A name I hadn’t thought about in a while came back into the news last week: John Cummins, the retired Bishop of Oakland, California. The story has been widely covered: Cummins, who served as bishop in the 1980s and ’90s, wanted to laicize one particular predatory priest, Stephen Kiesle. In 1985, Cummins wrote several letters to the Vatican office of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would have had what was essentially the final say on defrocking priests for sexual abuse and other grave sins. Ratzinger, who of course is now Pope Benedict XVI, was exceedingly reluctant to grant Bishop Cummins’ request to remove this pedophile from the priesthood, suggesting that the scandal of the laicization might do more damage to the church than Kiesle had done.
I meet Bishop Cummins in early 1988, when I was seriously considering the priesthood. A brand-new convert to Rome, I was a junior at Cal. I had fallen in love with God and the church, and was dividing my worship time between the campus Newman Center (run by the liberal Paulist Fathers) and the Dominicans (whose small seminary was right across the street from my co-op on Ridge Road.) I met with several Dominicans in Berkeley and Oakland, as well as various priests and officials in the Oakland Diocese. Even though I had a girlfriend at the time, and even while I was volunteering as a peer sexuality educator on campus, I began to explore the idea that I had a vocation to serve as a priest. I began the discernment process, though without breaking up with the woman I was seeing or interrupting my progress towards my bachelor’s degrees at Berkeley.
Though I had fallen in love with the Dominicans, it was my Paulist spiritual advisor, Father Al Moser, who helped clarify for me that I was not called to be a priest. I met with Al not long after I had had a brief meeting with Bishop Cummins, a meeting that had left me on fire for the priesthood. (Not because of anything the bishop said; it was more what I what projected onto him when we had a quick little talk after a mass in Oakland.) Father Al said, “Hugo, most young men who make it in the priesthood are answering a call, not running away from something. And I think if you’re honest with yourself, you’re running away from something.” He was right — I wanted the certainties I imagined would come with being a priest. I also imagined, as I know many young men in my position have imagined, that a life of public celibacy would magically make my sexual struggles vanish.
In my late teens and early twenties, the struggle I had around sexuality was not about my orientation. I had had some attraction to men, but recognized that the passions of my heart and my body were primarily, albeit not exclusively, directed towards women. I certainly didn’t struggle with attraction to anyone age-inappropriate. Rather, I was having trouble reconciling my feminism with my own sexual ferocity. I was compulsively promiscuous and dishonest; the gap between my desire to see women as my true equals on the one hand and my desire for novelty, validation, and sexual release seemed impossible to bridge. I imagined that if I took a vow of celibacy, God would grant me the strength and the courage to live up to that vow. And I would be able to love everyone, men and women alike, without objectifying them.
I went back and forth in my college years between different strategies for reconciling my sexuality with my humanity. I worked for the university’s Peer Sexuality Outreach program, leading workshops on safer sex, consent, and relationships. I took women’s studies courses (there was no “gender studies” program in those days), and sought an academic and intellectual understanding of sex. And I converted to Roman Catholicism and explored a vocation, hoping to find a way to take all of that rambunctious sexual energy and redirect it into something purely selfless. I was a not terribly unusual, though rather persuasive, bundle of neurosis and compassion, shame and defiance, narcissism and generosity. Thank heavens Father Al called me out on what I was trying to do, and gently suggested I needed to rethink my strategy for reconciling my sexual impulses with my ideological and theological commitments.
I don’t know what kind of priest I would have become. Probably the sort who falls in love with a woman and leaves the priesthood for her, but it’s possible I would have stayed in the church. I might even have found celibacy to be a discipline I could not only bear, but one under which I could thrive. One doesn’t get to see “what would have happened if”; but the examples of the many priests with stronger faith than mine who found it impossible to live up to their vows suggest that I would likely have shared their fate, causing who knows what sort of harm along the way.
