You wouldn’t expect a blog run by three or four (I think) gay, essentially secular guys to be the sort of place where you could go to find a pretty sane analysis of the sexual abuse scandals that are, with help from a flame-fanning media, currently rocking the Church (by which I mean, in this case, the Catholic Church specifically, though we’ll touch (ahem) on that more in a minute).

But then, the guys at HillBuzz are not your typical gay, essentially secular guys. I’ve been fans of theirs for quite a while, and while I was worried that their treatment of the issue would sour my view of them slightly, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they’ve addressed The Scandal in a way that, while not entirely informed by fact, is quite commendably even-handed and fair. And they make a good point, toward the end of the article, about the essential error of pushing latent homosexual men into the seminary, which is a mistake that was made not only by the parents of such men over the course of the last few decades, but by various activists seeking to make the Church more progressive as well.

(Update: Ugh…I think I may have spoken a wee bit too soon. This new posting is a bit more ugly and bitter, which makes me wonder if there isn’t some other lingering issue at work. Be that as it may, it’s a somewhat more ignorant effusion of words, and I hope the boys have, with it, got out of their system whatever was bothering them.)

This issue has been addressed by more and better folk that me, and then more eloquently, so I’m only going to briefly comment on a few points that stand out in the HillBuzz article. Let’s start with terminology.

One of the other commenters on the article already pointed out that very few priests are actually guilty of being pedophiles (which is a clinical term referring to sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children). In fact, a statistically insignificant number of priests have been found to be pedophiles:

The Chicago study also found that of the 2,200 priests [every priest who had served in the archdiocese over the previous 40 years], just one was a pedophile. Now, many people are confused about the distinction between a pedophile and a person guilty of Sex with a minor. The difference is very significant. The phrase “pedophile priests” conjures up images of the worst violation of innocence, callous molesters like Father Porter who assault children 7 years old. “Pedophilia” is a psychiatric term meaning sexual interest in children below the age of puberty.

But the vast majority of clergy misconduct cases are nothing like this. The vast majority of instances involve priests who have been sexually active with a person below the age of sexual consent, often 16 or 17 years old, or even older. An act of this sort is wrong on multiple counts: It is probably criminal, and by common consent it is immoral and sinful; yet it does not have the utterly ruthless, exploitative character of child molestation. In almost all cases too, with the older teen-agers, there is an element of consent.

Also, the definition of “childhood” varies enormously between different societies. If an act of this sort occurred in most European countries, it would probably be legal, since the age of consent for boys is usually around 15. To take a specific example, when newspapers review recent cases of “pedophile priests,” they commonly cite a case that occurred in California´s Orange County, when a priest was charged with having consensual sex with a 17-year-old boy. Whatever the moral quality of such an act, most of us would not apply the term “child abuse” or “pedophilia.” For this reason alone, we need to be cautious when we read about scores of priests being “accused of child abuse.”

The technical term for a person attracted to, in essence, teenagers is a ephebophilia, just for the record. It’s still a clinical disorder, and still a crime, but it’s also distinct from pedophilia. This is nowhere more the case than in regard to the nature of the victim’s participation in the act; though still illegal and immoral, it is not typically characterized by the same ignorance (on the part of the abused party) that one would expect in the case of child abuse. Teenagers, we are often told, focus quite a bit of attention on the issue of sex; a teenager who becomes sexually involved with a priest (or anyone) can thus be assumed, safely, to be more knowledgeable about the act. Not that there are not still issues there, as we’ve already discussed.

Now, what does this mean? The vast majority of cases of sexual misconduct perpetrated by Catholic priests (98% or more, in fact) is between priests and teens/near-adults. Moreover, roughly 85% of all misconduct cases involve priests and boys. So there is also a very obvious homosexual issue at work, which gets back to what the boys at HillBuzz end their article worrying about; they are, it would seem, right to worry, even though it’s quite probably the case that none of their gay priest friends have personally abused teens (or children).

It’s also worth looking at just how likely priests are to offend, especially compared to other groups.

…the [Chicago] survey found that about 40 priests, about 1.8 percent of the whole, were probably guilty of misconduct with minors at some point in their careers. Put another way, no evidence existed against about 98 percent of parish clergy, the overwhelming majority of the group.

Just for reference, here’s how Baptists apparently stack up in comparison:

The Journal of Pastoral Care reported on a survey in which 1000 senior Southern Baptist pastors were randomly selected from 15,000 churches in 6 states. The number of pastors who anonymously reported that they had engaged in “inappropriate sexual behavior” was 14.1 percent. And 70.4 percent had knowledge about other ministers who had engaged in “inappropriate sexual contact” with church members.*

…

A Baptist-published brochure states that 35% of ministers surveyed “had engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior.” It also states that Protestant clergy are “sexually exploiting their parishioners at twice the rate of secular therapists.” (Broken Trust, published by the Christian Life Commission of the BGCT)

…

Other studies “have shown no differences” in the frequency of clergy sexual abuse “by denomination, region, theology, or institutional structure.” Thus, “the problem of clergy sexual abuse is not just a Catholic issue – the problem extends to Protestant denominations as well.” (Ministerial Ethics at 162*) Penn State professor Philip Jenkens reported that between 2 to 3 percent of Protestant clergy are pedophiles. His same study reported that less than 1.7 percent of Catholic priests are pedophiles. There is simply no reason to think that clergy child molesters are solely a Catholic problem.

There’s something else we can tease out of the above: if 35% total misconduct rate is twice that of secular therapists, then secular therapists have a misconduct rate of about 17 to 18%. The study of course gets wrong the pedophilia/ephebophilia distinction, but the abuse rate it cites for Catholic priests matches, essentially, the Chicago study’s conclusions. So Protestant clergy are just under twice as likely to abuse children as are Catholic priests; assuming that the 35%/3% ratio (total misconduct/misconduct with a child) ratio applies, it would seem that secular therapists are about as likely as are Catholic priests to abuse children (or, presumably, teens).

And then there’s teachers, who have utterly staggering abuse rates that may soar as high as 100 times that of Catholic priests. But at least you hear about some of these stories in the news, from time to time. Strangely, nobody ever uses them as a comprehensive condemnation of the educational system. A question, though: why don’t we hear about Baptist abuse cases in the news? It sure seems like there’s no shortage of them, after all.

Here’s one hypothesis:

The story of clerical misconduct is bad enough without turning into an unjustifiable outbreak of religious bigotry against the Catholic Church.

Could the media have an anti-Catholic bias? Heh…I wonder why I would ever even think such a thing is possible! Oh, right…

Anyhow, to wrap things up, I want to quickly speak to the HillBuzz boys’ concern that Pope Benedict XVI had full knowledge of the goings on in his diocese in regard to at least one particular abusive priest there…well, Jimmy Akin has already dealt quite handily with that pernicious lie. Hint: “it wasn’t one of then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s priests. He was the cardinal archbishop of Munich, but the priest was from the diocese of Essen.” And it goes from there.

But you didn’t expect the media to let anything so silly as the actual facts of the matter get in the way of an opportunity to smear the Church, did you?

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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: Catholicism - Christianity - Education - Protestantism - Sex | Tags: California, Catholic Church, Chicago, child abuse, ephebophilia, Essen, homosexuality, Journal of Pastoral Care, Munich, Orange County, pedophilia, Philip Jenkens, Pope Benedict XVI, Sex, Southern Baptist, the Church