CONFRONTING POWER AND SEX IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

 

 

The book I have written is a response to the revelations of sexual abuse within the church.  Even though the book may seem to move away from this topic, every page is part of that response. 

For the nine years from 1994 to 2003 I was a member and then chairman of the committee established by the Australian bishops to coordinate a national response to these revelations, in the hope that the whole church in that country might speak and act as one.  I spoke with hundreds of victims, both individually and in groups.  I met with offenders and I worked with bishops and religious leaders.  For nine years it completely dominated my life.  There were many failures, but also a number of successes.  It was an experience that changed me in so many ways that, even if I wanted to, I could not now go back to being the person I was before.

Out of this came the conviction that, if we are ever to look to the future with a clear conscience, there must first be profound change within the church. 

Firstly, there must be a study of the more immediate causes of abuse, and there I have suggested that we need to study carefully three elements: unhealthy psychology, unhealthy ideas concerning both power and sex, and unhealthy environment or living conditions.  I suggest that it is when these three things come together that the murky world out of which abuse arises is most likely to be created.  We must in a particular way look at all institutional factors in the church that may contribute to a lack of health in any of these three areas, and we must be ready to make radical changes wherever they are needed.

Secondly, in addition to looking at abuse, we also need to look with equal seriousness at the inadequate response to abuse, for this created as much scandal as the abuse itself.  I do not believe that it is enough to blame bishops, implying that they are all either incompetent or malicious.  We must rather look at why so many decent, good and intelligent leaders did not act as we might have hoped or expected, and in doing that we must once again look at the institutional factors that led to the poor response. 

Thirdly, it is my belief that these two areas of inquiry will inevitably lead to a study of all aspects of the two subjects of power and sex within the church.  Sexual abuse is all about power and sex, so to counter abuse, we must be free to ask serious questions about power and sex in the institution of the church. 

I believe that the fundamental difference between myself and those bishops who have criticised my book is in the starting point of the discussion.  I believe that these bishops are saying that there are many teachings, laws and attitudes proclaimed within the church and that we may not question these teachings, laws and attitudes, not even in responding to abuse.  I start from the opposite end, that is, from the fact of abuse.  I argue that, in order to eradicate it, we must investigate it thoroughly and, in doing this, we must be free to follow the argument wherever it leads.  If it causes us to question various teachings, laws or attitudes, we must be free to do so.  Without this freedom, we would be attempting to respond to abuse while blindfolded and handcuffed.

 

            Power

The issue of power is complex, but I point to two factors.  The first will indicate one of the reasons why abuse occurred, the second will help to understand why the response was inadequate.

            The Mystique of the Priesthood

The first can be summed up in a misunderstanding of a sentence in the letter to the Hebrews,

“Every high priest chosen from among human beings is put in charge of things pertaining to God on their behalf…” (5:1).

The Greek text says only that one human being exactly like all the others is chosen for the task of priesthood, but the Latin translation that was used from the time of St. Jerome until just a few years ago said assumptus, “taken up”, and from this developed a mystique of the priesthood (and to a lesser extent of religious life) as “taken up”, on a pedestal, not like other human beings. This is exactly the kind of unhealthy idea that can contribute to abuse, and sexuality is only one of the ways in which it can make priests or religious think that they are special, unlike other human beings and so not subject to the restrictions that bind others.

It is never easy to change an ethos or mystique, but this ethos must change, for it denies the essential humanity of the priest or religious, and so establishes a series of false relationships at the heart of the community.  Priests and religious are ordinary human beings.  This ought to be a most obvious statement, but both priests and religious on the one hand and Catholic people on the other hand have much work to do in this field.  I find that, wherever there are priests or religious trying to climb down from the pedestal, there are always, not only church authorities, but also many Catholic people insisting that they climb right back up again.  There is that most dangerous insistence that priests and religious must be perfect or, if they can’t do that, at least appear to be perfect.  An extraordinary number of people believe the naïve idea that “Priests and religious are celibate, so they don’t really have sexual desires and feelings the way the rest of us do.”

