Naughty
Priests
Naughty
Priests
By Joe Bob Briggs
March 14, 2002
Am I the only guy who thinks the press reaction to the Priests-Groping-the-Kiddies story is a little . . . uh . . . restrained?
Isn't this the kinda story that would normally have 96-point Boldoni bold headlines screaming across the front pages of newspapers for months? Or, if it happened on another continent, like Africa, it would be a "60 Minutes" investigation: "They call themselves priests, but in this obscure corner of the Congo people say they're turning children into concubines. Ed Bradley reports."
I mean, it's not like we just have one priest in a parish in rural Nebraska who spied on a boy in the locker-room shower. We've practically got a new priestly confession every day. The story is breaking faster than Enron, and going in new directions all the time, and the reaction is to run a bunch of "commentary" pieces that basically say, "The church is in crisis, but people say their faith in Catholicism is stronger than ever."
First of all, unless you're Catholic, who cares whether the church is "in crisis"? It's a criminal scandal so far-ranging that, if it had happened in, say, one of Jerry Falwell's organizations, you would have had the kind of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker media dogpile that provides fodder for a hundred "Saturday Night Live" sketches. Remember the religious leader in Utah who was prosecuted last year for having too many wives? He was hounded by law enforcement and media alike, and every story written about him had the unspoken subtext of, "This is just icky." He finally went to prison and nobody mourned for him, even though his crime was marrying a young girl who wanted to marry him.
Well, this is more icky than that!
But here's my question about it: Why is it always boys? Every single account I've read--in Boston, in Palm Beach, in Maine, Dallas, Connecticut, Long Island, Missouri, Newark, Santa Fe--in all these places we've got priests who fondle young boys. Even in the worst periods of the worst scandals of the church--in the age of the "Canterbury Tales," for example, or in the 10th century when the priests openly kept mistresses--they were normally busted for having sex with young girls. Entire classics of Victorian erotica are devoted to naughtiness in the sacristy, but as far as I know it was always heterosexual naughtiness.
Shouldn't we have read some kind of 30,000-word Sunday New York Times op-ed piece by an eminent psychiatrist, explaining why it is that so many modern priests are not only pedophiles, but homosexual pedophiles? (I would call them "gay," but they don't seem too happy. ) I mean, at the very least, it's interesting. One of the scary things about all the revelations is that so many of the priests who got caught were friends with other priests who got caught. Is there some kind of priestly sweat lodge where they trade bawdy tales?
But the second, more important, question is: How did so many of these guys become priests in the first place? Supposedly you have to explain to your bishop exactly how you feel about sex before he'll ordain you. I can understand one or two slipping through--they either lie to the bishop or lie to themselves--but there are advocacy groups that say sixteen hundred of these cases have been settled out of court, with money paid to families and secrecy agreements. And that's only the cases we know about, and it doesn't include the people who never reported anything.
It's not like the priests weren't warned in advance. During the Catholic ordination ceremony, the bishop says the following words before he even lets you take a vow of celibacy:
"You ought anxiously to consider again and again what sort of a burden this is which you are taking upon you of your own accord. Up to this you are free. You may still, if you choose, turn to the aims and desires of the world. But if you receive this order, it will no longer be lawful to turn back from your purpose. You will be required to continue in the service of God, and with His assistance to observe chastity and to be bound forever in the ministrations of the Altar, to serve who is to reign."
Well, it sounds pretty goldurn serious to me. And they even have priestly teaching about how the reason they don't want you to father children is that they want all the children of the parish to be your children. That makes what's going on a kind of spiritual homosexual incest. I wonder if they've ever had a case of a young trainee who runs screaming out of the church during his ordination, saying "I'm too weak! I can't do it! I'm setting myself up for failure!" Apparently not.
But let's take a look at why the church does this. First of all, I should point out that for the first 1100 years of the church they didn't do this. There were married priests all over the lot. So, in the whole history of the church, they've actually had more years with married priests than they've had with celibate ones.
But every time they have a sex scandal, this issue comes up again: Why make them be celibate in the first place?
Their answer, to my way of thinking, is kinda shaky. First of all, they can't find any words of Jesus that say priests should be celibate. The closest you come is in Matthew 19:11 where he talks about renouncing marriage and says "Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. . . . The one who can accept this should accept it."
