Suspicions of Pedophilia

Years ago, I was attending church and the priest discussed some kind of parish program. Then he said, "Now for my favorite part, the C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N.  I do not think that every priest who likes kids is a pedophile.  Lots of perfectly normal priests have a fatherly and entirely normal interest in kids. But this priest was GUSHING.  Normal men do not gush over children. Chills went down my spine. I sat in the pew and told myself "Oh, come on. Just because a priest likes kids doesn't mean he's a pedophile."  Still, I couldn't shake the gut feeling that something was very, very wrong.

If You Don't Like Your Priest

I talk to a lot of Catholics who feel mistreated by priests. Because Catholic priests have so much power--turning a wafer into the real presence of Christ--problems with priests are especially painful. Here is some advice on how to handle the situation if you don't like your priest.

• Give the priest the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was tired and irritable when he did something you didn't like because he was at the hospital all night with a dying person. Or maybe he has health problems. I know I am not at my best when I am sleep-deprived or coming down with the flu.
• Try talking to the guy. He is, after all, a human being.

Sometimes, priests just refuse to talk to you or the situation can't be resolved. In that case your options are:

• Attend masses when other priests are officiating.
• Change churches. Send a resignation letter to the church. Forward a copy to his bishop.
• If you don't want to change churches, pointedly refuse to receive communion from his hands. Show up at mass. Sit close to him so that he knows you are there. When the wafers are distributed, remain in your seat or walk past him to get a wafer from a eucharistic minister. This snub will speak volumes and he will get the message loud and clear. Rush past him after mass without shaking his hand. These tactics are an absolute last resort, though, to be used only when other options fail. I tried this once with a priest who mistreated me, and it worked wonders. If people see that you will not passively accept mistreatment, they will usually start treating you better.

Sometimes, Catholics try to tell you to focus on Jesus in the Sacrament and to just accept the priest as a human being.  Somehow, this doesn't quite work for me. I am a teacher. Do I have bad days? Yes? Do I become impatient? Yes. Do I yell when I shouldn't? Yes, rarely. BUT, I always apologize and try to atone for my actions. Some priests think they are above all this because they hold the right hand of God. If a priest is consistently a jerk, there is no reason to tolerate it.

The Catholic Church cannot have it both ways. They cannot tell the faithful that priests have extraordinary spiritual powers and then when the priest acts like a jerk tell them that priests are only human and to focus on Jesus.

Here's a big secret: a lot of people are priests, not because they have a vocation, but because they are hiding out from their problems. They lost a girlfriend and are heartbroken. They are gay and want an excuse not to marry. They are escaping poverty in their country of origin.

Here is a rule of thumb: if you wouldn't accept a certain kind of treatment from a business associate or family member, don't accept it from your priest. I am talking here about a consistent pattern of misbehavior, not a bad day or the character faults we all have.  If the treatment is repeatedly bad, vote with your wallet by changing churches. And if you won't change churches, write the bishop.

Long, Dark Night of the Soul

I haven't been to mass in, I think, two months. I simply don't want to spend an hour of my life daydreaming in a church pew. I have always struggled with the idea that the communion wafer is the real presence of Jesus, who doesn't seem that real to me anyway. Oddly, the less I believe in the theology about him, the more I like him as a human being. He is, after all, the man who defended sinful women against their accusers and believed in teaching women. He also understood the devastating effects that social disapproval have on people, as evidenced by his changing the water into wine and healing skin diseases that were probably something akin to psoriasis or eczema rather than leprosy.  He knew that, often, life really is about the small stuff and that the small stuff is important. It is too bad that such a wise and compassionate man is obscured by theological pedantry like the trinity and blood atonement.

Anyway, if I could write my own prayer, it would be this:

Dear Lord, we pray

• For all people who have lost someone or something dear to them.
• For those who are unjustly imprisoned, that they may speedily regain their freedom.
• For victims of war and violence
• For anyone experiencing physical or emotional abuse and degredation, that they may be brought to a place of safety
• For all who have physically disfiguring conditions, that they may find medical help and loving acceptance from others
• For persons suffering from mental illness, that they may find understanding
• For all people with sleep disorders, that they may find relief.
• For the lonely, especially for single mothers and their children
• For abused and neglected children
• For all those tormented by past sins, that they may find peace.

Imagine This: A Pedophile Who Is NOT a Priest

Instead, he is, or was, a university professor at California State University who taught public affairs and administration. His theoretical and research interests included analyzing public issues from the perspective of the Frankfurt School, an intellectual movement brought to the U.S. and that taught that human behavior was far more strongly influenced by social systems and environment than by genetics or other biological actions.

He was sentenced to 37 years for, among other things, having child pornography on his laptop and for raping--not fondling, but raping--a five *month*-old girl.

Cynic that I am, I can't help wondering if he was an altar boy.

Multicultural Parishes

The church I attend, St. Elizabeth of Hungary in Pompano Beach, is not a bi-lingual parish. It is a tri-lingual one. The parish includes members who speak English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole. A surprising number of people are disaffected by this, especially when the issue of trilingual masses arieses. One dear friend is an immigrant from an Eastern European country who worked hard to learn English as a second language. He feels overwhelmed trying to worship in his second language and at the same time, follow along in Spanish and Creole.