 

            Creeping Infallibility

The second factor is that of papal authority.  We know that the doctrine of infallibility states that the pope cannot be wrong on a matter solemnly proclaimed ex cathedra.  But gradually, over centuries, the protection of that ex cathedra level of papal authority has meant that other levels also had to be protected. 

For example, the encyclical Humanae Vitae on contraception does not use the language of infallibility, and yet so much papal energy over so long a period of time has been invested in condemning artificial contraception that to say now that all those popes were wrong would be seen as striking a massive blow against all papal authority.  Indeed, one may say that the widespread rejection of the teaching on contraception over the last forty years has already had this effect, as people have said, “I am convinced that the pope is wrong on this matter, so how do I know that he is not wrong on many other matters?”  As a result, that encyclical caused a lessening of respect for all levels of papal authority. 

In the same way, most popes have rejected the very idea of women priests, and to accept it now could be seen as admitting that two thousand years of popes have all been wrong.  When pressure arose to discuss the matter, it was instead upgraded to a level where infallibility was in play and even discussion of the issue could be banned.

Is papal teaching condemning homosexual acts infallible?  No, but it would be defended as though it were, for once again so much papal authority has been invested in this teaching.

What about all church teaching on sexual morality?  There might be room for movement on this or that point, but not on the core teaching, for yet again so much papal teaching has been invested in this teaching.

What I am suggesting is that the formal language of infallibility is less important than the amount of papal energy invested in a particular teaching.

To move a further step lower, the law of priestly celibacy is no more than a law, and yet to change it now could imply that a thousand years of popes had been wrong.  Once again, so much papal energy has been invested in this law, and such heavy measures have been taken to enforce it, that even to change a mere law could affect papal authority across all fields.  As a result we have seen protectors of papal authority conclude that, since all those popes cannot have been wrong and since, therefore, obligatory celibacy cannot be a significant cause of sexual abuse, they would find another scapegoat, and the one they found was priests whose sexual orientation is homosexual.  This kind of argument will never discover the truth, for it is not merely mistaken, but an avoidance of the truth in order to protect papal authority. 

Before they are ordained, all bishops are required to take a special oath of loyalty to the pope (not to God, not to the church, but to the pope).  This oath is a symptom of the constant and severe pressure on all bishops to protect all levels of papal authority at all costs and in all circumstances.  A very high value is put on a bishop being “a pope’s man”. 

It was this pressure that led me to a very personal conflict between my duty of loyalty to the pope and my duty of loyalty to that portion of the church that the Australian Bishops had assigned to me, the victims of abuse.  It was the conflict between being a “pope’s man” and a “victims’ man”.  The conflict eventually became a genuine crisis for me when the pope of those years gave no real leadership in relation to abuse and failed to do anything at all with the two cases that he alone could deal with (the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna and the founder of the Legionaries of Christ).

The pope is extremely important in the Catholic Church, so imagine that twenty years ago, in 1988, Pope John Paul II had said one Sunday morning to the crowd in St. Peter’s Square, “I have just received a report concerning sexual abuse by priests and religious.  Priests sexually abusing innocent children!!  I have never heard of anything so horrendous.  So let us respond as Jesus would have responded, with humility, honesty and compassion.  Let us reach out to victims and put them before the good name of the church.  Let our response be a model to others.  I ask, and in the name of Jesus I demand, that all bishops give me their fullest support me in this.”  With this leadership the whole response of the church would have been different.  The very loyalty of the bishops to the pope would have worked in favour of victims, not against them.  Instead bishops were asked to be loyal to a profound silence.

I am not seeking to put all the blame on one man, for all individuals are finally responsible for their own actions, but he was a very strong pope who constantly reminded us of his authority.  And with authority goes responsibility. 