So then they go looking through the letters of Paul, who was the kind of guy who could definitely be counted on to tell you what the rules are, and all they find is a letter to the Corinthians about how, if you're a married priest, your loyalties are divided, because you have to take care of your wife before you can take care of your flock. So it's better not to be married. But he's just talking like it's a practical matter. There's not enough time in the day to do both things. And in another place he says, "Better to marry than to burn." I think we all know what that means. We had a bunch of burning priests lately, but they didn't have that marriage option. (Not that the marriage option would mean that much when you have homosexual priests.)
So the church starts out with this idea that marriage is not always a good idea for a priest, but not feeling particularly strong about it one way or the other. In fact, a couple of the disciples were probably married, but we know they had at least three years away from home--so, not practical.
Okay, that gets us up to the fourth century. Celibacy is just a good idea. But then they have something called the Spanish Council of Elvira, and the bishops convened there decide that priests, bishops and deacons should be celibate, or at least the woman they've been living with should live in a separate house. But just a few years later, at the Council of Neo-Caesarea in Cappadocia, this is modified when they decide that they'll make a judgment call at the time of ordination. They'll ask the would-be priest whether he can handle celibacy. If he says that celibacy is "above his strength," then they'll give him permission to get married and he still gets to be a priest.
By the way, throughout this period of history, any time you were already married at the time you became a priest, they waved your wife on through right along with you. They just didn't want you getting married after you'd closed the deal with em.
But apparently this subject just kept coming up, year after year. So in 692 we have the Council of Trullo, where they decide that bishops are required to separate from their wives if they wanna stay bishops. Priests, deacons and subdeacons are allowed to continue in a marriage that existed before they were ordained, but they can't take a wife after they're ordained. Apparently some of them did anyway, though, because we have Pope Zachary in 747 issuing an edict that no priests can marry after ordination.
Then we get the wild and wacky 10th century, when the priests went off the deep end and started marrying, keeping mistresses, and indulging in all sorts of things, to the point where they eventually had to be cleaned out, defrocked, and whacked upside the head, resulting in the ultimate word on celibacy--the First Lateran Council of 1123. That's when the church decided, for once and forever, that priests are supposed to be celibate. Period. And not just priests--even subdeacons and ecclasiastics. The way they did this is refuse the sacrament of marriage to anyone who had a churchly office. You could still get married, but in the eyes of the church your wife was a concubine.
Now. Here's what I get from all this. If you go way back to the first century, celibacy was considered a higher calling. It wasn't for everybody. In spiritual terms, it was a privilege. Nobody expected it, but if you wanted to do it, then it was considered a great thing.
It seems to me that they had it exactly right in the fifth century, when they would simply ask you whether you could handle celibacy or not, but they didn't take away your cassock if you said you couldn't handle it. This is actually similar to the standard they have in many of the Orthodox churches to this day. The celibate priest is a better priest, but it's not that big a deal.
I think you have guys who wanna be priests so badly that they tell themselves, "Well, uh, sure, I can do this. It won't be easy, and I'll have to pray like crazy, but I'll get over this burning thing." But what they say to the bishop is, "Celibacy. No problem!"
But let's go back and look at what the J-Man himself said about it, in that one passage in Matthew where he talks about it. "Not everyone can accept this word," he says, "but only those to whom it has been given. For some are eunuchs because they were born that way, others were made that way by men, and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it."
Isn't this the answer? There are three kinds of celibates. Guys who are born that way. Guys who get traumatized into it. And guys who choose it. If you're one of the first two types, then it doesn't count. He wanted the third guy--the one who knows exactly what sex is and what it's for, but has stuff to do that's so much more important it doesn't even bother him to leave it behind.
In other words, it's not a test. It's not an ordeal. You either are or you aren't, and very few are. The bishop should make the call on this, but the bishop can't make the call if the guy thinks the penalty for saying he's weak is to be barred from the priesthood. When you try to make everybody do it, you end up with guys who have very active imaginations in very secret places. They start thinking like Bill Clinton, coming up with very precise definitions of what is and what isn't sex, and saying, "Hey, here's something that's probably not sex in the strict definition of lying with a woman. It might not be a vow- breaker at all." In other words, they go a little crazy and end up with their pictures on the front page of the Boston Globe.
Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at joebob@upi.com or through his website at www.joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221.
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