Because I don't like missing two-thirds of a service, I had planned to attend the Maundy Thursday service at St. Coleman's in Pompano Beach. This church, by the way, has a profoundly moving service on that night. I especially like the use of the clapper, which I think is more formally called a crotalus, to signal the arrest and impending death of Jesus. At the end of the service, a large crucifix is processed through the church as an altar server uses the clapper. Thud. Thud. Thud. This sound makes the death of Jesus seem heartbreakingly and heart-stoppingly immediate.

In any case, I got a late start that night and ended up going to St. E's. They didn't use the crotalus, which disappointed me, but they did incense the host as it was brought to the chapel. The clank of the chain as the censor swung was doleful also.

The important point is, though, that this was a tri-lingual mass. Instead of being frustrated by it, I was in awe of the way our new pastor, Father Steven O'Hala, had worked out the details. It was inclusive without being alienating. The gospel was in English, one of the OT readings was in Spanish, and the Psalm was read in all three languages. It was a simple matter to follow along in the missalette.

Father O'Hala, who spoke English and Spanish before he came here, is working hard to learn Haitian Creole. He repeated parts of his homily in all three languages.

In the hands of the wrong pastor, a tri-lingual parish could be a disaster. Because Father O'Hala has approached his task in a spirit of good will--and has worked very hard to include everyone--this is actually working.

Sexual Abuse of Girls by Clergy

A NOW Report on Clergy Abuse of Girls

In my previous post, I argued--more from intuition than research--that an entirely heterosexual priesthood wouldn't eliminate child sexual abuse but merely shift it from boys to girls. According to the NOW article linked above, girls are also abused by priests at an alarmingly high rate and may in fact be the majority of victims. In additional issue is that almost 10% of nuns in the United States are sexually exploited by those in religious life.

Gay Priests

(I spend my life wavering between belief and doubt. I am in high doubt mode now. Hence, there are no articles on faith or saints or mystical experiences. I am mostly focused on church politics right now.)

Goodbye, Good Men, a book arguing against gay men in the priesthood and in favor of a celibate, heterosexual male priesthood, makes three tacit assumptions:

• Gay men are less capable of genuine holiness than straight men
• Gay men are more likely to have sex with minors than straight men
• Celibate people are able to attain higher levels of spirituality than non-celibate people.

If one accepts these assumptions, it is easy to assume that rooting gays--or at least non-celibate gays--out of the priesthood will result in a re-invigorated priesthood.

Since it is seemingly impossible to measure holiness and spirituality, I would like to address the point about gay behavior with minors. As a woman, I have vivid memories of being fourteen years old and approached by men of all ages in a sexual way. Many of these approaches occurred while I was walking home from school carrying an armload of books. In other words, I was not at a party, loitering on the streets, or behaving in a provocative way.

These experiences have convinced me that an attraction to adolescents is not the exclusive province of gays. Rather, it is a trait common among men regardless of sexual orientation. As I understand it, the abuse rates for heterosexuals and for homosexuals who are comfortable with their orientation are virtually identical. From this perspective, a priesthood of straight men would decrease the abuse of boys but would increase the abuse of girls. The net benefit would be zero.

My own, anecdotal, experience with priests is that gay priests are frequently more compassionate than straight ones. The last straight pastor at my church not only alienated me and a close female friend, he also antagonized the other priest to the point that they were not speaking. At the end of mass, the officiating priest typically intoduces the pastor, who speaks briefly about church functions. Instead of saying "Here's our pastor, Father X." the priest would simply say "Be seated," and let the pastor come forward and read. The coldness spoke volumes. The previous pastor treated the associate pastor like a colleague, with full access to the checkbook and other privileges. This straight pastor took that privilege away, for no reason, and created the position of "business manager" as a ruse for stripping this authority from the associate priest.  The only good thing I can say about this priest is that he was definitely NOT a pedophile. While this is a good start, it is not nearly enough.

This same priest, after I had a falling out with one of his young friends who treated me abusively (according to someone who heard her voicemails to me), refused to shake my hand after mass and made a big show of making a horrified face and turning away from me, thus letting other parishioners streaming out of church just how he felt about me. In other words, he did not even provide the bare minimum of pastoral care.


This pastor also fired the long-time caretaker of the property, who had worked there for close to 15 years and had done an excellent job, and replaced him with someone else, apparently out of some sense of personal friendship. The man he fired had a terminally ill wife. This job was their only income. The person who replaced him had a healthy, working wife.

Other straight priests of my acquaintance are alcoholics, have girlfriends, or are involved in financial irregularities. Get real: physically and mentally healthy men do not give up sex for long periods of time. The gay priests are not celibate and neither are the younger straight priests. In Europe, priests have girlfriends who are ostensibly live-in housekeepers. In the U.S., one reads every few years about priests with girlfriends or priests getting sued by former sexual partners. One need only read Boccaccio and other literary figures to understand how frequently the rules of celibacy are flouted. Since human nature hasn't changed since then, the problems that existed then will continue to occur.

A similar phenomen has happened on a higher level. The former archbishop was widely regarded as gay. As I understand it, this was something of a scandal and the Vatican had the new archbishop come in to straighten things out. But, as people who follow Catholic politics realize, the old archbishop, with all of his faults, was at least nice to everyone. The new one, a straight man, is so lacking in civility that a Catholic commented "No one worries about priestly morale any more. There is none."

All of this is a long way of saying that human nature is flawed, regardless of whether people are gay or straight and that a straight priesthood will have a slightly different set of problems. However, the overall quality of the priesthood may not be better.