I hope that these few thoughts give some idea of why, in responding to abuse, it is essential to go well beyond the immediate issues of abuse itself, and to look seriously at all the ways in which power is understood and exercised within the church.

 

            Sex

In the First Testament there are a number of very beautiful sayings concerning love and sexuality, perhaps most of all in the Song of Songs.  Having said this, one must add that these beautiful sayings tend to be swamped by the far more frequent sayings concerning two principles that had great importance in relation to sexual relationships: the principle of property or ownership, by which the wife was the property of her husband, and the principle of ritual purity, by which many things and actions were considered to be ritually clean or unclean.  Jesus abolished the principle of property when he made the novel and, indeed, revolutionary statement that a man could commit adultery against his wife, for this meant that she was not his property.  He abolished the principle of ritual purity when he said that nothing that enters the body from outside can make a person unclean.

The problem for the early church was that, having abolished these two principles, Jesus did not spell out any details of what he would put in their place, and this is a most important fact.  As a result of this absence of specific teaching on sex by Jesus, two things happened.  Firstly, something of both the property ethic and the purity ethic remained in Christian history.  Secondly, the substitutes for these principles found by the church were less than satisfying.  In relation to sex the major substitute came from the idea of what is “natural”, and within the Catholic Church this eventually led to the idea that every “natural” act of intercourse had to contain both a unitive element (the love and mutual support of the spouses) and a procreative element (openness to new life).  To use the sexual faculties when either of these elements was not present was considered “unnatural” and, importantly, a direct sin against God because it was going against a divine intention.

This led to unhealthy consequences.  It meant that even thinking about sex was a sin and, because it was a direct sin against God, every sexual sin was mortal.  This made many people despair of avoiding mortal sin and give up on the moral life.  Most important of all, I believe, was that it encouraged the idea of an exceedingly angry god who would consign a person to an eternity of punishment in hell for a single sexual thought.  There are elements here so unhealthy that, when put together with an unhealthy psychology and unhealthy living conditions, they can easily contribute to abuse.

Furthermore, in placing all the emphasis on the sin against God rather than the offence against the abused minor, these ideas were a direct part of the unsatisfactory response to abuse.  An offence against a minor was treated overwhelmingly and often exclusively as a sexual sin against God, and hence to be dealt with in exactly the same manner as any other sexual sin.  This meant confession, total forgiveness and restoration to one’s former state, and this was a significant part of the motivation for the practice of moving priests around from one parish to another.  Indeed, to argue for a sterner response, even today, can still lead to the accusation of being lacking in the essential Christian virtue of forgiveness.

The problem is overcome only when, in forgiving a past wrong, we also see the necessity to take all precautions to prevent future wrong, and we will do this only when we place the emphasis, not on a direct offence against God, but on an action that is deeply offensive to God because of the harm caused to innocent children.  I do not believe that God gets upset by sexual desires or acts in and of themselves alone, but God gets very upset by harm caused to other people.  In relation to sex I believe that the first question we need to be asking is not whether it is harming some natural order determined by God, but whether it is in any way harming either another person, or the community or oneself.

 I also suggest that not harming others is not enough for, if Jesus did not spell out the details of what he would substitute for the two ethics of property and purity, he did give the overriding principle when he said, “Love one another”.  Loving my neighbour rather than merely not harming my neighbour must be the true Christian criterion of morality in this field.  Yes, this principle needs to be spelled out in many ways, just as the Ten Commandments spell out what loving one another means in various different fields.  It emphatically does not mean that, if you feel even a transient liking towards someone, you can do whatever you like.  At the very least, it means putting the other person first, as all true loving must do.

I believe that, if the church moved away from a sexual morality based on the artificial concepts of natural and unnatural towards a morality based on persons and relationships, and away from the concepts of direct offences against God to the idea of harm caused to persons, we would finally be basing sexual morality on the gospels rather than a theory that has little reference to the gospels.  We would all have a healthier basis for our understanding of sexuality and for living our lives as sexual beings.

