARGUED ESSAYon priest/boy sexual predation, Mary Eberstadt fails to convey the concept of sexual "immaturity" correctly...
...Sexual abuse is a crime of authority, and of power, not just of sex, and the loss of autonomy suffered in forced sexual submission (especially to an authority figure like a priest) does as much damage to victims as the sex itself...
...However, the church has apparently long accommodated homosexual men who also do not wish to be celibate...
...She writes of "human history," as if gays are not part of that history (as if not human...
...But warped by her objective disorder, Eberstadt proposes a one-sided research program designed to show that sexual orientation is malleable...
...Perhaps Eberstadt would rather not consider these incidents abuses because they screw up her central point—that this scandal tells us that gays are child molesters and corrupters...
...it is sinful and in many cases criminal...
...Pedophile priests are a Catholic problem, not a gay one...
...This is true in a trivial sense, insofar as "married" implies "heterosexual," and the abuse problem is (as Hecht and most other writers acknowledge) overwhelmingly homosexual in etiology...
...But at a time of actual crisis for the Church, it seems tepid to argue that the abuse cases are somehow less of a "Catholic" problem on the grounds that the Lutherans and the Episcopalians and even some rabbis suffer from them, too...
...Finally, if a significant percentage of the children assaulted had been female adolescents abused by heterosexual men, these men would be in prison now and the outcry in the press would have been massive beyond comprehension...
...WILLIAM A. DONOHUE President, Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights New York, NY GREAT PIECE AND MUCH NEEDED.Unfortunately, I believe that this affair will soon be swept under the rug for several reasons...
...As deeply as I disagree with many of the political pronouncements of the Hoover Institution, it is still a community of intellectuals based at one of the finest universities in the world...
...Heterosexual and homosexual preferences are innate, not learned, as a century of post-Freudian psychotherapy has documented in clear and unmistakable detail...
...These exceptions aside, most of my critics object that the Catholic church's sexual abuse problem is not a homosexual problem...
...That is because "ephebophile," in the technicalsounding nomenclature of the scandal commentary, is a term whose chief attraction is that it spares one from having to employ the words "homosexual" or "gay" in attempting to describe exactly which sexual crimes the offending priests have committed...
...Also this year, legislators cut $100,000 from the University of Missouri's budget because political scientist Harris Mirkinof published a 1999 article questioning whether all sexual contacts between adults and children constituted abuse...
...First, a couple of isolated points...
...If the problem instead were priestly heterosexual rape, there would similarly be no esoteric rationalizations about "immaturity," "psycho-dynamic development," and the rest...
...I do believe that some Catholics have become overly enamored of sociological—as opposed to, say, moral or religious—analyses of the scandals...
...Both these options, though manifestly conducive to short-term tactical success (witness the bishops' conference), are nevertheless doomed to longer-term strategic failure...
...PHILIP JENKINS Professor of History and Religious Studies Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA MARY EBERSTADT'S ARTICLE on the crisis in the Catholic church is the most clear-headed piece to date on this subject...
...other than what it appears to be...
...She asserts that many of the pedophile priests were abused as children and continue the pattern of abuse by inflicting their sexual attentions on other helpless children...
...What this scandal tells us is that if our religion had not been laboring under centuries of sexual persecution, hypocrisy, fear, and ignorance, we would never have had this present-day disaster to deal with...
...It thinks he is a heterosexual who has unacceptably transgressed certain social and moral and criminal lines...
...There are only two ways of negotiating the elephant in the sacristy: Either ignore it, or fight tooth and nail against anyone who names the animal...
...Wasn't the "elephant" essay long enough...
...And so especially do the bishops...
...Likewise, the same Jesuit psychologist quoted in a preceding paragraph goes on to report with apparent seriousness that despite the fact that "most" offenders of his experience are gay, "a significant number" of those actual and potential boy-ravishers are in fact "straight...
...Eberstadt's equation of celibacy with teetotaling is completely inapt...
...And let us also repeat, for the record, that most homo-sexually inclined adults manifestly are not child abusers...
...The unquestioning obedience conservative Catholic rulers and lay followers demand (now, bizarrely, more than ever) probably facilitated these abuses and coverups...
...Yes, "straight...
...Why is that...