Amanda had a fine post on Saturday about clerical celibacy. I will say that I’ve known a great many current and former Catholic priests in my day. Some I met in church settings; many I met in various Twelve Step programs. A few, a very few, were clearly genuinely called to a a celibate life. Celibacy is, I’m convinced, a very specific vocation. A great many folks, filled with shame or confusion of one sort or another, imagine that celibacy will solve their problems. As the church’s problems illustrate, that false understanding has had disastrous consequences for many of the most vulnerable members of the flock. Those who make it as lifelong celibates are not necessarily those who are asexual, though some are that. Those who make it, and make it joyfully, are those who have been granted a very particular gift. The church’s great mistake has been to insist that all those who serve in ministry either have that gift (which few do) or feign its possession.
It took many theological, marital, psychological and spiritual peregrinations in order for me to come to the point where I could reconcile my private and public lives. Embracing and accepting my sexuality, in all its complexity and its earthy ordinariness, took time. Matching my language and my life wasn’t easy. In my case as a young Catholic, I was blessed with a wise spiritual advisor who told me to my face I was confusing a genuine vocation with the longing to hide away from the messy reality of my still-emerging sexual identity. It is a great tragedy and a great scandal that more aspiring priests weren’t told the same. And it is a great scandal too to suggest that those who love others sexually are any less capable of serving and loving the world at large.
Hi Hugo,
I’m a little bit conflicted about this post. You began by mentioning the problem the Catholic Church has had with priests who turn out to be sexual predators, then finish your thoughts by speaking about the gift of celibacy, and asserting that such a lifestyle is not right for many of those who enter the priesthood. Though you never made the connection explicitly, you seem to be suggesting that this culture of “forced celibacy†in the Catholic Church is somehow a catalyst for the sexual abuse that takes place. I think this is a dangerous assumption to make. I don’t know that we can use sexual frustration as an explanation for pedophilia. I can see the decision of a priest to leave the priesthood so he can marry, or even a choice to have surreptitious sexual relationships with other adults, as possible consequences of sexual frustration in a normal adult, but not the sexual abuse of children. I think this phenomenon is much more likely tied to an abuse of power and authority in the Church, and the knowledge that one will likely be insulated from the consequences of one’s actions, than it is to sexual desire. I’ve also heard it posited that men with this particular perversion are drawn to the priesthood, as they are drawn to other professions that will put them in close proximity to children. As I am not a Catholic, I don’t have any strong convictions about whether or not priests should be allowed to marry, but I don’t believe that lifting the celibacy requirement will necessarily lead to the diminishment of this particular abuse.
C: Hugo is not alone in asserting that the enforced celibacy of the priesthood may have a direct relationship with the abuse the clergy later perpetrate. But you are also right about the abuse’s relationship to power. In other words, the theories are complimentary, not contradictory.
Anson Shupe, a sociologists who has extensively studied the scandals, has theorized that both have played a huge role in not the initial abuse but also the abuse of power involved in the cover-ups. His take on the role of celibacy is actually quite interesting. His research showed that most priests are put on the priestly track when they are quite young, that their sexual development arrests in that place. They are then attracted to those who are at the same stage of sexual development as they are.
But Shupe also goes on to talk about the idea of priests and clergy as spiritual fiduciaries, trusted with something valuable and charged with acting in the best interest of their parishioners. Instead, they often act as religious elites who are bent on protecting their power at all costs.
Shupe’s most recent book on the subject was called “Rogue Clerics” and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in better understanding the issues.
C, I don’t think that celibacy causes pedophilia. I think that many who are drawn to celibacy, as I was, are drawn to it as they imagine (falsely) that they can find automatic redemption from their sexual shame. And those who do have great shame about their sexual urges may seek refuge in the priesthood, and find that, alas, ordination is not a magical elixir that makes libido vanish.
Celibacy is not the problem — but the expectations around it are. The expectation that the celibate can more effectively minister to God’s creatures is problematic; the expectation that celibacy is a panacea for unresolved inner sexual conflict (and my experience, and the words of my mentors, suggest that it often was thought of as such a panacea) is even more problematic.