Clearly this is a field in which it is easy for misunderstandings to occur.  I beg of you to read chapter ten of my book most carefully before quoting me.

 

            How Do We Bring About Change?   

Because I have written this book, people are constantly saying to me, “This is all very well, but how do we bring about the changes you speak of?”  Allow me to give an answer in four parts. 

The first is that change will be most difficult, for we are trying to change a culture, and the defences of that culture are a thousand years old and rock solid.  Simplistic ideas will achieve little.

The second is that we need to combine confrontation with conversation.  Yes, there are times when only confrontation is possible.  It was necessary in the Boston situation of 2002 and it is essential now in combating moves to retain statutes of limitations.  If a bishop has committed a criminal defence, he should be judged like any other citizen.  At the same time, we must realise that the major changes we seek cannot at present come from any source other than the pope, and we must be aware of the relative powerlessness of the bishops before the power of the papacy and the Vatican systems that support it.  Since we will need the support of the bishops in this, I suggest that we must not limit ourselves to confrontation and must seek conversation wherever and whenever it is possible.  It will be a lengthy process in which we engage bishops in conversation, gradually show them that there are problems in the culture they have been living in and that the new culture we would like to introduce to them has a real beauty and freedom in it.  The title of my book is “Confronting Power and Sex…”, but it is a confrontation of issues, not of people, that I speak of there.   

The third part of my answer is that we need to have this conversation, not just with leaders, but as widely as possible among all the members of the church.  The greater the number of people involved and the clearer people’s ideas are concerning the church of the future, the more chance there is of bringing about such a church.  Mahatma Gandhi once said, “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.”  And the church I wish to see is a church of conversation, not confrontation, so that is the church we must be now. 

The final part of my answer is that I believe that the best way to engage reluctant leaders in conversation is precisely through the issue of sexual abuse, for the scandal of abuse has been so great that it is arguably the one issue that has the energy to do something as powerful as change a culture.  All church leaders have at the very least been through a profound humiliation and embarrassment over this issue, and deep within them they know that on this issue the popes have not given the courageous leadership the church needed.  However much they might pretend to the opposite, all leaders also know that we still have much to do before we can face the future with a clear conscience.  There is much room here for fruitful dialogue.  Parents have an obvious concern for the protection of their children and no sincere leader should refuse to discuss this issue with them. 

Provided it is done in a spirit of conversation rather than confrontation, may I suggest some of the issues that can be raised:

“We have been so profoundly shocked by the revelations of sexual abuse that our faith in the church itself has been seriously damaged.  In addition, as parents we are concerned for the protection of our children and we feel that as yet not nearly enough has been done to ensure their safety into the future. 

“We believe that Pope John Paul II should have handled the two cases of Cardinal Groer and Father Degollado promptly and openly.  Indeed, we expected a far stronger lead from the same pope at the very beginning of the crisis.  He gave such strong leadership is so many other fields that the absence of adequate leadership in a field that affected us deeply left us confused.

“Despite the welcome statements made recently in the United States by Pope Benedict, we believe that there is still a need for a public and formal apology directly to victims, made by the pope in St. Peter’s Basilica surrounded by the Cardinals.  This apology should 1) assure victims that they were not guilty of any fault because they were victims of more powerful persons who abused the spiritual power the church had given them, 2) apologise for any ways in which teachings, laws, structures or attitudes within the church may have contributed, and 3) assure them that the church will investigate all aspects of the matter in order to eradicate anything that might contribute to abuse.

“We are by no means satisfied, however, that the church is in fact doing everything possible to uncover the causes of abuse and to eradicate them.  We believe that, as a first step, there is a need to study all the ways in which church teachings, attitudes, laws and practices contribute to unhealthy psychology, unhealthy ideas and unhealthy living conditions of priests and religious.