...If their emotional development stops at this still-juvenile stage, then it follows that, as grown men, they will desire the objects they desired as boys, that is to say, other boys...
...Are crimes such as wife-beating or infanticide ever deployed to challenge the very validity of heterosexuality, as Eberstadt insinuates priestly sexual abuses do of homosexuality...
...I wonder who now disputes the wisdom of their decision to exclude gay Scout leaders, and I praise the leaders of the Scouts for considering first and foremost the welfare of the boys in their charge...
...The sexual abuse of women and girls by priests has been consistently marginalized by conservative Catholics...
...EDMOND KEENAN WYNN Healdsburg CA MARY EBERSTADT DECLARES the scandal at hand to be "almost entirely about man-boy sex...
...This year, the University of Minnesota Press published Judith Levine's book Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex, which argues that the effects of pedophilia are less harmful than commonly thought...
...Perhaps a sanctimonious coverup culture in the hierarchy led pedophile priests to believe that they could act on their impulses without consequences...
...When was the last time you heard the phrase "ephebophile" applied to a heterosexual man...
...It's hard to agree with this posture, especially when just before the opening of the recent National Council of Bishops conference one of their number resigned after being discovered carrying on affairs with various women over the years...
...Who could possibly argue otherwise...
...For Eberstadt to try to demonstrate that the high number of same-sex cases in the current Catholic scandal reveals something worrisome about homosexuality itself is wrong...
...Both groups seem to intuitively understand what studies have demonstrated— gays are no more likely than heterosexuals are to commit acts of sexual abuse...
...Do we really have to add that heterosexual exploitation by any authority figure, in or out of a Roman collar, should be—and is—widely deplored...
...While Eberstadt condemns left-wing pressure for party-line research on pedophilia, right-wing pressure is also intense...
...JAYWEISER New York, NY MARY EBERSTADT REFERS to Andrew Greeley as a Jesuit in "The Elephant in the Sacristy...
...Resorting to venerable Church reactions such as ignorance, hysteria, and persecution might make a few powerful people feel more so—but it will also destroy the already seriously damaged faith and trust of millions more...
...PATRICK GILES New York, NY MARY EBERSTADT approvingly quotes a sentence from the Catechism in the conclusion of "The Elephant in the Sacristy": "This [homosexual] inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most a trial...
...Varied directions of sexual expression are born in all of us, and the path a person will take is set long before a priest lays hands on an altar boy or a parent explains the facts of life to a preteen...
...A second way of answering the larger question is empirical—i.e., to examine the real facts of actual cases, as my essay undertook to do...
...The involvement with boys is homosexual activity, but that doesn't mean the person who's doing it is homosexually oriented," goes a typically contorted example (from one of the most widely quoted authorities on the scandals, incidentally...
...Well then, how about Rod Dreher's National Review report in March that "of the 80 priests [in Boston] whose names were turned in to cops, only two or three were true pedophiles...
...The answer is almost certainly that you haven't...
...Many thanks to Mary Eberstadt for having the guts to speak to the record...
...George Orwell, Catholic America hath need of thee...
...Finally, my regrets to all for calling Andrew Greeley a "Jesuit" when he is not...
...Very few gay men of my acquaintance—one apparently not shared by Eberstadt, who seems never to have met a gay person except within the pages of some very odd and reactionary books— have any interest in seducing children or satisfying their sexual urges through children...
...If the catholic church made the celibate vocation optional, wouldn't it make sense that more heterosexual men would be attracted into the ministry, thereby reducing the percentage of homosexuals in the priesthood...
...WILLIAM M. KLIMON Herndon, VA MARY EBERSTADT RESPONDS MY THANKS to Philip Jenkins, William A. Donohue, Duane R. Pierson, Warren Saunders Jr., Edmond Keenan Wynn, and others, including those writers not published here, for their insights and encouraging words...
...At times Eberstadt seems not only ignorant of homosexuality, but of sex, period...
...He is not a Jesuit, but rather a secular priest in the Archdiocese of Chicago...
...It shows in horrifying detail not only Shanley's preeminence in the gay community and his predatory sexuality, but also how other gay priests helped make it possible for him to rape and seduce scores of boys...
Vol. 7 • July 2002 • No. 43