And those who do have great shame about their sexual urges may seek refuge in the priesthood
No, that’s what being a monk is for. It’s not priest or nothing.
If you’re a male Catholic who’s ashamed and conflicted about sex and wants the stricture and discipline of vows and a place to put yourself where you’ll be safe from the world and the world from you, you go to a monastery.
If you want all that but above all you want power, power and wide-eyed adulation, you go for the priesthood. There may be shame mixed in there too for some, but it’s a very subordinate strain. Look at Kiesle, your example. He didn’t grovel and repent, he bragged. He boasted. He called himself the pied piper. The idea that rapist priests are consumed with shame is by and large a wishful projection of outsiders.
You’re ignoring the obvious, even though it’s very relevant to the gender breakdown of the abuse. The church offers celibacy to women and men alike, but it’s only to men that it offers the temptation of absolute power (see Stupak’s recent declaration that he didn’t need to listen to 50,000 nuns, only to bishops.) If you didn’t feel that the power was the main enticement, compared to the celibacy, well — does a fish know water?
It really blows my mind that even for a short time, you imagined that being a priest would be a solution to a dilemma that had anything to do with feminism. Did you somehow forget that women are barred from the Catholic priesthood? Were you considering joining a whites-only golf club too, while you were at it? (For the peace of mind it would bring, of course.)
Well, I almost joined a very traditional fraternity. I was bouncing around to various things.
And I’m too much an ENFP to find much appeal in the silent, monastic life. It wasn’t about power — at least not consciously — it was about service, about teaching, about interacting with people.
The expectation that the celibate can more effectively minister to God’s creatures is problematic.
Which puts you in conflict with St. Paul, who offers exactly this justification for it.
John, that’s a pretty tenuous case — Paul makes a passing reference in 1 Corinthians 7:32 that supports your argument, but in a broader context, what Paul is talking about is the ideal of celibacy for those who find that state natural. “Better to marry than to burn with passion” makes it clear to me that Paul wishes more people were naturally celibate. Celibacy ought never be mandated, rather it is a rare and special gift, bestowed with insufficient frequency to make it a required leadership quality.
Clerical celibacy, as I see it, isn’t as much about sex as it is about marriage–for most people it would be difficult or impossible to be a good priest and a good spouse at the same time, at least under the current system. Catholic priests are generally assumed to be mobile and may move frequently. They visit people in the hospital at all hours of the night. (Protestant ministers tend to delegate that type of ministry, at least at the churches I’ve attended). They are paid very little and are often paid in part through access to church housing, which is not set up for families. If the church is to remove the celibacy requirement, it must completely overhaul what it expects of its priests. Ordaining women would be a comparatively simple and much more important change, but that’s another post…
If the church decides to ordain married people, it might make sense to subject them to the same requirements that deacons are: minimum age, outside employment, family support, etc. In fact, it would be pretty easy to just “promote” some people who have been serving as deacons for a few years–that might help with the priest shortage and give an opportunity to “test out” the ramifications of having married people in the Catholic clergy.
“Clerical celibacy, as I see it, isn’t as much about sex as it is about marriage–for most people it would be difficult or impossible to be a good priest and a good spouse at the same time, at least under the current system… (Protestant ministers tend to delegate that type of ministry, at least at the churches I’ve attended).”
Actually, as a Protestant, I think it is just as difficult for a Protestant minister to be good at his job and a good spouse at the same time as it would be for a Catholic priest. Hugo is saying that it’s not only the celibate who can effectively minister, but celibacy does offer some definite benefits in that it avoids the problem of dividing one’s loyalties between home and church. I have known many, many pastor’s wives who feel neglected or overlooked by their husbands because his church obligations must always come first. Not to mention the fact that these wives are very often expected to provide services to the church alongside their husbands without receiving any compensation for it. Thus, I don’t think the benefit of celibacy lies in the greater ability of the celibate to minister, but in his or her ability to focus on the church without neglecting family obligations.