“We know that celibacy is not the sole cause of abuse, but we also know that it is impossible to say that it has made no contribution.  We wish to see a particular study of this matter, especially of the ways in which an unwanted, unaccepted and unassimilated celibacy, so common among priests, including many of the best of them, can contribute to unhealthy psychology (e.g. severe depression), unhealthy ideas (e.g. misogyny) and unhealthy living conditions (e.g. loneliness and lack of support).

“We believe that it is so obvious that obligatory celibacy cannot be simply excluded as a possible contributing factor that it has become a symbol of the church’s response, in the sense that we will know that the church is serious about confronting abuse when it puts obligatory celibacy on the table for discussion of its role, and we will know that it is not yet truly serious for as long as it does not allow discussion of this issue.

“Looking beyond these immediate issues, we believe that no study will be adequate unless it looks at all matters relating to power and sex within the church, e.g. the idea of priests and religious being “taken up”, the need to protect the good name of the church at all costs, the inability to look at issues surrounding abuse in a fresh light because of the fear that any questions raised might harm papal authority, the idea that abuse was primarily a direct sexual offence against God rather than offensive to God because of the harm caused to innocent children, the need to distinguish between forgiveness of past wrong and prevention of future wrong.

“We have been most unhappy with the overall response to abuse by church authorities at every level and ask for an investigation of why this was so.  In particular, we ask for a study of any and all institutional factors that may have contributed to the inadequacy of the response and to such practices as the moving of offending priests from one parish to another.

“We believe that part of the problem was that each diocese and each religious order responded separately, so that the overall response was most uneven and the whole country inevitably ended up being judged by its worst cases.  We believe that the means must exist whereby the whole country can respond as one in times of crisis. 

“One single good and holy man, Pope John Paul II, was unable, for whatever reasons, to respond adequately to this crisis, and the whole church suffered as a result.  We believe that the ideas of collegiality and the sensus fidei of the whole church, both solemnly proclaimed by the Vatican Council must, as a matter of urgency, be given concrete form in specific structures that, had they existed, would have enabled a coordinated and far better response to abuse by the whole church.

“We know that there are very large numbers of sincere and devout Catholics who have serious problems with many church teachings concerning power and sex.  We feel that these Catholics are so many and so sincere that they deserve honest conversation on these topics rather than simply the imposition of authority or condemnation.”

 

            A New Church

An early title that I thought of giving to the book was “Nothing so Ugly, Nothing so Beautiful.”  This is based on a letter that John Henry Newman wrote to a friend a year or two before he took the step of joining the Catholic Church, in which he said, “There is nothing on this earth so ugly as the Catholic Church, and nothing so beautiful.”  In the midst of the revelations of sexual abuse and of many of the grubbier details of the response to abuse the church was so ugly that outsiders turned away in disgust, while insiders like ourselves felt a deep shame and confusion. 

At the same time, I know that I am speaking mainly to people who have not left the church.  And they have not left because they have seen and experienced the beauty of the church.  If you cannot see the ugliness in the church, you are closing your eyes, but if you cannot see the beauty, you do not know the church.  If I have personally encountered some of the ugliest things in the church in the story of abuse, I have also been in a privileged position to experience some of the most beautiful things, not least in all those people who have been ready to get down into the mud and filth in order to help people.

Despite some of the reactions there have been to my book, it is emphatically not an attack on the church or a desire to cause it harm.  On the contrary, it comes out of an intense desire to see a better church, a church in which everything that is humanly possible has been done to abolish all forms of abuse, a church that encourages growth through freedom, a church in which there is conversation rather than confrontation, a church in which all, women as much as men, laity as much as clergy, share equally in the full life of the church and can grow to become all they are capable of being.  By reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus, I want to see a new church for a new millennium.

_____________

This is the amended final version, sent from Australia June 21, of the talk Bishop Robinson gave during his American tour. The initial lecture at Temple University can be viewed in Google Video.